Democratization of product

Note: Last week was a bit rough on the wellness front. Thankfully I'm back to about 90% health. Glad to be back to writing.

I've been thinking a lot about product design, and where it goes from here.

A friend of mine is hard at work designing an app.

He's not a developer; he's not a designer (although he's had a lot of interest in both fields and loves technology in general), but he is an expert in his field, and wants to build a tool to scratch his own itch and help his customers.

Earlier in the journey I and another friend worked with him a bit on a plan to build out the app; and my other friend created the development infrastructure to get it up and running. But the product is in a specialized field, and has a use case that requires deep knowledge of the user base—something he knows intimately. Though the pieces were in place for it to work, the user experience wasn't there.

If this were my day job I'd tackle the project with UX research, deep dives in interviews, iteration, and ultimately work together with a small team toward a solution. I'd use all the things I've learned to get myself into the head of the end users since I'm not able to dogfood the experience.

It's something I've wanted to do on this project, but I haven't had the capacity. And so the project has sat in his head, and he's kept iterating forward on it, but with slow progress.

But then last week something shifted.

My friend showed me his laptop, with a prototype he'd built out in Figma Make.

Over the summer and fall I'd been sharing my process for interacting with ChatGPT, designing a prompt, and iterating with Figma Make, or ChatGPT, or Claude. He decided to try the same.

With what I presume was a few hours of work in the evenings, he created something worth playing with. He shared his screen and I clicked around, got a feel for what was in his mind, and was able to actually understand how he needed the pieces laid out. I could see the design coming to life. Frankly, I was amazed.

It was a fantastic start.

But, I came away nervous about the interface as a whole. It had a lot of disparate pieces, wasn't clear and cohesive, and it was hard to understand how to navigate through the screens. It was a product created by an enthusiastic and caring person with a mind toward the user, but it was a bit confusing.

But then he shared an update with me yesterday.

He'd switched from Figma Make to Claude, and kept iterating and prompting and "arguing" with the LLM to clean things up.

The new design kind of rattled me—in a good way. The new design is good.

I've been wrestling with what that means for the future of product design as a whole.

A single person can take an idea, connect it to their field, and iterate freely toward a solution.

That just wasn't possible a few short years (or months frankly) ago. You needed to have experience in product, design, development. But now, with a proper willingness to tinker, a desire to improve and learn, and experience on a specific topic, you can work with a chat bot to iterate toward a solution.

Product has become democratized.

And though that unsettles me as a practitioner of this profession, I'm also incredibly excited for that means for software as a whole.

I'm excited to see what my friend builds, and it has me wondering how things will progress from here.