In Search of the Product Guy
Code taught me constraints, design taught me intent, and psychology taught me why intent is messy. This is what I found looking for the work between them.
I started as a technologist. A problem, to me, was a system to build, and a good system was one that worked. I moved into design because I wanted to understand the people using the systems I was building. Then I studied psychology.
From the outside that looks like three careers. From the inside it was one search: for the work that sits between all three, and a name for whoever does it. The name I settled on is the one on this site.
Each stop taught me something the previous one couldn't.
What code taught me: reality has rules
Engineering lives in physics, logic and mathematics, and none of them negotiate. Processing power is limited, and so is battery life. Networks have latency, materials fatigue, budgets run out. These are structural constraints, and engineering is the work of resolving them: finding a path through those limits to something that functions, scales and survives.
A designer can draw an impossibly thin, bezel-less phone. The engineer has to answer what the drawing skips. Where does the battery go? How does the heat get out? How does the glass survive a drop? Resolving them is rarely about finding a perfect answer. It's about choosing the best compromise: show a low-resolution image now, or make the user wait three seconds for the 4K version?
Code also taught me that the happy path is a fiction. Networks drop, databases crash, users type in malicious code. A well-engineered system degrades gracefully instead of exploding.
What design taught me: people are not specs
Code had taught me how to build things. Design showed me I'd been building them for an imaginary user who wanted exactly what the spec said.
Real people are messy. What we want is rarely clear and often contradictory. Human intent is the underlying why — what someone is actually trying to accomplish, feel or avoid. Design is the articulation of that intent: giving a messy want a shape, a flow or a form that someone can use.
Nobody opens a banking app intending to "make a POST request to a database." They want to feel financially secure, or to pay a friend without looking foolish. Design answers that with a calm interface, plain language, and an immediate green checkmark that settles the anxiety.
What psychology taught me: why intent is messy
Design taught me that intent is messy. Psychology showed me why. Most of what drives it isn't logical, and very often people can't say what it is.
Henry Ford supposedly said that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. The line is probably apocryphal, but the point holds: what they wanted was faster transport, and a horse was the only form of it they knew. Finding that root intent is the work.
It also explained failures I'd seen without understanding them. Push a door that has a pull handle and the design has failed you, because the door doesn't match the model in your head. A user lost in a software menu is having the same experience with a screen.
What the product guy does
Put the three together and you get the reason neither design nor engineering survives alone.
Intent without resolution is a dream: a beautifully articulated design that can't be built is a concept car that can't drive. Resolution without intent is a solution looking for a problem: an efficient, robust system nobody needs is a bridge built to an empty island.
No-code, AI and existing platforms have collapsed the cost of the right-hand side. Nothing has collapsed the left. Tools move you along the spectrum; the thinking is what you still bring.
The product guy is whoever holds both at once — the human intent and the structural constraint — and keeps either from winning by default. That's what I was searching for, and it's the work I do now.