Product design is about making (digital) things. Apps, generally. Whether you’re solving a problem, presenting information, or helping users complete a task, the focus is the same: creating with purpose.
Product design in 2025 is commonly referred to as covering a range of specific roles, such as user research, user experience design (UX), user interface design (UI). These roles and skills are needed to design and deliver the design of digital products.
In interface design, this often means presenting information in a way that’s easy to understand or creating tools that help users achieve their goals efficiently. The beauty of product design lies in the balance between creativity and practicality. It’s about making something useful – and sometimes delightful – for real people.
What makes product design different from just UX or UI design is the big picture. Scalability.
From Bespoke Solutions to Scalable Products
When designing for a user, it’s tempting to create something highly bespoke and tailored. Custom solutions can be incredibly effective – solving a unique problem for a specific user. However, what happens when you discover that multiple people face the same issue?
Product thinking is about shifting from solving a single, specific problem to creating a general solution that can scale to a broader audience. Instead of reinventing the wheel for every new user or use case, you develop a product that addresses the shared needs of many. This approach doesn’t just save time and resources; it also creates something that can evolve and grow as your user base expands.
In software, the goal for product design is to create something users can pick up “off the shelf” and use, with very limited need for customisation. The marginal cost of a new software customer is close to zero, and so any customisation or servicing time needed to get a user or client setup eats into margins very quickly. You should be thinking how a particular layout, component, chart etc could be programmatically changed to adapt to a completely different user. One way of doing this could be to give the user more controls, e.g. to switch between a line chart and a bar chart. This would cover a lot of bases around potential different types of data.
Identifying Patterns Through Research
To design a scalable product, you first need to become an expert in the problem space. This means talking to multiple users, observing their workflows, and understanding their pain points. The more users you engage with, the clearer the patterns become:
- What do most users need or want?
- What features or requirements are unique to one user but common across many?
- Is this particular user request is a one-off?
- If we adapt this design, can it fit more use cases?
By identifying common threads, you can move from a custom solution to a general product. This generalization is the foundation of good product design. It ensures that your product remains relevant to a wide audience while still solving the core problem effectively.
The Art of Generalization
Finding the right level of generalization is where the true skill of product design comes in. It’s a balancing act:
- Too broad, and your product loses its focus. It becomes a generic tool that fails to meet anyone’s needs effectively.
- Too narrow, and your product becomes overly specific, useful only to a tiny subset of users.
The goal is to create reusable components, layouts, and concepts that cater to common needs. Meanwhile, the content or data can be customized to fit individual users. This approach allows for flexibility without sacrificing scalability.
In software, a broad solution might be a Spreadsheet application. You can create many different types of output with a spreadsheet, and they come with a lot of tools and features. A narrow solution might be a specific pension calculator tool that takes one type of input and one type of output, coded up for that year’s tax rules. They are different tools, and will have different appeals and different levels of scalability. In consulting and business apps (i.e. B2B), again a broad solution might be implementing a general to-do list or task app, and a narrow one would be a workflow or pipeline management tool that had hardcoded department names as tabs, specific to that company. One has more general appeal through being more vague, the other may only be useful for a handful of people.
Building a Product That Works for Many
A great product strikes the right balance between generalization and specificity. It’s reusable, scalable, and adaptable while still solving the core problem it set out to address. By focusing on shared patterns and common needs, product designers can create tools and interfaces that serve a wide audience without losing sight of individual user experiences.
Here are a few things you can design into your app to help scale your solution into a product. A lot of these are around empowering the user to feel in control of what they are doing, giving them flexibility. By designing in flexibility, you will naturally cover a huge amount of edge cases that you will not be able to think of if you designed a narrow, linear solution.
- Design options for the user to select, e.g. if there’s a data visualisation, let them change the chart type
- Customisation: allow users to change layout, headings, titles to match their workflow
- Challenge user feedback critically, working out where the line falls between solving a problem for one user, vs solving a problem for many
- Create a hierarchical layout, allowing the user to choose their journey through the tool
- Think how a menu system, a toolbar, or content area would scale. What happens in the future if we add more items here (i.e. more options)?
- Design using familiar patterns – menu and navigation in commonly used places, settings pages found where you might expect them to be etc
Ultimately, product design is about more than just solving a problem. It’s about creating something that scales, evolves, and continues to provide value over time. By mastering the art of generalization, you can ensure your product does just that.