Product owners are usually expected to balance business objectives, stakeholder interests and user needs. But there is one area that often gets less attention than it deserves in product ownership: it’s the product design. Traditionally seen as the responsibility of designers, in my opinion, product design is increasingly becoming a strategic skill for product owners. Because understanding and adopting product design principles helps us to build better products faster with more confidence that we’re solving the right problems.
Bridging the Gap Between Vision and Experience
A key part of product ownership is defining two W questions, which are “what” and “why”, behind a feature or a product. Product design brings in how the solution looks, behaves and feels to the user. When product owners embrace design thinking, they can better communicate the intent behind a feature and ensure the end experience aligns with the product vision. This actually doesn’t mean doing the designers’ job here. It means integrating design early into your product thinking.
By framing such questions like “what’s the user journey here?” or “are we solving the core user pain or just adding another checkbox feature?” early, product owners help shape solutions that are not just functional, but also usable and valuable.
Design as a Decision-Making Tool
Design isn’t just about aesthetics, it’s actually a way of thinking and validating. Wireframes, user flows or prototypes are not deliverables to check off, but tools for learning fast. A product owner who understands this can use design artifacts to spark early feedback and accelerate the iteration. More importantly, POs can use design as a tool to test assumptions instead of waiting for development to build something before gathering feedback. Each PO should use simple prototypes to run lightweight usability sessions and bring real user insight into the prioritization decisions.
Collaboration Over Handoffs
A healthy product team does not operate in silos. Designers, developers and product owners should be in continuous collaboration. When product owners speak the language of design, such as iteration and usability, they create stronger alignment and reduce the back and forth which slows down the entire team. This collaboration pays off when it’s time to make trade-offs. Understanding what’s essential to a good user experience helps POs make decisions without compromising the product’s integrity.
A Practical Approach
As a product owner who has been working on software development projects comprising of pragmatic user interfaces, I follow below principles to adopt product design thinking.
- Learn basic UX principles, like accessibility, visual hierarchy and information architecture.
- Make user sessions to understand the end user’s behaviours and tendencies.
- Sketch a wireframe or prepare a prototype for an initial product mockup.
- Make another session with the users (for example, your stakeholders) to showcase the initial prototype and gather valuable feedback.
- After revising the mockup, create user stories based on the user needs. If the development team needs more information, make a product refinement session.
Over time, integrating product design into your process enhances your ability to make user-informed decisions, advocate for better outcomes and lead with more clarity. So, product ownership and product design are not separate domains as of they’re just puzzle pieces to build great products.
For the next posts, I’m planning to cover how I wireframe and prototype for such product design works. Thanks for reading.