Meet the Customer Where They Are
I can recall a particularly uncomfortable meeting during my time at a smaller fintech startup.
We had a weekly “Scrum of Scrums” meeting, led by our COO. It was uncommon to have a COO partake in product decisions, but he had a sharp eye for product and provided clear-eyed feedback, often informed by his visibility across each of the different internal orgs. I had been working with one of our product managers on a redesign of how our customers provide their complete set of diligence requirements within the product interface and how they knew when they had fully provided their requirements without the need for our GTM team to chase them down.
We presented our work updates. Our COO’s response to the work was fairly neutral, we presented a good narrative, informed with product data and evidence to support our hypothesis. However, his pushback came hard and came out of left field: “This is great and all, but I would encourage you to stop thinking and working on the product altogether.”
This company made it’s money by selling money, not software. This is more common than not with tech companies: a lot of them are not selling primarily software, they are selling something else wrapped in software. Somewhere along the way the team had built out a fairly expansive interface layer. The reasoning was simple: having an interface would help the team scale.
My COO had a deeper point that he was making. In an era where the idea that we should “meet the customer where they are” is becoming more and more accessible, a quality user experience might mean looking at a customer’s journey and making the decision to integrate into it instead of convincing them to change their behavior and open up one more tool.
A few years ago, Scott Belsky wrote1 that we are living in the battle of the interface layers. Every company fights to be included in the interfaces that we see everyday.
That battle is shifting away from the interface layer with the proliferation of AI, and agentic AI has poured gas on the fire.
When a customer can run an agent from Whatsapp and that agent can navigate to a given piece of software, talk to an agent on the company’s end, and complete the task without the need for the customer to open an interface, what good is an interface?
With a shrinking interface layer, where does design go? Does it make sense for design to hyperfocus on taste when the layer that taste lives on is contracting? Or does it make more sense that design doubles down into mapping, systems design and agent orchestration?
I agree with MC Dean that design is moving upstream2. Taste will still matter, but I can foresee that it will matter for a smaller subset of designers.
I could almost see a world where the existing creative arm of a company inherits the taste side of the interface, while product design embraces a more expansive surface area across both the in-product and outside-of-product customer experience, and how it interacts with the internal operations within a given company. A world where product design can fully embrace and execute on meeting the customer where they are.
1https://www.implications.com/p/insights-on-collapsing-the-talent 2https://marieclairedean.substack.com/p/five-design-skills-disappearing-seven