Product Design & Systems Thinker
A human-centered, design-thinking, information architectural, systems-focused product manager
August 4, 2025
As sort of a follow-on from my previous post about the changing state of product management and design, I’ve been mulling product design and UX from the perspective of 'Systems Thinking’; hopefully articulating a mature and comprehensive view of what modern product design really is—systems thinking applied across technology, business, and human behavior.
In seeking out a new job, I see huge swings in the definition and understanding of ‘Product Designer’. Many people hear 'Designer' or 'UX' and think artist, someone who draws graphics and user interfaces (UI). People used to ask what I did, and for a long time I would say ‘Basically I draw for a living.’ That was really inaccurate and cheapened what I do. In reality I was always a ‘systems thinker’. An Interaction Designer.
I started out as a Product Manager. I learned graphic and Web design, and quickly moved on to front-end code with html/css, and then usability. This was partly a necessity in understanding the technologies I was working with, but I actually found it extremely interesting and enjoyable.
For almost 6 years I’d been working in technology at larger companies. MP3.com, Vivendi-Universal, CNET, Kintera. After a layoff, I pivoted—going back to school to formalize the design skills I’d been using for some time, and diving more into the psychology of human-computer interaction. It was a boot camp before there were boot camps for this stuff. I learned a lot even if I already knew most of the coursework—I even helped teach the class about Web 2.0 and CSS—the curriculum was a bit behind.
That was 20 years ago.
My next few titles evolved. Creative Director > Senior Interaction Designer > User Experience Designer > Product Designer. Product design seemed to capture what I really did. A hybrid between interaction designer and product manager. That sufficed for many years. Over time lines blurred. Graphic designers started doing UI, Web designers learned about usability and user testing.
Today, as a product designer (and maybe that’s just not the right title any more), I am thinking about much more than just the screen or the UI or even just the user interaction. I am thinking about the order of operations in the code, the tech stack. The functionality.
All along, I’d been practicing visual design, creating UI, page layout, information architecture, interaction design, requirements gathering, conducting user research and design testing.
The technological dependencies like the server speeds, redundant systems, databases, API structures, billing components, security. How all of that fits together. I’m thinking about the product as a whole entity.
I’ve recently began viewing that as 'Systems Thinking'. Not a new term, but I feel like it more accurately describes what I do, beyond the current conventional perception of ‘Product Designer’.
A human-centered, design-thinking, information architectural, systems-focused product manager
