Meta Layer Of Product Design

Building an enabling system for creative consumer brands has stretched my product design muscles in entirely new ways. I have to think beyond individual brands and consider categories as a whole — and then beyond that, what is common across all categories. That is what allows us to extrapolate what works in one category, like fashion, into adjacent ones like home furnishings.

My thesis is that all creative consumer brands face the same fundamental challenge: how to marry aesthetic appeal with commercial viability. How to build on a winning formula while continuously iterating to deliver freshness and creativity. How to do this consistently in a fast-moving space. And how to encode all of it into AI without losing the human touch.

I think we are succeeding because we have understood that what is needed is a constant balancing of many competing factors, supported by enough data and rationale to give brands the confidence to make better decisions, faster. It is not taking away the judgement and taste element — which is what makes product designers and creative teams excellent — but helping them harness that embedded intuition and sometimes confirm their hunches through reasoning to enable faster and more integrated decision making.

Thinking about product design at this meta level has been one of the most invigorating applications of my creativity to date. It lets me help many creative brands launch, rather than just one. It expands the mode of creativity as a whole and makes building a brand more accessible to anyone who simply has an eye and a feel for their market.

We are truly living in a creators' world, and it is exciting to be building the infrastructure that supports it.