The Invisible Work of Product Design
I often think about how much good product design depends on work most people never see.
Not the screens. Not the flows. Not the final polish.
But the invisible parts that shape whether good work is even possible in the first place. Things like:
How teams collaborate
Whether there’s real cross-team alignment or just meetings
A shared language for talking about problems and tradeoffs
Design systems that reduce cognitive load instead of adding to it
Decisions made today that make future decisions easier, not harder
This kind of work doesn’t show up in screenshots, but it has an outsized impact on everything that follows. Years ago, Google spent a significant amount of time trying to answer a deceptively simple question: what makes a team effective? They looked at team composition, seniority, individual talent, work styles ... all the things people tend to assume matter most.
What they found surprised a lot of people.
The strongest predictor of a high-performing team wasn’t who was on it. It was how the team worked together.
Things like:
Psychological safety — whether people feel safe asking questions, admitting uncertainty, or challenging ideas
Clarity — around goals, roles, and expectations
Dependability — knowing others will follow through
Meaning — believing the work matters
Impact — understanding how the work connects to real outcomes
In other words, the “soft stuff” turned out to be the hard leverage.
That insight maps directly to what I’ve seen play out in product and UX work over and over again. The difference between teams that struggle and teams that move quickly isn’t usually raw talent. It’s clarity. It’s shared understanding. It’s whether people feel safe saying “this doesn’t make sense” before weeks of effort are sunk into the wrong thing.
This is where senior UX roles quietly carry a lot of weight. At a certain point, the highest value work isn’t about polishing screens or perfecting interactions. It’s about creating clarity where complexity exists. It’s about helping teams align on what problem they’re solving, why it matters, and how decisions connect over time.
That can look like:
Establishing shared language so teams stop talking past each other
Using systems and patterns so teams aren’t re-solving the same problems
Framing decisions in a way that makes tradeoffs visible and intentional
Reducing cognitive load, not just for users, but for the people building the product
When teams have clarity, speed follows, not because they rush, but because they don’t waste energy second-guessing or undoing work.
When systems are strong, creativity scales, not because everything is rigid, but because the basics are handled well enough to leave room for exploration.
This kind of invisible work is easy to underestimate because it’s not flashy. It doesn’t always ship as a feature. Sometimes it shows up as fewer meetings, fewer rework cycles, or better conversations early on. But over time, it’s what allows good design (and good products) to exist at all. That’s the kind of work I find most meaningful now. The work that makes other work 100x better!
