When Design Thinking Runs Backwards: A Common Pattern Behind Struggling Products

Across industries- technology, consumer goods, services, media, and internal tools, new products often follow a similar early path. An opportunity is identified, resources are secured, and teams move quickly into execution. Something tangible is produced early to create momentum and demonstrate progress.

This approach is understandable. Making things visible aligns teams, reassures stakeholders, and creates a sense of forward motion.

From a UX research perspective, however, starting with production rather than understanding often introduces risk long before that product ever reaches its audience.

The Momentum Trap

In many organizations, shipping has become synonymous with progress. Output is measurable. Learning is not.

The issue is not speed; it is sequence. When execution begins before the problem space is fully understood, teams can move quickly while reinforcing untested assumptions. What looks like momentum can quietly accumulate different forms of debt that are harder to see early on.

Three Types of Debt Created by Starting Too Soon

Validation Debt

Validation debt accrues when teams commit to solutions before confirming that they address real, meaningful problems. The product exists, but confidence in why it should exist is missing or incomplete.

This debt often surfaces later as:

• Low adoption or engagement

• Confusing positioning

• Repeated pivots that don’t resolve core issues

Design Debt

Design debt emerges when foundational decisions about structure, flows, and mental models are made without sufficient understanding of user behavior. It is not about visual polish; it is about misalignment between how a system works and how people think.

Design debt shows up as:

• Complex navigation

• Inconsistent workflows

• Features that technically work but feel unintuitive

  
  

Technical Debt

Technical debt is more widely discussed and generally well understood. It accumulates when systems are built quickly without fully anticipating future needs or changes.

What’s often missed is that validation and design debt frequently create technical debt. When assumptions change, systems must be reworked to support new realities.

These forms of debt are not failures; they are predictable outcomes of committing too early.

Starting With the “What” Instead of the “Why”

Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle framework describes a simple sequence:

• Why: the purpose or problem

• How: the approach or method

• What: the final output

  
  

In practice, many teams reverse this order. They begin with the What : a solution, feature set, or offering. The How is worked out during execution. The Why is clarified later, often when adoption, engagement, or retention falls short.

This inversion rarely happens by choice. It is driven by pressure to act, to demonstrate progress, and to make ideas tangible as soon as possible. The result is not poor execution, but execution that is misaligned with real needs, often accompanied by growing validation, design, and technical debt.

“We’re Always Thinking About the User”

At this point, many founders and teams push back, and reasonably so.

They’ll say:

“This idea came from our own experience.”

“We think about the user constantly.”

And often, that’s true. Intuition and domain knowledge are valuable starting points. Many strong ideas originate there.

From a research standpoint, however, thinking about users and learning from users are not the same activity.

Internal reasoning, no matter how empathetic, is shaped by personal context, bias, and limited exposure. It reflects how a problem appears to us, not how it shows up across different people, environments, constraints, and priorities.

When teams move forward without external input, validation debt begins to accumulate.

What Changes When You Ask Instead of Assumming

Direct conversations with users fundamentally change the quality of insight.

Instead of validating a solution, researchers focus on understanding the problem space by asking questions such as:

• What challenges do you experience today?

• How do you currently deal with them?

• What happens when your current solution doesn’t work?

• If you had a magic wand and could solve this perfectly, what would that look like?

  
  

This “magic wand” question is particularly powerful because it removes existing constraints, tools, budgets, processes, and reveals what people are actually trying to achieve, not just what they are willing to tolerate.

These conversations reduce validation debt early, before design and technical decisions become difficult to reverse.

Why Timing Matters

Across disciplines, the cost of change increases over time. Adjustments made when ideas are still abstract are relatively inexpensive. Adjustments made after production begins are not.

Once systems, processes, or structures are in place, learning becomes constrained by what already exists. Insights discovered later must be negotiated with sunk costs rather than shaping direction freely.

From a UX research perspective, early learning is not just about insight, it is about debt prevention.

Design Is Not a Finishing Step

Design is often treated as a refinement phase, something that happens once direction is set. When introduced late, its role is limited to improving usability or aesthetics within fixed constraints.

When paired with research, design helps prevent design debt by aligning structures and flows with real mental models before they are locked in.

A well-designed solution that addresses the wrong problem will still struggle. A less-polished solution that addresses a real need can evolve without carrying excessive debt.

A Research-Led Sequence

While no single process fits every context, a lower-risk sequence often looks like this:

1. Understand people in context. Observe real behaviors, constraints, and motivations.

2. Define the problem clearly

   Articulate what needs to change for people, not just what can be produced.

3. Prototype to learn

   Create representations that are realistic enough to test but inexpensive to change.

4. Test and refine

   Let insights shape direction before full production begins.

5. Execute with confidence

   Commit resources once uncertainty has been meaningfully reduced.

   
   

This approach doesn’t eliminate debt. It keeps it manageable.

Not all teams start with production. Not all teams that do will fail. Context, constraints, and timing always matter.

But when products struggle, it’s often worth examining not how well something was built, but what kind of debt was accumulated along the way, and when.

Thinking about users is essential. Asking users and letting that learning shape decisions is what keeps debt from compounding.