Two people smiling in front of a wall covered with several award plaques, celebrating their innovative product design philosophy.

Product Design Philosophy

I’m sharing my core product design philosophy that I’ve learned and formed over the decades of working with Harman, Fender, Gibson, Acer, Foxconn, Steinberg, Dolby and other brands on creating lasting and profitable products.

  • Don’t reinvent anything that’s not broken.
  • Find the simplest and most straightforward solution–Make it easier and more economical for the program to be adopted widely, even in low, medium-income countries.
  • For functionalities that’s outside of our core mission (or is too big or expensive for us to take on), select partners who are the best in class (i.e. developing a large language model from scratch, student information system). Always remember your core competencies. If certain billion-dollar companies concentrate their entire R&D budget to a certain feature (i.e. contact center, LLM), do NOT try to home brew it without good reason. The landscape would change before you even get anywhere.
  • Collaborate and before investing our own resources.
  • Building a feedback loop into the product to incorporate continuous improvement and relevancy (It is real world user and market testing that’s much more reliable–people lie and most people have no idea what they want
  • Don’t forget to make it fun. Assume that people are busy or lazy, so you have to earn the intended action.
Caitlyn Wang Avatar

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Touched by what you read? Join the conversation!

  • Who doesn’t procrastinate?
    Who doesn’t procrastinate?

    These are the most common excuses people use when they procrastinate—delay doing what they need to do. How many of these have you personally used? According to the American Psychological Association, almost 80% of the people surveyed admit to lying to themselves about the reasons they put off doing things. So, who doesn’t procrastinate?    The…

    Read more >> about Who doesn’t procrastinate?

  • The Extraordinary You
    The Extraordinary You

    My autistic daughter has mentioned a Netflix show called “The Extraordinary Attorney Woo” a few times this year, and we finally got to watching the show today.  I didn’t want to like it at first because it seemed to fall into the stereotypical savant portrayal of autistic individuals in the media.    Hollywood’s infatuation with the…

    Read more >> about The Extraordinary You

  • Untitled post 43429

    My parents only cared about my grades. I think they may have been depressed while I was growing up. Definitely, no one practiced self-help techniques or knew about them in my family.

    Read more >> about this post