What Does “Product Design” Really Mean?

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, host Drew McLellan sits down with Chris Murphy to unpack the concept of product design. They explore what it means to be a product owner and how one can develop the necessary skills.

Guest & Resources

What Does a Product Owner Do?

A product owner is not simply a project manager with a different title. While a project manager is typically focused on scope, timeline and cost, a product owner takes responsibility for the product itself — the value it delivers, the problems it solves and the way it evolves over time. It’s a more strategic role that connects business objectives with user needs and often sits at the intersection of design, management and technology.

Murphy’s point is that product design as a discipline isn’t limited to a single job title. It can be a mode of thinking applied by designers, developers, and managers. But there’s a distinct skill set around product ownership — understanding users, shaping them into a viable roadmap, and communicating the product vision across a multidisciplinary team. This requires not just design talent but also organizational empathy, critical thinking and the ability to negotiate priorities with different stakeholders.

Learning the Craft of Product Design

One of the most important themes from the conversation is that product design can absolutely be learned. It’s not an inherent trait or merely the by-product of having a design degree.

Murphy argues that there are strong analogies between designing products and the structures we see in various industries. He highlights how established companies shape products, but importantly, the underlying mindset is something anyone can develop. Exploring educational resources outside formal design training is one way in. Chris references how disciplines such as The School Of Design try to collate emerging practices and perspectives whose fundamentals are accessible.

Learning is largely about getting involved early and experimenting without fear of making mistakes. In practice, you can learn a great deal through small-scale experiments that challenge assumptions, such as outlining a mock feature and asking users for feedback before building anything. There’s also a strong link between writing and thinking. A product strategy often depends on pitching an idea: explaining an idea, getting buy-in and explaining the reasons behind it. Communication skills are often undervalued in design educational settings, yet they are foundational to product design’s success.

Iterating on a Product Requires User Feedback

To be successful, Murphy explains, you need to see the process through the eyes of the users, always testing assumptions and anticipating how their behavior evolves. Feedback loops serve as the constant hum beneath product development — whether it’s formal conversion metrics or more informal experiences. Looking over each decision with a careful and sometimes critical eye — but not overly self-critical — is just as critical.

For Chris, it's clear that you don’t need seniority to do this. Even when new to your field, or if you’re transitioning from another role such as development or UX design, you can begin by allowing yourself to take ownership for your work and engage in discourse with the people it’s supposed to affect. That is the heart of product thinking — feeling comfortable in uncertainty and leaving room to adapt.

The team aspect cannot be ignored. A smart product manager asks for contribution and creates space for more people to influence decisions. Chris mentions the importance of clarity in processes but strengthens that role by advocating for various perspectives early.

From Design Into Product

Many building or managing experiences today look for a method they can apply day after day. Chris suggests that the attitude still comes first. The structures and artifacts such as design systems, prototypes or analytics charts will only help if there’s an appetite to engage with the unknown long-term, measure continuously, and remain open to learning quickly from what was initially a “wrong” thought — turning errors into deliberate strategic pivots.

Listen to the full episode for more direct advice from Chris on moving into product design, learning to evaluate the outcomes of business strategy, and how your product ownership can create meaning in your own daily responsibilities — regardless of your title.

Design-Focused Means Designing More of It

When Chris Murphy talks about design-focused companies, he doesn't mean businesses that merely employ designers. He means organizations that treat design as a factor in every decision, from manufacturing to retail. Apple is his reference point — not for its products alone, but for how the hardware, software, chips, stores, and even the COVID-era buying experience all feel considered. The claim isn't that every company achieves this, but that everything can be designed, and the most design-focused businesses simply choose to design more of the process than their competitors.

Murphy, a designer, educator, and founder of The School of Design, argues that traditional boundaries between design disciplines have collapsed. A physical product like a laptop depends on software; the software depends on getting the device into a customer's hands; that retail journey is itself a designed experience. The lesson for founders is that their work doesn't stop at the interface or the object. It extends to packaging, emails, unboxing, and even the tone of a social media reply.

That mindset shaped Murphy's own consulting practice. When asked to solve one problem, he often spends days investigating and returns with a different diagnosis: "I can totally help you with problem X, but I really think a more pressing issue is this thing over here." As he admits, he's terrible at business, so he sometimes offers the extra work for free. The motivation is genuine interest in the whole experience, not the scope of the original brief.

Touchpoints Beyond the Screen

A design touchpoint, Murphy explains, is any moment a customer comes into contact with a business. It's how you answer the phone, the tone of your emails, the voice of your social media, the way you write a blog post. He hired a placement student this year who drew him a diagram of touchpoints because he constantly meets people who have never heard the term. That gap in knowledge is exactly what The School of Design aims to fill — all the things nobody teaches in art school.

His own venture sells sketchbooks, bands for holding pens, and an organizational system. When orders go out, they don't contain just the product. Murphy includes badges, stickers, and handwritten notes. He wants the person opening the box to feel something, to make a deeper connection than a transaction would allow. He prefers "friend who paid me some money" over "customer."

This philosophy scales down well. As a small business, you can do things a mega-corp can't. Murphy keeps every handwritten thank-you note from Counter-Print Books; when orders arrive from Celine, they say, “Enjoy your zine, Christopher.” A note that's printed and fake-signed at scale backfires, he says — customers like him hold it up to the light and notice. But a genuine personal touch from a small operator creates real loyalty. He once taught a group of craftspeople and one woman was laughing — she'd kept all her notes from the same company, too.

Packaging is one of the most overlooked touchpoints. Murphy has long used a lecture comparing an Apple box and a Dell box. Both were just packaging, but the Apple packaging repeatedly told the buyer they'd made the right choice; the Dell box just got the computer from A to B without a scratch. “That's a real missed opportunity,” he says. Japanese packaging culture takes this further. Books like How to Wrap Five Eggs show how layering tissue, bags, and tape around even a single egg creates an experience of unwrapping something precious.

Storytelling and Provenance

Origin stories matter because they turn commodities into something people choose for reasons beyond price. Field Notes is a canonical example for Murphy — $9.95 for three tiny notebooks when a cheaper set is a short walk away. The difference is the story: details about the printing press, the Pantone inks, the paper, the people who invented the staple. “You're not really buying notebooks, you're buying a story there.”

Hiut Denim does one thing well — jeans — and uses them as a vehicle for stories. The company, run by David and Clare Hieatt after they left Howies, calls the people who stitch the jeans “grandmasters.” The bigger a business gets, the harder it is to hold onto that provenance. Middle management starts asking why they're paying workers in Wales when the same jeans could be made cheaper elsewhere. “That's the slippery slope,” Murphy says, “and when that happens, the provenance suddenly disappears.”

Apple's marketing works the same way, he notes. The story of milling a product from a single piece of aluminum isn't practically necessary — any manufacturing process that works would do — but it sells care and craft. Reviewers repeat it; unboxing videos reinforce it. The emotional connection does the work that a spec sheet can't.

Emotion Over Rationality

Most purchases are emotional, not rational, Murphy argues. He has paid around £90 for Camper shoes when a decent pair costs £20. Why? They're bright blue, they start conversations, they bring joy. He bought one pair in a size 10 and another in size 11 because the Kvadrat fabric is so stiff — the second pair now sits on a bookcase like an ornament.

The M1 Mac launch seduced him the same way. He spent ten minutes convincing his son, a wedding photographer whose business has been decimated by COVID, to buy the new machine before realizing he should be the one upgrading. The next day, rational thinking returned: “I don't need an M1 computer. There's nothing wrong with this one.”

This is why product design is about more than solving problems. Murphy splits products into two rough categories: problem-solving and delight-bringing. The most successful products mix both, but he estimates 70% of purchases are problem-driven and 30% are pure joy. As a designer, you can be good at the first and forget the second.

Vision Versus Flexibility

Sticking rigidly to a founding vision is a balancing act. Basecamp (formerly 37signals) is a model of saying no to customer requests that don't fit the product. Murphy agrees there's a place for having a vision and not bowing to one customer's whim. He asked Drew McLellan, during the interview, to add features to Notist that would make it useful for educators rather than conference speakers — and McLellan declined. That's fine; it's his product.

Murphy nearly made the opposite mistake with The School of Design. A developer taking one of his courses said he'd feel more included if the community was for “creatives” rather than “designers.” Murphy almost changed the business's entire pitch for one person. A few days later, rationality kicked in: “That's insane. It's called The School of Design. It's all about design. You can be a non-designer and come into The School of Design, that's totally cool, but I'm not going to change the language for that one person.”

But dogmatism has a cost. When he and two former students built the ticketing platform Get Invited, their vision was “let's not be Eventbrite.” They locked down the page design so customers couldn't ruin it — no custom colors, no logos, descriptions capped at 140 words. Hundreds of people asked for those features. Eventually, the evidence was overwhelming. “We needed to flex a bit.”

His metaphor: don't try to be a chef's knife at the start. Be a garlic crusher — focused, serving a specific group really well. Once those customers are happy and paying, you can slowly expand. You don't want to be a smorgasbord of your competitors, and getting into a feature-by-feature arms race is a slippery slope. But at some point, being a garlic crusher becomes too limiting. The balance shifts.

Venture Testing Before Building

Murphy's advice for founders testing an idea: build a smoke test page, drive traffic to it with Facebook or Instagram ads, and measure sign-ups. If nobody signs up, either the traffic is wrong — in which case, adjust — or it's time to close and move on. He launched a workshop with a friend that got exactly one sign-up. He calls that a success because building out the full course would have been a waste of time. The one sign-up proved the concept wasn't worth pursuing.

The Segway is his cautionary tale. The founder believed it would transform transportation. It became a tour vehicle in Berlin. “It's really important not to get deluded with your own belief that this product's going to be amazing when you don't really check with anybody else.”

The School of Design's Shape

Murphy admits he doesn't know exactly what The School of Design is yet. He's been working on it for 11 months in beta form. The audience shifted from students to mid-career professionals. The word for participants shifted from “students” to “founders” — and that may not be right either, since some members want to build their own businesses while others just want to do better work inside companies like Booking.com.

A key turning point came from Anne-Laure Le Cunff's Ness Labs. He'd signed up and realized he'd joined a community that gave him access to workshops — the inverse of his own model, which was selling workshops that gave access to a community. “That's the same thing, but different.” The School of Design will be a community first, with learning materials as a benefit of membership. He envisions a library at library.theschoolofdesign.com with sections on marketing, branding, pricing, productivity, and mindfulness — everything he taught in his master's program at Belfast School of Art “but for a fraction of the price.”

The launch begins December 1 with a blog at theschoolofdesign.com. From January 1, he'll invite more people into the Slack community, conduct more customer conversations, and share a first season of speakers — set up like a Netflix-style season, part of a venture called Beacons that highlights companies worth learning from. Hiut Denim and Field Notes are beacons; so are Ustwo Games, Blok Knives, and, further back, Charles and Ray Eames and the Bauhaus — historical figures who never heard of boundaries between disciplines like furniture, textiles, and buildings.

On pricing, he's thinking of something around £60 a year, despite friends telling him it's too low. “The community should be open to as many people as possible. To me, that's more important than making money. Somehow or another, I have to earn enough to pay my bills in order to just help as many people as I can.”

Just Start

Murphy's parting advice is simple: just start. For years, his Tiny Books project was enormous in his head — a solar system of interlocking products. This year, he embraced the mentality that everything is a prototype. “If something works, great. What did I learn from it? If something doesn't work, great. I still learned something from it.”

So many people have an amazing idea that never leaves their sketchbook. “I'd rather see it out there on the web or somewhere. So start, one word, simple.”

You can follow Chris Murphy on Twitter at @fehler and explore The School of Design at theschoolofdesign.com.