Hello picnicker! It’s Pavel Samsonov, from the internet. I’m trying something new with how I’m gathering and framing ideas around Product and UX Design, and I’m excited to have you along for the ride.

What’s Product Picnic?

A little while back I announced that I would be turning my article series on cultivating a work environment that enables good design into a newsletter. This is that newsletter!

As I dwelled on the idea, I decided to expand the scope of what I mean by “publication.” The biggest reason that I got into long-form writing in the first place was that the best outlet for my energy at the time - Design Twitter - shattered into a hundred smaller communities hosted by other social spaces. Those communities have experienced various degrees of success. Cohost, for instance, has shut down, while the Bluesky design community is picking up steam. Then there are places that are small by design like Posts.cv, Slacks, and Discord group chats.

I’m personally active across a number of these, and while the ideas I come across are a great source of inspiration for my long-form writing, there are too many to shine a spotlight on each one that deserves it.

So that’s what this newsletter will be: a place to share the notable and interesting things that I come across, to try and spread important conversations between our dispersed communities.

The format is going to evolve. This wouldn’t be fun if I didn’t get to try new things. But here are the categories as I’m thinking of them right now…

The Timeline

This is where I’m going to gather a few conversations from across the socials that are worth reading, even if you’re not on that site - and worth replying to if you do have an account. Think of it like a Retweet by email.

• Madame Hardy shares a quote from a senior engineer that sums up how most of us feel not only about our meetings, but about much of our work. It doesn’t matter if our activities have measurable impacts if those impacts are measured in “inches of sock.”

• I thought I’ve seen every design job posting fail, but Jamie Sigadel finds one pattern that’s new to me. Click on this one if you want to go “oof.”

• Joanna Weber riffs on yet another great John Cutler diagram. Earning trust and setting expectations are critical for every product and design leader interested in changing not just the product, but the way the product is delivered. And that means understanding our colleagues just as well as we try to understand our customers.

• I have made a terrible mistake and now - even after writing over 200 UX Facts - am still over 600 posts behind. These are the wages of hubris.

Reading Material

I’m not going to do bullet-form summaries of these articles. Whether they’re new ideas driving the conversation, or old papers that have something relevant to say about the challenges we face, they deserve to be read in full.

Sometimes there’s going to be a theme, other times the theme will be “what I’m reading, and think you should read.” The connections you draw between them as you read will undoubtedly be much more powerful than what I can come up with for you.

• In order to design systems (and not merely their surfaces), we need to understand how they actually work. Cameron Tonkinwise is the guy to read for that. His article on Critical Loop Literacy is mandatory for anyone who wants to engage with social and economic systems, which is where the real leverage is (this one is a Donella Meadows piece and also worth reading), rather than just the technical widgets we attach to them.

• A great companion piece is this oldie - an interview of Prof. Joseph Weizenbaum. It goes to a lot of places, but the one that most resonates with me is the distinction between technical and social inventions. “I think the computer has from the beginning been a fundamentally conservative force... What the coming of the computer did was to make it unnecessary to create social inventions, to change the system in any way.”

• An old Charles Stross piece completes the set by framing corporations as a kind of AI system - “old, slow procedural AI” - that is capable of being more than the sum of its parts, yet operates as a black box and might not be said to “understand” what it does.

Visual Metaphor

We say that designers are visual thinkers, but keep using the same visual metaphors (desire paths, ketchup, iceberg) to explain our concepts to people. Let’s shake things up a little bit.

This week I wanted to bring up one that I’ve written about recently. The desire path thing is something of a pet peeve of mine - if you pave every desire path you’ll end up with a world of asphalt - so I wanted to give a shout-out to microwave buttons as a much better metaphor.

Good Questions

As a student, I always thought it silly when teachers told us “asking the right question is more important than the right answer.” Perhaps that was because the majority of the way we were measured was by being given a sheet of fixed questions and then having to answer them.

It was one of the many things I’ve been wrong about. So I want to feature a weekly “good question” that can shake up a stagnant conversation veering into “satisficing” and set the discussion in the right direction.

Often this kind of question helps reframe things by turning around another question that we are used to reaching for. Instead of “who would buy it?” Rob Snyder encourages us to ask “who would it be weird for not to buy it?” I’ve used this one since learning about it, and it has been an effective counter to stakeholders who don’t want to discuss their customer’s persona because they “don’t want to limit their market” or some such.

Diagram of the Week

By this part of the newsletter we have passed a thousand words and you’re overdue for an image. This one is a theme that has come up a lot recently - especially in my work, where UX and Product cross paths a lot, and the “desirable, viable, feasible” triad is highly relevant.

The thing is, “viable” doesn’t belong in that triad.

Viability is a secondary factor, one that is determined by two things: how important a thing the customer perceives the thing to be, and how important the business perceives the thing to be. The first factor is of course, desirability. The second factor is its business-facing mirror Priority. The viability of a particular product is going to be constrained by these two factors; it doesn’t matter how valuable it is if that value doesn’t have a place in the business’s framing of its strategy.

A product manager who does not understand this will find themselves pushed further and further into trying to own the desirability conversation, because it is the only way they can affect the shape of their product’s viability space. Here, they will inevitably collide with designers, and conflict will ensue.

I believe that we are observing that now.

That’s all from me this week. As this newsletter finds its legs, I welcome any and all feedback that will make it more valuable or interesting, and earn that spot in your inbox. Drop me a line!

- Pavel at the Product Picnic