When the product isn’t made for the user, it becomes tragic for them

Have you ever tried asking your team what a Product Designer does?

If you ask a PM, a dev, QA, data, or marketing, chances are each one will give you a different answer. But almost all responses will orbit around the same idea: to create the best possible experience for the user.

But what does that really mean?

For me, the role of a Product Designer boils down to one thing:

Being the representative of the user inside the company.

Tools, processes, frameworks, design systems… none of that matters if it doesn’t actually make the user’s life easier within the product’s context.

On the book Tragic Design – The True Impact of Bad Product Design and How to Fix It, it says:

“Bad designs are the ones that collide with human behaviors and cause undesired friction. When we create things without the end users in mind (or with some vague sense of them as customers), we almost always end up creating bad designs. Badly designed products serve their creator (or sponsor) first and the users second.”

This perspective makes complete sense. It’s not about saying stakeholders don’t know what they’re doing — it would be naïve to think that. The issue is that a company will always defend its own interests, and those interests don’t always align with what’s best for the user.

And that’s where the Product Designer comes in: the user isn’t in the room to defend themselves — so someone has to be there on their behalf.

Always remember: a user whose needs are met — and exceeded — is a user who stays. They are the ones who sustain the product. And, ultimately, sustain the business.

The designer, then, walks a tightrope: between the needs of the business and those of the user.

Not everyone has the luxury of simply saying “no” to a decision they disagree with. And not everything that seems wrong at first glance is actually a bad choice. Sometimes the issue lies only in perspective.

A change in point of view can reveal that what seemed unfeasible for the user was, in fact, just poorly communicated.

Example of perspective: Imagine a subscription flow that requires a credit card to start the trial. At first glance, you might think: “this hurts the experience.” But after talking to users, you discover the problem isn’t the card requirement — it’s the lack of transparency about the future charge. With a simple clear notice before the trial, you reduce cancellations, increase trust, and still deliver value to the business.

Even so, regardless of internal pressures, the Product Designer’s role is always to ask: how will this impact the user?

And how do we do this?

User advocacy is not an act of faith. It is a grounded job.

And what supports this are data. Data are indisputable. You may even have opinions, but they become more relevant when supported by real evidence.

A practical case:

I worked at a startup that offered installment purchases to facilitate access to products. Since they were still at an early stage, both the application and the technology were quite limited and did not keep up with the real needs of the product and the users.

The problem? Users had no way of knowing how much they owed. Even if they wanted to pay, they needed to contact finance to find out the amount.

The result was:

• Users indebted without realizing it.

• Growing financial gap in the company.

• Lack of trust in the product.

I started with interviews and routine studies. I discovered that:

• Users used the product as sales intermediaries.

• The profit margin came only from labor, not from product resale.

• Without clarity of the amount owed, there was no cash flow control.

A feature that seemed like a “detail” that would help the user’s daily life was, in fact, what separated a business that worked from a business about to break for them.

With this understanding, we repositioned the strategy. What was once only a problem of defaulting became a restructuring of the OKRs and the growth strategy.

In conclusion, the work of a Product Designer is not to please everyone.It is not to make pretty screens.It is not to follow the briefing to the letter.

It is to transform what you see, hear, and analyze into decisions that represent what the user really needs — and what they don’t even know they need yet.

In the end, being a designer is about empathy, but also responsibility.

Because when the product is not for the user, it becomes tragic for them.