Can this team actually design and build a product our customers will use?
Products customers use
Customer-facing products usually fail for a reason that has nothing to do with visual design. A checkout, a portal, or an app gets redesigned to look better, but the underlying workflow — what the customer is actually trying to do, and what the system requires of them to do it — was never redesigned. The result is a better-looking version of the same problem.
A redesign that changed the visuals but not the number of steps
Customers calling support to do something the product should let them do themselves
A product roadmap driven by internal requests, not by where customers actually get stuck
We treat product design and product engineering as one decision, not two handoffs — the screen a customer sees and the system behind it are designed together, not designed and then implemented separately. Before proposing an interface, we map the task the customer is actually trying to complete and where it breaks down today; a better interface on the same broken workflow moves the friction, it doesn't remove it.