Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

What Great Product Design Looks Like

20 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, the speaker argues that great product design involves creating experiences that have never existed before, requiring designers to navigate uncharted interaction paradigms without prior training data. He cites the iPhone’s introduction of multitouch and Snapchat’s radical reimagining of communication as prime examples of innovative design that addressed unmet user needs in novel ways. The speaker also stresses the critical role of keeping humans in the loop when tackling such unprecedented design challenges, as human intuition and empathy help bridge the gap where data is lacking.

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Everything we're doing is trying to design something that hasn't existed before. If you look at great products that have come out in the last 10, 20 years, you know, take the iPhone. We're designing for multitouch, and that opened up like this whole new interaction paradigm. And there's no training data for that. You're kind of really trying to understand this new thing. And then Snapchat, I think, is another good example of great design in that it was kind of a— maybe people thought strange sort of like interaction design, but it completely flipped on its head the way people might want to communicate with each other. And to me, that is like great design. It's like truly understanding, like, people have this problem or there's this unmet need and I'm going to build it in this unique way. So yeah, I do think that there's that sort of like fresh, new kind of way. I think there's a lot of reasons why having that human in the loop is going to be so important.