We operate under the illusion that we’re all working towards a single, shared vision of the product. The reality is, we’re not. The designer, the product team, and the engineer are each guided by their own “Product Ideal” — a perfect, internal vision of what the product should be, seen through their own perceptual lens.
This perceptual gap is the source of our most expensive problems: the misaligned meetings, the frustrating compromises, and the hurt egos. This article is an attempt to make those invisible ideals visible, exploring a shared language to diagnose this friction and begin building an ontology for the practice of digital product design.