Well-Designed

Have you ever wondered why some products—like the iPhone, Airbnb, or Nest—feel almost human, while others seem like cold, confusing tools? In Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love, Jon Kolko challenges the traditional logic that building successful products is all about efficiency, technology, and profit margins. Instead, he argues that the secret to meaningful innovation lies in one human quality: empathy.

Kolko contends that truly great products don’t just solve problems—they connect emotionally. They make people smile, trust, and even form attachments. The book is both a philosophical guide and a practical manual for bringing empathy, design thinking, and emotional understanding into the heart of product management. Whether you’re an engineer, marketer, or designer, Kolko wants you to think less like a strategist and more like a storyteller who understands the people behind the market data.

From Design Thinking to Design Doing

The book opens with a simple but powerful argument: most product development processes—filled with feature checklists, endless meetings, and rigid timelines—produce lifeless products. They may function, but they rarely inspire love or loyalty. Kolko describes this as the difference between design thinking—the theoretical understanding of creativity—and design doing—the messy, emotionally grounded process of actually engaging with people and building something for them.

To illustrate, Kolko contrasts bureaucratic corporate approaches with companies like Nest and Airbnb. These organizations behave as if their products have souls. Their products “feel” friendly, delightful, or even caring. The Nest thermostat, for example, took one of the least exciting household devices and transformed it into something people found “sexy” and “beautiful.” These successes, Kolko argues, stem less from cutting-edge technology than from carefully observing, empathizing with, and anticipating human behavior.

Empathy as the Core of Innovation

Kolko’s central premise is that empathy is not an innate talent—it’s a skill that can be developed. Empathy means more than collecting user data or running surveys; it’s about feeling what your users feel. You can only achieve that by getting close to them, observing them in their natural environments, and interpreting not just what they do but why they do it. This process often reveals unspoken desires and emotional needs that traditional market research overlooks.

Design-driven companies, Kolko notes, invest in understanding subtle details of human life that others miss. They discover “latent needs” that users can’t articulate—like the desire to feel safe when sharing their home on Airbnb, or the pleasure of being recognized by a digital assistant that “knows” you.

A Practical Framework for Empathetic Design

Kolko organizes his approach into four steps that merge human understanding with business reality:

• 1. Determine product-market fit by identifying emotional needs shared by communities.
• 2. Identify behavioral insights by engaging deeply with individuals to uncover underlying motivations.
• 3. Sketch a product strategy that articulates emotional value and defines your product’s “personality.”
• 4. Polish the product details through iterative design, storytelling, and relentless attention to emotion-driven decisions.

What ties these steps together is the recognition that people don’t form relationships with spreadsheets—they form them with experiences. When execution remains aligned with empathy, even mundane products can spark joy, trust, or pride.

Why Emotional Products Win

Kolko cites companies like Apple, Starbucks, and JetBlue to show how emotional connection drives profits and loyalty. Their offerings have distinct personalities—the comforting warmth of a barista, the elegance of a Macbook, the optimism of a flight attendant—that make customers fall in love. Emotional differentiation, not technical superiority, sustains these brands.

“People tend to personify products—especially digital ones,” Kolko writes. “They form relationships with products as if they were human.”

This humanization is not accidental. It’s designed deliberately, through empathy and an understanding of emotional value. In contrast, organizations that lack design sensibility chase fads, add unnecessary features, and erode user trust.

Design Thinking for Everyone

Kolko stresses that empathy and creativity aren’t reserved for designers in black turtlenecks. He makes a democratic argument: everyone in an organization—engineers, marketers, product managers—can and should “think like a designer.” This mindset relies on curiosity, playfulness, visual thinking, and optimism about the future. Leaders who embrace these traits can “design” organizations that are more adaptive, collaborative, and inspiring.

Unlike lean or agile methodologies, Kolko’s design process isn’t about speed—it’s about depth. It’s methodical and introspective, favoring meaning over measurement. In that sense, it feels like an antidote to today’s obsession with metrics. “Design,” he insists, “doesn’t claim to be efficient. It claims to be effective.”

Why This Matters Now

In an era of constant digital disruption, empathy might seem like a luxury, but Kolko argues it’s a competitive necessity. As technology floods every corner of life—from thermostats to banking apps—users don’t just judge function anymore; they judge feeling. Products that anticipate emotional needs will dominate those that merely fulfill technical ones.

By the end of Well-Designed, you realize this isn’t just a book about building better products. It’s a manifesto for a more humane business world—one where success is measured not just by metrics, but by moments of joy, trust, and connection that technology can create when guided by empathy.

Kolko redefines product management by placing design—not technology or marketing—at its center. Traditional product development tends to split along two directions: marketers chase market share, and engineers chase technical brilliance. But both often forget the user’s heart. Design thinking, Kolko argues, brings that heart back into focus.

From Analytical to Integrative Thinking

Design thinking differs from analytical reasoning in one key way—it embraces ambiguity. While business decisions traditionally rely on optimizing variables, designers hold two opposing ideas at once and creatively integrate them into something new (Kolko cites Roger Martin’s integrative thinking concept). A design-oriented product manager doesn’t just choose between a delayed release or a flawed product; she considers a third path that serves users while maintaining internal harmony.

This philosophical shift builds a culture that values curiosity and visual storytelling over control and certainty. Designers translate ideas visually—through whiteboards, sketches, and storyboards—because visuals create shared understanding across diverse teams.

The Power of Emotional Bias

Unlike agile or lean approaches that aim to reduce bias through testing, design thinking embraces bias—specifically, emotional bias. It acknowledges that emotion, subjectivity, and intuition are not flaws but creative forces. Kolko finds that teams who trust their intuition, when it’s shaped by empathy, can leapfrog incremental improvements and create revolutionary ideas—like Apple’s iPod or Airbnb’s home-sharing model.

“Design is extraordinarily effective,” Kolko writes, “in understanding what people want, need, and desire—and in creating beautiful, usable systems that serve them.”

Applying Design Leadership to Any Role

Kolko makes a key point: anyone can practice design leadership. Joe, the book’s fictional chief product officer, learns that empathy doesn’t belong only to designers. A marketer can use customer stories to test strategy; a software engineer can “walk in the user’s shoes” to simplify code; an executive can sketch ideas to inspire alignment. In that sense, Kolko transforms “design” from a job title into a mindset—a participatory, creative form of leadership.

The result is an organization where intuition and empathy coexist with analysis and logic. It makes design not only a discipline of creation but also a new form of leadership for an age where humans must tame technology with authenticity and care.

When Kolko describes achieving product-market fit, he’s not talking about chasing clicks or quarterly profits. He defines it as the emotional relationship between a community and your product. Whether a start-up or a legacy brand, success depends on how meaningfully your product resonates with people’s collective values and hopes.

Seeing Markets as Human Communities

Instead of viewing “the market” as data points or demographics, think of it as a community of people who share habits and cultural signals. Kolko illustrates this with Heyride, a short-lived car-sharing app in Austin that failed not because of poor technology but because it ignored legal and cultural dynamics. Its rival Uber thrived by recognizing and adapting to shared expectations of trust, safety, and insurance. Emotional resonance, not functionality alone, separates disruption from implosion.

The lesson is clear: look beyond spreadsheets and trend lines. Watch how values shift within online communities, notice what makes them angry or joyful, and identify those “signals” in context.

Learning from Signals

Signals—small clues in user behavior, tweets, reviews, and even protests—help you anticipate change. In Kolko’s framework, the richest signals come not from competitors, but from people. For example, Zappos didn’t differentiate by shoe inventory; it created unmatched customer trust. The emotional signal their community responded to was human kindness, not free shipping.

Kolko encourages teams to synthesize such signals visually, using tools like 2×2 matrices or “what-if” maps that compare emotional traits (like anxiety and excitement) across segments. These tools move decision-making from abstract metrics to visceral understanding.

By treating the market as a living, feeling entity, you don’t just find fit—you create belonging. And belonging is the most powerful form of loyalty a market can offer.

If product-market fit explores community emotion, behavioral insights go one level deeper—to the individual. Here Kolko’s process becomes a master class in design ethnography: observing people in their natural settings, experiencing their frustrations firsthand, and transforming observations into insights that drive innovation.

From Observation to Empathy

Kolko teaches that understanding users begins with watching what they actually do, not what they say. Interviews and surveys often reveal what people want to want, not what they truly feel. Joe, his fictional product manager, follows yoga instructors to learn about stress tracking—but ends up discovering that his subjects don’t need data, they need mental calm. That unplanned discovery transforms LiveWell’s product vision from fitness metrics to emotional wellness.

Empathy, however, takes more than observation. Kolko advises you to feel as your users do—even if that means role-playing, shadowing, or physically disrupting your comfort zone. True empathy blurs the line between researcher and participant.

Synthesis: Turning Chaos into Clarity

After fieldwork, Kolko’s method of “synthesis” transforms thousands of messy data points into clear insights. Using walls of sticky notes, teams externalize all the data, group themes, and craft interpretive statements like “People seem concerned with stressful jobs but don’t fix them.” That statement evolves into an insight: “People perceive stress only after it overwhelms them.” It’s these leaps—from facts to emotional truth—that unlock innovation.

Insights are “provocative statements of truth” about human behavior, Kolko writes. They feel authoritative even though they are interpretive guesses.

This process—the messy transition from empathy to clarity—differentiates real design research from analytics. It’s not about precision. It’s about understanding hidden motivations that data can’t reveal.

Once insights are in place, Kolko shows how to translate them into a design strategy—a “playbook” that guides product decisions toward emotional resonance. This stage is where empathy meets storytelling, helping you define your product’s moral compass and personality.

Defining Emotional Value

A product’s emotional value proposition goes beyond utility. It’s not what your product helps users do, but what it helps them feel. Kolko cites Google’s utilitarian promise, “to organize the world’s information,” as functional but unemotional. Contrast that with Virgin Atlantic’s focus on making long flights “soothing, glamorous, and human.” Function delivers efficiency; emotion creates love.

Kolko encourages teams to craft emotional statements such as, “Our product will help users feel confident, cared for, and in control.” These become the filters for every design and business decision—pricing, interface, marketing tone, even bug-fixing priorities.

Establishing Product Stance

To make emotions tangible, Kolko introduces “product stance”: your product’s attitude and personality. Like people, a product can be playful, calm, or assertive. For instance, Lexus is sensual and refined, while Mini Cooper is cheeky and vibrant. Emotional consistency makes a product feel alive and coherent across every touchpoint.

The stance is shaped through “emotional requirements,” declarative guidelines such as “Our product will always be affirming” or “It will speak in a casual, conversational tone.” A clear stance ensures every feature contributes to a unified emotional experience.

Kolko’s idea echoes Marty Neumeier’s The Brand Gap: when design defines not just form but feeling, it transforms a product into a relationship.

Kolko believes that a product’s vision is not a static document—it’s a narrative meant to be shared visually and emotionally. This chapter merges art and leadership: how creative artifacts—from sketches to posters—rally teams around a shared purpose.

From Concept Maps to Hero Flows

Kolko introduces tangible tools that make abstract vision concrete. A product concept map lays out every user, process, and relationship—connecting verbs and nouns into living systems. Hero flows visualize ideal user journeys, showing how a first-time customer becomes engaged and returns. These blueprints act as communication bridges across engineering, design, and marketing.

In Joe’s case at LiveWell, his concept map drew relationships between “emotions,” “daily actions,” and “feedback.” By simplifying this into clear visuals, his team began to see the product not as an app, but as a daily conversation between human and machine.

Visual Storytelling Inside Organizations

Kolko recounts how design leaders like David Merkoski at frog design used massive 30-foot posters to depict company-wide vision. Such artifacts bypass corporate jargon and inspire empathy through imagery. For Kolko, visual artifacts are not decorative—they are instruments of change. They turn invisible strategy into something people can literally point to and discuss.

This approach resonates with IDEO and Pixar’s methods of storytelling: if you can draw your vision, you can align people behind it. In today’s distributed, interdisciplinary companies, visual clarity is a superpower.

The final stage in Kolko’s framework—shipping—mirrors his belief that execution should preserve emotional integrity as rigorously as code quality. Launching a product is not the end of design; it’s the beginning of a living relationship with users.

Roadmaps and Iteration

Kolko guides teams to build product roadmaps rooted in empathy. These visual timelines link features directly to user value rather than technical milestones. Instead of “add API integration,” write “help users feel more control.” This emotional reframing keeps engineering decisions human-centered. Roadmaps evolve constantly—each iteration is an opportunity to realign emotion and utility.

Iteration, Kolko reminds us, is not just about efficiency. It’s about refinement through human feedback. The most successful products—like Gmail or Instagram—grew organically from continuous emotional learning, not static plans.

Sweating the Details

Kolko’s mantra that “details are emotional” echoes Dieter Rams’s discipline of precision. Small touches—tone of voice, button shape, microanimations—signal care and build trust. Teaching developers to see design flaws, not just bugs, elevates quality beyond function. Kolko even recommends overlaying screenshots to spot pixel-level deviations because “visual subtlety communicates respect.”

Building a Culture of Empathy

At the organization level, empathy must be socialized. Product managers, Kolko writes, should evangelize emotional goals, display user stories, and celebrate small victories. Engineers, marketers, and executives align best when they “live and die by the same emotional metrics.” Rather than measuring cost and speed alone, track how users feel empowered, connected, or joyful. Those numbers, Kolko says, are the truest indicators of success.

In the end, design maturity means not just delivering features but cultivating a relationship between company and community. Your product becomes an empathetic companion—and that is the essence of being well designed.