Product Design Philosophy

I’m sharing my core product design philosophy that I’ve learned and formed over the decades of working with Harman, Fender, Gibson, Acer, Foxconn, Steinberg, Dolby and other brands on creating lasting and profitable products.

  • Don’t reinvent anything that’s not broken.
  • Find the simplest and most straightforward solution–Make it easier and more economical for the program to be adopted widely, even in low, medium-income countries.
  • For functionalities that’s outside of our core mission (or is too big or expensive for us to take on), select partners who are the best in class (i.e. developing a large language model from scratch, student information system). Always remember your core competencies. If certain billion-dollar companies concentrate their entire R&D budget to a certain feature (i.e. contact center, LLM), do NOT try to home brew it without good reason. The landscape would change before you even get anywhere.
  • Collaborate and before investing our own resources.
  • Building a feedback loop into the product to incorporate continuous improvement and relevancy (It is real world user and market testing that’s much more reliable–people lie and most people have no idea what they want
  • Don’t forget to make it fun. Assume that people are busy or lazy, so you have to earn the intended action.
landscape photography of person's hand in front of sun
Emotional Wellness
Caitlyn Wang

How curaJOY started

The Toll of Continuous (and Ineffective) Therapy on a Family For over five years, behavior therapists, counselors, and social workers came into our home 3 to 5 hours at a time, five days a week. My neurotypical daughter flipped out one day and said, “Mom, can we just have one

Read More »
Our Stories
Grace Li

Machine Learning 101: A Youth Guide to Teaching Computers to Think

When Netflix recommends your next favorite show or when your email filters out spam, that’s machine learning at work. Machine learning (ML) is a branch of artificial intelligence that allows computers to learn from data and make decisions without being explicitly programmed. Instead of humans writing every rule, the computer figures out patterns itself and improves as it sees more examples.

Read More »
A group of people, mostly young adults and teenagers, pose for a photo in an art gallery with various framed artworks—some labeled "Ready to Ship"—displayed on the walls behind them.
Our Stories
Caitlyn Wang

Safe to Break, Ready to Ship

I hired a newbie handyman to replace five faucet fixtures. He and I both assumed he knew what he was doing. Nothing leaked before. That night, every sink he touched started dripping. Three callbacks and extra parts later, the total bill far exceeded what a licensed plumber’s—plus the time and

Read More »