The Productist Manifesto
Productist: A Manifesto for the Product Artist
Scientists observe nature and create science.
Technologists observe science and create technology.
Productists observe technology and create products.
That sequence matters to me.
For years, I have been trying to describe the kind of work I actually do. Product designer was sometimes too narrow. Product manager was often wrong. Strategist captured part of it. Builder captured another part. Architect came close. None of them named the whole practice.
The word I have settled on is productist.
I do not use it to sound novel. I use it because I need a precise word for a real job.
Across my career, I have worked in product design, product strategy, software, research, architecture, prototyping, and company building. I was Global Head of Product Design at Adobe, where I helped shape early web applications and design systems for new markets. At Roxio, I worked on transforming a set of separate tools into a product suite used at massive scale. At FilmLoop, I helped grow a photo-sharing product from zero to more than a million users in a year. In health tech, I worked on turning sensor technology into products that patients and clinical teams could actually use. Today, while building Callings.ai, I move between product concept, interface design, architecture, prototyping, code, AI systems, and product strategy.
Looking back, one pattern is obvious: I have rarely fit inside a single box.
That used to feel like a professional inconvenience. Now I think it points to a real missing role.
Why this word exists
We already accept a family of words built around creation.
A scientist is not just someone who follows a process. A scientist observes nature, forms concepts, tests them, and produces science.
A technologist is not just someone who applies a checklist. A technologist studies what science makes possible, works with materials and systems, and produces technology.
A productist works in the next layer.
A productist studies what technology now makes possible, understands where it can meet a real domain and a real human need, and produces products.
That is the gap I am trying to name.
Technology by itself is only potential. A productist works at the point where a new technical possibility meets a real domain, a real behavior, a real frustration, a real workflow, a real culture, and a real human being.
That is where the product begins.
The productist is not simply a bridge between technology and users. A bridge is too passive a metaphor. A bridge connects two sides that already exist. A productist does more than connect. A productist interprets, composes, invents, shapes, and gives form.
The productist stands at the intersection of technology, domain expertise, human behavior, and product form.
That intersection is not a process diagram.
It is a creative space.
The meaning of the “-ist”
The word matters to me because of its ending.
Scientist. Technologist. Artist. Productist.
The “-ist” points to a practitioner whose identity is tied to making, shaping, composing, and discovering through the work itself. It points to craft. It points to creation. It does not describe administration.
A pianist does not merely manage a piano. A novelist does not merely coordinate words. An artist does not merely administer materials. These people work through a medium until something new exists.
That is how I think about product.
A productist is, in that sense, a product artist.
Not an artist in the decorative sense. Not someone added at the end to make things look better. I mean artist in the older and deeper sense: someone who works a material deeply enough to produce form.
For the scientist, the material is nature translated into concepts and methods.
For the technologist, the material is science translated into systems and tools.
For the productist, the material is technology translated into products that people can actually adopt, use, and live with.
The material is not paint or stone or sound. The material is technology, behavior, interface, data, business model, workflow, language, trust, friction, and expectation.
The canvas is the experience of the user.
The work is creation.
That is why I needed a word that does not reduce the role to management, facilitation, or process. Product work, at its highest level, is not the administration of features. It is the creation of a coherent product reality.
Creation comes before process
A lot of modern product work has been split into functions that are useful for organizations but weak for creation.
One group owns requirements. Another owns roadmaps. Another owns design. Another owns engineering. Another owns research. Everyone touches the product, but no one fully composes it.
Strategy lives in one room. Design in another. Engineering somewhere else. Research becomes a service. Management becomes process. Architecture becomes technical governance. Branding becomes a layer of polish. User experience becomes a set of screens. Data becomes a dashboard. Roadmaps become the product.
That model can maintain a business.
It often struggles to create something new.
The deeper problem is that product creation has been framed too often as a process problem. I do not think it is. Process can support product work, but it cannot substitute for product creation.
Products get shipped, yet something essential is often missing: a point of view strong enough to connect technical possibility, domain understanding, human need, product form, and execution.
That missing layer is the work I call productist.
A productist is not simply coordinating specialists.
A productist is creating.
The work begins with observation:
What has become technically possible?
What is changing in the world?
What does this domain really need?
What friction do people still live with?
What behavior reveals a deeper need than what people say they want?
What form would make this useful, usable, desirable, and worth repeating?
What should not be built?
That last question matters as much as the others.
When tools become more powerful, the danger is not only that we build too little. It is that we build too much, too quickly, without enough judgment.
The productist’s craft is not only invention.
It is selection.
Domain expertise is not optional
A product is not created from technology alone.
The productist stands at the intersection of technology, domain expertise, and people.
Without technology, there is no new material to work with.
Without human understanding, there is no adoption.
Without domain depth, there is no real fit.
This part is essential to me because again and again in my career, I have had to enter a field deeply enough to understand its internal logic before I could create anything useful.
Every domain has its own physics.
Healthcare has clinical workflows, patient anxiety, regulatory pressure, reimbursement models, professional habits, institutional constraints, and life-or-death consequences. Glaucoma management is not simply “healthcare.” Diabetes prevention is not simply “wellness.” Each has its own behaviors, vocabulary, stakes, measurements, and hidden frictions.
At Kali Care, that meant understanding glaucoma management, medication adherence, clinical studies, patient behavior, client needs, and regulatory constraints before shaping products around sensor technology. Later, in chronic care and diabetes prevention, it meant studying the workflows, incentives, language, and frictions of that environment before exploring new product directions.
Memory technology is not simply “hardware.” Working with SanDisk required understanding the dynamics of flash memory, chip behavior, storage constraints, performance tradeoffs, and the way invisible technical limitations shape the product experience.
When developing a psychoanalysis lesson on CD-ROM, I had to enter two worlds at once: the latest digital media technologies of the time, and the conceptual world of psychoanalysis. That meant absorbing enough of Jacques Lacan’s principles, including his topological thinking, to create a product that could respect the depth of the subject while using an emerging interactive medium.
Working with Claude Picasso was not simply a cultural or branding project. It required understanding Pablo Picasso’s work, his legacy, the meaning of the archive, the emotional and historical weight of the material, and the responsibility of creating something connected to that world.
Only after absorbing the domain can a productist create something that truly connects new technology to a meaningful application.
This is one of the reasons the productist role is hard to define. It is not a fixed specialization. It is a way of entering a new field, learning its structure, absorbing its dynamics, and then using technology to create a product that belongs there.
The productist must be able to catch up fast, but not superficially.
They must see the trends, the tensions, the rituals, the constraints, the incentives, the language, the power structures, the existing tools, the failed attempts, and the emotional reality of the people inside the domain.
Without that, the product will feel imported.
With it, the product can feel inevitable.
What digital product work failed to inherit from industrial design
The idea of entering a domain deeply is not new.
The great industrial designers understood this intuitively. They did not design in an abstract vacuum. They designed trains, tractors, cars, appliances, packaging, aircraft interiors, work environments, and machines. To do that well, they had to understand not only form, but also use, manufacturing, ergonomics, culture, business, and the specific domain of each product.
Raymond Loewy is one of the clearest examples. His work moved across transportation, consumer goods, corporate identity, agricultural equipment, and aerospace interiors. What makes that history relevant is not only the beauty or commercial success of the objects. It is the way industrial design required the designer to enter unfamiliar domains and learn enough of their logic to reshape them.
That tradition did not fully transfer into digital media and software.
In software, the field split too quickly into roles, tools, deliverables, and organizational functions. Education followed the split. Design education often became focused on interface, interaction, research, and visual systems. Engineering education focused on technical execution. Business education focused on markets and management. Product management emerged as a coordinating discipline.
What got lost was the integrated product creator.
The person trained to move through technology, domain knowledge, user behavior, product form, and execution as one continuous act.
That is one of the reasons product designers in software gained visibility but not always control. They were recognized as important, but often positioned beside the core of product power rather than inside it. They improved experiences, clarified flows, designed interfaces, and advocated for users. But too often, they did not own the product idea, the product architecture, or the product business.
The productist is an attempt to recover that missing integration for the digital age.
Productists already exist
Even if the word is new, the practice is not.
Throughout my career, I have met many people in technology who were productists without having a name for it.
Many were founders or entrepreneurs. They observed a change in technology, saw a product possibility, and moved directly into prototyping and iteration. They did not begin with a large process. They began with a product instinct. They noticed something the market had not yet named. They built something rough. They tested it against reality. They refined it until it became useful, then coherent, then valuable.
Others were senior engineers or developers with unusually creative minds. They were not only builders in the narrow sense. They had taste, product intuition, architectural judgment, and a sensitivity to user experience. In many cases, they protected their creative work by sheltering themselves inside corporate environments, creating quietly, away from the full burden of process-heavy organizations.
I have seen this pattern many times.
Some of the most valuable product creation happens in small pockets where a person or a very small team has enough technical fluency, enough product judgment, and enough freedom from organizational noise to keep the creative loop alive.
This is not because collaboration is bad. Collaboration is essential when the product is ready for scale. But early product formation is fragile. It can be damaged by too much consensus, too much ceremony, too much premature alignment, and too many people translating the idea before it has found its form.
The productist often appears where observation, technical possibility, domain insight, and creative urgency meet.
Sometimes that person becomes a founder.
Sometimes they become an internal innovator.
Sometimes they remain hidden because the organization has no language for what they actually do.
That is another reason the word matters.
A practice that has no name is harder to recognize, harder to teach, harder to protect, and harder to reward.
Product is composition
For me, product creation has always felt closer to composition than administration.
A good product is not a pile of features. It is a shaped experience.
It has rhythm. It has hierarchy. It has silence. It has timing. It has affordances. It has promises. It has moments of confidence and moments of doubt. It teaches without overexplaining. It hides complexity without lying about it. It creates expectations, then meets them, misses them, or exceeds them.
Most product mistakes come from getting that relationship wrong.
A product can be technically impressive and still fail because it does not resolve into a meaningful experience.
A product can be visually polished and still fail because its core value is weak.
A product can be usable and still fail because nobody truly needs it.
A product can be useful and still fail because it does not fit the behavior, context, or emotional state of the person using it.
We often talk about products as if they were built in clean layers.
First usefulness. Then usability. Then desirability, or aesthetics, or emotional quality.
There is truth in that sequence when we analyze products after the fact. It helps explain failure. It helps identify what is missing.
A product that is not useful cannot be saved by good usability. A product that is useful but hard to use will struggle. A product that is useful and usable but emotionally flat may still fail to create attachment.
But in the act of creation, those elements do not arrive one by one.
In a genuine creative state, they begin to merge.
The core value, the interaction model, the language, the visual tone, the rhythm of the workflow, the way trust is established, the way delight appears or stays restrained, all of that starts to behave like one integrated substance.
I think of those not as stacked layers but as ingredients of the product’s DNA.
They still exist as distinct concerns. They can still be analyzed separately. But when a product starts becoming coherent, they are experienced at once.
The interface is not added after the utility.
The architecture is not separate from the experience.
The aesthetic is not decoration.
The workflow is not just implementation.
The product idea is not separate from the way the product behaves.
A productist works on the whole composition.
Why AI changes the conditions of creation
The rise of AI and modern development tools changes this work in a profound way.
For a long time, the interval between idea and implementation was too long for many individuals to stay in a true creative state. A product concept would appear, then disappear into delays: handoffs, queues, translation, specification, dependency, rework.
That rhythm breaks creative thought.
A painter cannot really paint if every brushstroke is separated by hours or days. The act depends on continuity. The eye sees, the hand responds, the canvas answers back, and the next decision happens inside that loop.
Product creation has often lacked that continuity.
AI is changing this.
With modern development tools, code assistants, generative interfaces, rapid prototyping systems, and accessible software stacks, the cycle from thought to artifact has compressed dramatically. That compression is not just a productivity gain. It is a creative gain.
It makes micro-iterations possible.
A micro-iteration is small enough to preserve intent. The thought is still alive when the result appears. The creator can react while still inside the same mental frame. That means form, workflow, utility, interaction, language, and architecture can evolve in a tightly coupled loop.
This is one reason I have become so focused on hands-on product creation with AI. While building Callings.ai, I move across concept, workflow, interface, architecture, prototyping, and code in a much tighter cycle than would have been possible years ago. The distance between imagining and trying has collapsed.
When that distance collapses, a new kind of individual product creation becomes possible.
Not because process disappears, but because creative momentum stops being interrupted at every step.
AI and modern development tools allow the productist to stay closer to the canvas.
They make it possible to move from concept to prototype, from prototype to interface, from interface to behavior, from behavior to architecture, and from architecture back to product judgment without losing the thread.
This is why the productist matters now.
When execution becomes faster, judgment becomes more important.
When tools become more powerful, taste becomes more important.
When building becomes easier, deciding what is worth building becomes the central act.
AI is compressing process and execution time. That compression does not make the human less important. It changes where human importance lives.
The uniquely human responsibility moves upstream and inward: creative thinking, strategic thinking, and critical thinking.
Creative thinking asks what could exist that does not yet exist.
Strategic thinking asks why it should exist, where it fits, who it matters to, and how it can become sustainable.
Critical thinking asks whether the idea is true, whether the product deserves to exist, whether the evidence is strong enough, whether the tradeoffs are acceptable, and whether we are confusing novelty with value.
These three forms of thinking are becoming more important, not less.
AI can accelerate execution. It can produce options. It can assist with code, language, structure, research, and prototyping. But acceleration without judgment creates noise. The productist’s role is to turn acceleration into creation.
The value is not simply doing more.
The value is thinking better, seeing sooner, iterating faster, and making stronger choices.
Productist versus product manager
Product management and productism are not the same thing.
In its dominant corporate form, product management is largely about coordination, prioritization, alignment, planning, and execution flow.
Those things matter. I have done them. Every serious product effort needs them.
But that is not the center of my practice.
The center of my practice is closer to composition. It is about seeing a possibility before it is obvious, understanding what a technology can become in a given domain, turning that into an experience, and refining it until utility, usability, and form become one coherent whole.
Product management asks: How do we organize the work?
Productism asks: What should exist?
Product management asks: What are the requirements?
Productism asks: What is the product trying to become?
Product management asks: Who needs to agree?
Productism asks: What is the strongest product truth?
Product management is often about alignment.
Productism is about authorship.
Those are orthogonal dimensions. One is mostly process. The other is mostly creation.
That difference matters because the software industry has often placed product designers in a satellite position around the real center of product power. Designers are asked to shape the experience, but not always the strategy. They are asked to improve usability, but not always define the product. They are asked to make things clear, but not always decide what should exist.
This has created a long-standing tension between product design and product management.
Product designers brought a deeper understanding of experience, behavior, form, and user meaning. But too often, they were kept at the edge of the product business. Product managers owned the roadmap. Engineers owned the architecture. Executives owned the strategy. Designers were asked to make the result better.
That model is not enough.
I know this history personally because this is not the first time I have felt the need to introduce a new term.
Long before product design became a common label in software, I was already trying to bring that discipline into technology. I helped frame product design as something central to digital products, not something added after the fact. I co-created an early European master’s program in product design for digital media. I worked with international design organizations to help define an agenda for product designers in technology. Over time, I also mentored many people who later carried that title in software.
That term mattered. It helped name a new kind of design practice.
But over time, product design in software became constrained. It gained visibility, but not always authority. It gained process, but not always ownership. It gained methods, but not always authorship.
The productist is a response to that limitation.
A productist is not a designer waiting for permission from product management.
A productist is not a product manager borrowing design language.
A productist is not a strategist detached from execution.
A productist is not an engineer building whatever is specified.
A productist owns the creative act of product formation.
Productist as architect
If I had to point to the closest existing profession, I would probably point to architecture.
An architect is not just an artist. Not just an engineer. Not just a project manager. Not just a stylist. Not just a client representative.
Architects do not only draw plans. The best of them absorb materials, technology, structure, environment, behavior, cost, use, symbolism, and time. They work at the boundary between imagination and reality. They create artifacts that people inhabit.
That feels close to what I mean by productist.
A productist is an architect of products.
More specifically, in the world I work in, a productist is a new kind of digital and software architect.
Not only an architect of systems, but an architect of experience.
Not only an architect of code, but an architect of value.
Not only an architect of interfaces, but an architect of behavior.
Not only an architect of technical possibility, but an architect of what that possibility should become in the hands of people.
An architect of product is responsible for the whole: the concept, the composition, the technical logic, the human flow, the constraints of the domain, and the quality of the final experience.
This is why the productist must stay close to the material. An architect who does not understand structure is dangerous. A productist who does not understand technology is equally limited.
The productist does not need to be the best engineer in the room. But they must understand the technology deeply enough to think with it, prototype with it, challenge it, and discover through it.
They must be able to move between concept and implementation without treating implementation as someone else’s problem.
What a productist commits to
This is the set of principles I keep returning to.
Creation comes before process. Process should protect momentum, clarity, and collaboration. It becomes harmful when it replaces thinking.
Technology is material. To shape a product well, the productist must stay close enough to the technology to think with it directly.
Technology is potential, not product. A technical breakthrough matters only when it finds the right form, the right domain, and the right human use.
Domain depth is non-negotiable. A product is credible only when it respects the reality of the field it enters.
Human understanding creates adoption. A product only matters when people can recognize its value, trust it, use it, and return to it.
Micro-iterations unlock creativity. The shorter the cycle between thought and result, the more alive the product work becomes.
Prototype to think. A prototype is not only a validation tool. It is a way to discover the product itself.
Products are composed, not assembled. The best products are coherent because their parts evolve together.
Utility, usability, and desire belong together. They can be separated for analysis, but they must reunite in the work.
AI increases the need for human judgment. When execution is compressed, creative, strategic, and critical thinking become more important.
Small teams matter when the problem is still forming. Early product work needs focus, trust, speed, and a strong point of view.
Taste matters more when tools become easier. When more people can build, the defining question becomes who can judge what is worth building.
A productist owns the whole experience. Not every function alone, but the composition that makes the functions meaningful.
What I am rejecting
I am not interested in product work reduced to ceremonies, status updates, and endless consensus.
I am not interested in treating product as packaging around technology.
I am not interested in separating imagination from execution so completely that nobody owns the whole experience.
I am not interested in a model where design decorates, engineering implements, management coordinates, and the product itself has no author.
I am not interested in process that protects organizations from creative responsibility.
I am not interested in products that are correct on paper and lifeless in use.
I am not interested in using AI to accelerate mediocrity.
Why I am naming this now
This is not a search for a more flattering title.
It is an attempt to name a practice that has become both more necessary and more possible.
More necessary, because product creation has been diluted by fragmentation and over-management.
More possible, because technology, especially AI, has compressed the distance between concept and execution enough to restore continuity to the creative act.
When scientists create science, we call them scientists.
When technologists create technology, we call them technologists.
When someone works at the next layer, absorbing technology, entering a domain deeply, and composing products that people can use, trust, and want to return to, I think we should have a name for that too.
For me, that name is productist.
It is hands-on. It is cross-disciplinary. It is technical, creative, strategic, and concrete at the same time.
It requires the curiosity of a researcher, the judgment of a strategist, the eye of a designer, the structural thinking of an architect, the technical proximity of a builder, and the creative responsibility of an artist.
The productist may be a founder, a designer, an engineer, an architect, a strategist, or an internal creator who has never been given the right title.
What defines the productist is not the title.
It is the act.
To observe what has become possible.
To understand where it matters.
To enter the domain deeply.
To prototype as a way of thinking.
To integrate utility, usability, desirability, architecture, and form.
To use technology without being used by it.
To create products that people can actually use, not just describe well.
That is the work I have been doing for a long time.
Now I finally have a name for it.