Your Product is a Living Thing

Busting the Myth of the One-and-Done Build

We’ve been in this business of designing and building websites, apps, and world-class digital experiences for a long time (nearly 25 years, in fact). In that time, we’ve seen countless organizations tackle software like a construction project, expecting a ribbon-cutting ceremony when it’s “finished.”

But nothing built for real people is ever really finished. Even buildings need maintenance and periodic renovations. Your digital products are no different.

The advantage of software and digital experiences is that they can evolve. Once real users start using the system, their behavior shifts, new needs surface, and all the careful plans you made come up against the truth of how people actually want to use your product.

Digital products are living organisms that grow, adapt, and respond to their environment. They are never truly finished or complete.

Your product launch isn’t a finish line. It’s just the beginning. What you’ve created needs ongoing attention, care, and direction so it can become stronger over time.

A “Project Mindset” Weakens Your Product Over Time

At Drawbackwards, we focus on long-term product growth, because we’ve seen firsthand how “build it and move on” thinking can make products brittle.

How do you know if you’re stuck in a project mindset that might be stifling your product growth? You may see signs like:

• You have a slew of outdated user flows that don’t match the reality of how people are actually using your product today.
• You’ve watched small UX cracks quietly and slowly widen into canyons of UX failure over time.
• You’ve accumulated so much technical debt that your greatest engineering heroes are running out of tricks to navigate around it.
• Your business growth is stalling because there’s nobody at the helm steering the ship around the unanticipated challenges that emerged after you launched your product.

If any of this sounds familiar, then you’re likely paying a lot in daily hidden costs. Your product is likely losing value with every misaligned user interaction. With nobody tending to its health and evolution, your entire ecosystem is falling behind and fraying at the edges.

Sure, you’re completing projects, but you’re likely not growing and nurturing your product’s long-term value.

What Healthy Digital Products Need In Order to Thrive

Like any ecosystem, digital products need regular tending. You can’t just “set it and forget it.” You need to prune, shape, nurture, redirect, and provide the right environment for long-term growth.

Here’s what healthy product growth looks like:

• You do regular usability checks with real people who rely on and use your product to catch any problems, pain points, and issues as early as possible, before they become deeper issues.
• You invest in consistent research to understand user behaviors at a deeper level and uncover how it’s evolving and changing over time regardless of how your product works.
• You continually refine your designs and fine-tune the smallest pieces of your UI to enhance the user experience and remove needless friction wherever possible.
• You proactively look for opportunities to fix the leaks in your tech stack and ensure your back-end performance is optimized to support the everyday needs of the product.
• You constantly track the market, looking for potential obstacles and opportunities on the horizon so you can navigate and guide your strategy through the shifting currents.

These aren’t nice-to-haves. You literally can’t afford not to invest in the long-term health of your product. Creating shortcuts or skipping these steps altogether just delays and increases your overall costs.

What Happens When You Ignore Your Product Growth

Products launched without long-term support often look polished at first, but under that shiny surface things can quickly start to deteriorate.

Here are some signs that you need to think more holistically about your product growth:

• You build features quickly and efficiently that end up solving the wrong problems for users.
• You notice your interaction design patterns drifting off and becoming inconsistent as the product grows haphazardly in different directions.
• Your product’s navigation slowly turns into a junk drawer for every good intention that found its way into the product without any real home or purpose.
• Your users start creating their own workarounds to make the product work the way they need it to, creating hidden friction in user flows that you can’t see.
• You notice a spike in user and customer complaints, bad online reviews, support tickets, and other outlets that show trust in your product and your company is eroding.

All of this can create hidden UX debt, which makes your product heavier and harder to move. What should feel nimble begins to steer like a cargo ship and your momentum fades away.

You quickly start to fall behind your competitors.

Why You Need Product Guardians

Once you recognize that your product needs long-term care, the next question is who should provide it. The answer isn’t a single product owner. It’s a dedicated team that ideally consists mostly of the same people that built the product.

Product guardians need to have a deep knowledge of the product and familiarity with why it was created in the first place.

Here’s why we think these original makers are so important:

• They understand the core product architecture, its constraints, and all the conversations that went into choosing that structure.
• They know why key decisions were made and the original intent behind the overall design, specific interactive patterns and components, and other core pieces of the product.
• They can see how their early assumptions have played out so they’re better positioned to pivot and create new variations and solutions as the environment and your users change.
• They’re in the best position to grow and evolve along with your product and the changing needs of your users and customers without introducing new contradictions and problems.

Every time a new team parachutes in, they must reverse-engineer years of decisions. Details slip through the cracks, your UX and technical debt grows, and your product’s progress and business growth slows.

Product guardians preserve the product’s history and help it evolve in a coherent way. They can direct its future growth in a way that preserves its value over time.

The Benefits of Treating Products Like Living Things

Just like a garden, products need time, attention, and the right conditions to grow. When they’re given those things, they start to provide long-lasting benefits to your users and your business.

Here are just some of the many benefits you can see from treating your digital product like a living thing:

• Healthier user experience: The people using your product or service experience fewer surprises and have more clarity as they navigate the workflows and features you’ve created with them in mind.

• Stronger product momentum: When you treat your product as a living organism, your decisions compound instead of compete. What you decide to do in the beginning of your product development is built upon and strengthened as you add to it over time.

• Lower long-term cost: A common complaint is that businesses don’t have the resources to pay for this type of long-term approach, but a strong foundation upfront helps you make smaller corrections along the way that prevent expensive rework down the line.

• More confidence in your product roadmap: When you’re constantly reviewing and updating your roadmap with feedback from users and internal teams, you no longer have to guess what users need because you know how to deliver the outcomes they want.

Living products grow into something that users continually want to use. Five years down the line, it may look very different to what you originally imagined. But it will still be alive and kicking.

Your Product Launch Is Just the Beginning

We talk a lot about product and feature “launches,” but we often treat them like landings. MVPs are seeds. Without care, they wither. But with the right stewardship, they’ll mature into products that people rely on in their everyday lives.

At Drawbackwards, we help teams cultivate that long-term mindset with the expertise needed to keep digital products thriving. Get in touch and let’s talk about how we can help you grow your product and your business with the right care and attention it deserves.