I really like IT pros. They tend to be smart, affable, hard-working people. It’s probably accurate to say that I am an IT pro. I have worked in IT departments and reported to CIOs. My SDG colleagues and I are often hired as consultants by IT leaders. And I’m sure many people reading this essay consider themselves IT professionals, even as they consider themselves product professionals.

IT pros are skilled technologists who understand software, hardware, data, infrastructure, and interface. So there’s a simple and reasonable belief by people in other professions that if something at a company involves computerized tech, it is, by definition, an IT concern. This presumption is especially tempting for companies that started as something other than software companies. These companies naturally think of their products as something manufactured, grown, shipped, printed, or otherwise physically built. The software stuff, running on computers? That’s not product. That’s IT work. Or so this thinking goes.

But this simplification—that IT is the place in an organization where technical skills live—leads to a structural or organizational mistake. Companies might reflexively house anything digital, anything consumed or created through these computational devices that dominate our world, in an IT department. And in the IT department, the work is subject to IT budgeting, governance, project management offices, and similar structures.

And that might not be the best environment for product innovation.

See, fundamentally (yes, this is a gross reduction), IT departments exist to make a business run smoothly through technology. Success for IT is often quiet: we didn’t get hacked, we didn’t crash, the upgrade was painless, therefore we succeeded.

Product, conversely, exists to delight users and win markets. Success for a product team may be noisy. It might be disruptive. So governance and funding structures designed for IT may not be right for product.

AI tools have made it even more important for companies to reconsider IT departments as the presumptive home of digital innovation. These tools have changed the barriers for participating in digital product work. Ideation, prototyping, design, exploration, and even software development are increasingly accessible to people outside the IT department. That doesn’t just change timelines and budgets—it changes org charts. (Yes, I realize that sentence—a statement, an em dash, a contrary proposition—looks like an AI pattern. I tell you, it came straight from my own AI-free pen.) And this change creates new opportunities for product-making. At the very least, it reminds us that product doesn’t need to be governed like IT is governed.

The good news: many companies have developed models that we can learn from. In your next online search or GenAI chat session, ask about the org structure of a digital product you appreciate. I bet you’ll find out that it wasn’t built by an IT department. This isn’t just true for software companies like Google or Duolingo. For example, John Deere, the legendary maker of tractors and similar agricultural equipment, houses an organization called the Intelligent Solutions Group (ISG) where cross-functional teams work on software innovations for the business. At SDG, we have seen many similar examples of product engineering functions working alongside, not within, IT department partners. The best usually involve cross-functional groups of product managers, designers, and makers (the classic Product Triad) working together, across reporting boundaries.

So if you’re a product pro working in an IT department, where approvals are governed through a Project Management Office and resources are funded like an IT project, consider what it would look like for your product-making to operate differently from IT. Even if you love IT—even if you are IT—this might be the most important change your company could make.

On to the Garden,

Around the Garden

Confidence Game

Check it out: LinkedIn post from Stephanie Leue on overconfident product content.

In this LinkedIn post, wise product consultant and Stephanie Leue shares an anecdote about a colleague with years of experience in product management and leadership who has been discouraged by the glut of content from self-proclaimed experts who confidently claim to know what the best product managers do differently, usually involving AI. Here’s an excerpt.

When I read this, I felt grateful to Leue for pointing it out. I too have been exhausted by the trend in product content spaces (LinkedIn, Medium, others) to declare what everyone is doing wrong or what the real secret is and how there’s some inside info that the poster possesses and that everyone else is missing. Leue plainly identifies the cost of this: “And somewhere a capable, thoughtful person reads it and quietly starts doubting themselves.”

The antidote to the anecdote: genuine, human connections with other product professionals who are on the same journey. That’s why I so appreciate this Pollinator community. To the garden I say: don’t let the glut of product and UX (or other tech and business) content written in the mode Leue describes cause skilled and caring professionals like you to question your own competence. A healthy community should in fact be building that competence.

Let it go

Check it out: Vibe Coding in Prod (Responsibly). Talk by Erik Schluntz (Anthropic). Shared by Opinion AI (Substack).

I received an excited text from SDG’s president one recent evening. You have to watch this video, he advised. It’s brief — just fourteen minutes of your time. But product makers and managers will see our roles change in these fourteen minutes.

The speaker, Erik Schluntz, a researcher at Anthropic, addresses technical concerns about leaf nodes and technical debt. But his focus is on how software developers can embrace vibe-coding, or writing software through dialogue with Artificial Intelligence agents. His conclusion? That vibe-coding increasingly enables software-makers to “let go of code”—Schluntz uses the phrase “let go” several times—and to focus on experience, value, and users. In other words, to spend their time in an abstraction layer called product.

Synthetic users is people!

Check it out: How Synthetic Users are changing product decision making (podcast). An interview with Tom Charman (Co-founder at Blok). The Supra Insider podcast.

At SDG, we’ve used AI chat tools to simulate user research. We’ve defined test partners and buyers for our consulting services and then, as those personas, generated insights on proposed refinements and additions to those services. While it’s not a replacement for analysis with people (I love meeting with people), I’ve found that conjuring these “synthetic users” through AI can sharpen a product team’s understanding of its products and its market, at high speed and low cost.

As I was considering the pros and cons of these approaches to research, I encountered this podcast with a thoughtful fellow named Tom Charman. He’s the CEO of Blok (joinblok.co), an AI-powered “synthetic user simulation platform.” Charman has thought long and hard about user research and how AI can improve it. He’s especially articulate about the drawbacks of using common prompt-based LLM platforms, vs. specialized tools with built-in psychographics like his own product.

Even if you never use Blok or similar tools, this podcast will improve your thinking about using AI in user research. And who doesn’t love improved thinking?

(Note: SDG has no relationship with Blok. We just appreciated its founder’s understanding of AI and user research.)

I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo

Check it out: Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want, by Elizabeth Lopatto. The Verge.

In this provocative and undeniably witty essay, technology journalist Elizabeth Lopatto reflects on the hubristic tendencies of some technology leaders to believe that they have some special understanding of human history and human psychology, and therefore that they are best equipped to change the future of, well, humankind. She argues that too often, such leaders forget what “normal people” actually want, and therefore products suffer.

Product pros like you and me will appreciate Lopatto’s reminder that our fundamental job is to uncover a user need and respond to that need. That’s helpful no matter what you think about technology trends.

Outside the Box

Solution Design Group’s unofficial mascot is the eagle. We think their ability to soar high and dive deep, their keen sight for opportunities, and their commitment and tenacity are a great representation of our mission and values. Plus our home state, Minnesota, is home to one of the largest populations of bald eagles in the nation. For several years now, Minnesota’s Nongame Wildlife Program has maintained an EagleCam. It’s trained on an aerie along the Mississippi River, which is occupied by a breeding pair. The female of the pair laid her eggs in February. They likely hatched in March, and usually the fresh eaglets make their debut on camera in late April and early May.

Check it out at https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/features/webcams/eaglecam/index.html

About the Pollinator

• The Pollinator is a free publication from the Product practice at Solution Design Group (SDG). Each issue features an opening reflection and a curated digest of noteworthy content and articles from across the internet’s vast product community.

• Solution Design Group (SDG) is an employee-owned digital product innovation and custom software development consultancy. Our team of over 200 consultants and other technology and business professionals includes experienced software engineers, technical architects, user experience designers, and product and innovation strategists. We serve companies across industries to discover promising business opportunities, build high-quality technology solutions, and improve the effectiveness of digital product teams.

• The Pollinator’s editor is Jason Scherschligt, SDG’s Head of Product. Please direct complaints, suggestions, and especially praise to Jason at [email protected].

• Why The Pollinator? Jason often says that as he works with leaders and teams across companies and industries, he feels like a honeybee in a garden, spending time on one flower, moving to another, collecting experiences and insights, and distributing them like pollen, so an entire garden blooms. How lovely.