Product Design > Technical Design?

Product Design > Technical Design - for B2x products? - IMO Absolutely.

Let me explain via an experience that I had a few years ago.

Back in 2013, I got to work with these two absolutely incredible Aussie guys. They had a killer idea for a social game, and I stepped in to build it out. While we built a great product, the guys killed it even more at marketing. 

When we launched, we were anticipating ~5000 downloads in a week. We actually began to get 5000 downloads every hour, taking our app to # 88 on the app store worldwide leaderboard.

However, we began to quickly see that users were finding core functionality to be repetitive. This caused a massive drop in downloads literally a few hours later and we crashed and burnt.

Product Design > Technical Design?

The tech we built was rock solid (native fe + hashtag#AWS). Where we fell short was to have the ability to make super quick changes to the app to counter the usage patterns that we saw.

We had anticipated all things that could go wrong and had mitigated for those scenarios (mainly tech wise, but also product wise). However we did not anticipate problems that arose from "too much of a good thing" scenarios. And this definitely was one. 

This was a time when app updates to the app store took days, and as much as we requested to expedite, we could respond with only so much speed. What was really needed was to account for this as a part of the overall product design (where say, we built switches to be managed from the backend that would allow us to steer user experience journeys). 

Huge learning for sure. The biggest being that don't just anticipate and mitigate for inadvertent scenarios, but also plan for intended scenarios that may cause problems if they are over-successful.