What is product design? Hyperact x Everyday Agile podcast
Sam, the co-founder of Hyperact recently appeared on Everyday Agile hosted by Jac Hughes.
Here are six quick things about Sam:
- He is the co-founder and design lead of Hyperact, a product-led tech consultancy that works with visionary tech companies to build products that scale.
- Over the last 15 years Sam has helped some of the biggest brands on the planet solve their customers' problems through great design and cutting-edge technology.
- His skillset spans across product design, service design, user research, product management, designOps, building teams and strategy.
- He has built and scaled user-centred design capabilities in two consultancies. The last, at Infinity Works, he grew from 1 to 50 in under three years.
- He's a father of three, including twins.
- He believes in the power of cross-functional, customer-obsessed teams.
The discussion covers Sam's journey in design, the spark that led him to launch Hyperact with his co-founder Dave, and how their vision is shaking up product development for scale-ups in the North of the UK.
In this podcast, you'll discover:
- Sam's career journey and the experiences that built his expertise.
- The story behind Hyperact's birth and our unique approach to product design and development.
- Insights on the iterative process of design: ship, test, learn.
- The real challenges of driving change in big organisations.
- The critical role of user research in creating products that truly delight.
Sam's career journey
Started in a web and brand agency 15 years ago before joining Valtech, an agile IT consultancy.
Early work on Government Digital Services and financial projects built a strong foundation in tech product design.
Grew a design team from scratch to 50 people at Infinity Works, later acquired by Accenture.
The birth of Hyperact
Sam and co-founder Dave launched Hyperact to redefine product development for startups and scale-ups.
Their principles and approach are core to Hyperact’s success.
Fun fact: someone once tried to sell them hyperact.com for $50,000.
Top-down transformation
Top-down transformation rarely sticks because change comes from the ground up.
It's the sum of the daily actions, behaviors, and norms of your organisation.
The longer you take to work your way down the layers, the longer it takes to see the results and the less amiable individuals are to change.
Challenges in transformation
Transformation starts at the bottom with very small changes at a team level. Once teams have a steady delivery flow, the next step is to assess whether their work is actually having an impact for users, leading to better discovery and strategy.
In large, complex organisations, you can’t rely solely on grassroots change. You also need the backing of the C-suite or sponsors to ensure that these small wins percolate upward.
Overall, rather than a grand top-down plan, transformation is more effective when you show tangible results from small changes before moving up the chain.
Understanding design in tech
Design in tech is described in three parts: it’s a noun, a verb, and then a noun again."
This means we start with the field of design, then the act of designing, and finally designing the design. A plan or blueprint that leads to the final outcome.
Digital product design is unique because the internet lets you ship design quickly, delivering finished outcomes to users rapidly and enabling fast feedback loops.
At its heart, design is about giving form to a solution that solves a problem. Whether through prototyping, wireframes, or other methods, ensuring the solution fits the context of user needs, business value, and the market.
What makes good design?
You can think of good design as a bit of a pyramid.
The first layer of good design is you've got to solve a problem. There's got to be value there. Understanding that problem better and using techniques like jobs-to-be-done and good user research helps shape a much better design.
If you're not solving a problem for somebody, or you're solving it in a way that doesn't fit their mental model, you're kind of back to square one.
Once you've moved up that level, this is where product and design blur together: it's around the feasibility and viability for the business.
When there's a problem that you could solve, it might not be feasible for your business to do that. It may take forever, be incredibly expensive, or be too complex. You have to validate that next layer: can we actually support this? Can we deliver it?
The next layer is really what most people think about design: is it intuitive? Does it fit users' mental models of how they want to interact with this thing? Whether it's a product or a service? Can they complete the task they need to do in the way they expect?
Then the final tip, the cherry on top, is: does it delight? Is it engaging? Do people come away with positive emotions after using it? This is probably the most challenging layer to achieve in agile ways of working because you might only get to a V1 or V2, while the V3 (which the designer had in mind all along) gets done much later.
Monzo always gets held up in the UK for really great design all the way through, Linear in the US for its workflow management and craft, and Notion has done a really good job as well.
Hyperact: The journey and challenges
Running a business is a series of daily highs and lows.
The market has been on a down term with layoffs and companies struggling to raise money due to interest rates.
Every challenge is a learning opportunity. Being small and nimble has helped us ride that wave and build resilience.
We're focused on doing the best work possible, building early credibility through successful case studies—every engagement has been a success.
The importance of user research
User research is a critical part of product development.
Engaging with real users is essential. Whether through casual, in-field interactions or more structured sessions.
User research should balance qualitative insights (how people feel and think about products) with quantitative data (numbers and metrics).
Tools like Dovetail and Miro are employed to capture, structure, and analyze research insights.
Contact information
Visit our website & blog. We regularly publish our thoughts. Around two or three posts a month. There are currently over 65 articles on topics from product and engineering to strategy and design.
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