Clarity is the real product work
Most products aren't confusing because the idea is bad — they're confusing because the thinking behind them was never made clear. Here's how I treat clarity as the actual work, not the polish at the end.
When founders show me a product that isn't landing, the first instinct is usually to blame the surface — the interface feels dated, the onboarding is clunky, the copy is off. So we redesign the surface, and a few weeks later the same problem is back wearing nicer clothes. The interface was never the issue. The thinking underneath it was unclear, and no amount of visual polish can hide unclear thinking for long.
I've come to believe that clarity is the real work. Not the thing you do at the end to make the product presentable — the thing you do first, because everything downstream inherits it.
Confusion is a symptom, not a cause
A confusing product is almost always a product whose makers hadn't fully decided what it was. Who is this for, precisely? What is the one job it does better than anything else? What are we deliberately not doing? When those answers are fuzzy in your head, they show up as fuzz on the screen — too many options, hedged language, features that each make sense alone but contradict each other in aggregate.
You can't design your way out of that. You can only decide your way out of it. Design is what makes a clear decision feel obvious to a stranger; it can't manufacture a decision you haven't made.
Clarity is a set of hard sentences
The exercise I run, for my own products and for the founders I advise, is embarrassingly simple. Write the product as a handful of sentences that leave no room to hide:
- This is for [a specific person], not everyone.
- It helps them [do one thing] that they currently do badly or not at all.
- It's better than their current option because [a reason they'd actually feel].
- We are choosing not to [the tempting thing everyone else does].
If you can't finish those sentences without qualifiers — "sort of," "eventually," "also" — you've found the work. The gaps in those sentences are exactly the gaps your users will feel, except they'll experience them as friction, doubt, and quiet abandonment.
Clarity compounds
The reason I lead with this isn't aesthetic. Clear thinking is the highest-leverage thing a founder owns because everyone else's work multiplies off it. A clear product brief makes design faster, engineering cheaper, marketing sharper, and support quieter. An unclear one taxes every one of those functions forever, and the tax is invisible until you add it all up.
The best products I know aren't the loudest or the most feature-rich. They're the ones where someone did the unglamorous work of getting clear, and then had the discipline to protect that clarity when it would have been easier to add one more thing.
That's most of the job. If you get the thinking clear, the product tends to follow. If you don't, no redesign will save you — you'll just be confused in a nicer font.
If you're staring at a product that feels muddy and you're not sure why, that's usually where I come in. Tell me where it's stuck and we'll find the unclear sentence together.
Written by
Entrepreneur, product strategist & experience designer
I build, advise, and invest in digital products — founder-first product strategy, AI-native experiences, and UX across industries. I run Zenith Studio, my AI-native product studio, from Kathmandu, working with founders globally.
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