Stressed companies build broken products (and how to survive it)

I have been working in product design for 17 years now. Since I was 18 basically.

And I always see when a product was built by stressed people.

I can almost immediately tell when the organisation behind it is fragmented, exhausted, disconnected from itself.

And I try to avoid these companies.

Recently I found a perfect example: I bought a Garmin watch.

I’ve been an Apple Watch user for probably 8 years now, but the frequent charging became annoying and I thought okay, on the surface Garmin looks good. Feature comparison with Apple Watch is there. Let me try.

I returned it after 3 days.

Not because it was “bad”.
It was packed with features, that’s true.

But I could almost feel how stressed the team behind it was.

Watch the video version.

Example one.

One thing that immediately stood out was how disconnected the widgets were from each other.

During onboarding, Garmin asks for your birthday.

Then later, when you set up Garmin Pay, it asks for it again.

And after 9 years working in big tech companies, I can already picture what’s happening internally.

There is probably a silo between these two departments so deep that people are discouraged from even reaching out and asking for a date of birth field.

And suddenly the org structure becomes my user experience.

Another example.

Garmin is clearly built for people who take sport very seriously.

But I bought it as a lifestyle person. Yoga, Pilates, walks, wellbeing. Sport as part of life, not identity.

And honestly I thought Garmin wanted that audience too because their marketing kind of suggested it.

Then on the second morning the watch greeted me with:

“Beat yesterday.”

And I remember feeling genuinely stressed.

I don’t want to beat anything.

I don’t want to wake up and immediately optimise myself.

And that tiny moment told me so much.

Either:

• they never deeply researched this audience

• or they did, but the insight never travelled through the organisation

• or marketing understood it, but product didn’t

• or product understood it, but whoever owns these motivational prompts never updated them

Again, internal company problems became user problems.

And what’s interesting is that after 8 years with Apple Watch, I never once found myself thinking about Apple’s internal politics while using the product.

That’s the difference.

Good organisations absorb complexity internally.

Bad organisations leak it onto users.

Sadly, most organisations are somewhere in the second category.

Users suffer.

People inside suffer.

And eventually nobody is producing work they can truly feel proud of.

When I was younger, I thought companies like this just wouldn’t survive.

But corporate reality is different.

They often survive for very long.

Usually because they identified the opportunity early and captured the market first.

Garmin probably did that extremely well with serious sports people.

But when organisations stop taking UX seriously and put org structure above product quality, they become slower and slower at evolving.

They stagnate.

And the harsh truth is that as an IC, you also can’t really change much inside a large organisation.

At least not quickly.

Not on a 3-5 year horizon.

And in the current economy, you also can’t always leave for a better company.

So most people detach.

I usually see this happening around the mid-senior level.

People stop actively learning.

They realise their actual zone of influence is much smaller than what they were sold on bootcamps and LinkedIn posts.

So they focus on other parts of life instead.

Family.
Sports.
Friends.
Travel.
Peace outside the 9-5.

And honestly, I fully respect that approach.

But some people can’t do it.

I think I’m one of them.

I can’t emotionally let go of 40 hours a week.

I want to live my life fully every minute.

So people like me start searching.

Side hustles.
Reskilling.
Changing companies.
Changing careers.

I tried content creation.

Opened and closed a UX school.

Opened and closed a recruitment agency.

Always in this hope that one day I can fully align my energy with what I do daily.

Maybe that’s unrealistic.

But I still can’t stop searching for it.

What about you?

Did you detach?

Or are you still trying to find a way to care without burning yourself out?

🩶