Vinay Débrou
product designer, maker, writer
Hi there, I am Vinay. I am a self-taught product designer in consumer software and now learning more to get into hardware design - starting with drones. I have 4 years of experience in consumer tech startups -- in crypto, social, and healthtech.
Check out my work or get to know more about me outside work. To get in touch, send an email or DM me on Twitter.
Shaping the Product Architecture
The first thing in product design is distilling the core user need you are trying to address. It has to be real, communicable, specifically addressable, and worthy paying for. Once you have distilled the core user needs, you can shape the product architecture by creating the overarching structure, core components & the first version of product assembly that makes sense. Here is an example deck for initial product shaping that I did and presented to Bryan Johnson's Blueprint CTO - Ryan Cabeen - on a personal health system for their new brand DON'T DIE.
one big consumer need that the product should aim to satisfy
core components that absolutely have to be part of the product for it to address the consumer need
an elegant assembly of the core product components for a coherent consumer experience
observations on how power users end up using the core product, every day -- to help you iterate
Harmonizing the Product Experience
Attention is NOT all that you need. You need TRUST. Too many founders focus on scaling fast and relegate retention to an after-thought. This is absolutely opposite of what you should focus on. Focus on creating and maintaining a sticky product experience that makes users want to come back to your product again and again and again and again. The success of your product depends on this much more than it depends on grabbing fleeting attention by doing virality stunts or burning money through paid ads.
The startup graveyard is full of products that chased virality too soon with a leaky bucket that does not retain new users and ended up burning through all the money to end up dead. After 2 years in the industry, I wrote about this in this essay in 2023 on why consumer crypto product landscape is so full of leaky products that fail due to poor retention rates. Farcaster, run by the talented Dan Romero, is a clear example of this unfortunate misprioritization. A year after raising $150 million from top investors like a16z, and despite burning demand for an alternative social network that gives users more flexibility & ownership over their data, they still fumbled because their product is a leaky bucket. Currently in April 2025, they have only ~35,000 daily active users, despite over 800,000 users signing up and trying out their product atleast once. You can see the traction data in this live dune dashboard.
transparency as a core value - to germinate & nurture trust with your power users, by sharing openly what you plan to do & why -- and then following that up with execution as best as you can.
big and small decisions on colors, typography & graphics. start from understanding the real-life context where power users use your product. this will give your product a foundation to build a sticky brand identity. instead of basing your design decisions on your mood or current trends, you will base them on what is complementary and meaningful in the real-life context of your product being used. this will help you create a pleasing aesthetic that invites your power users to both return to your product and evangelize it to their acquaintances -- gifting you word-of-mouth marketing for free. sometimes, the answer is elegant fonts and neutral color-scheme with minimalist icons, sometimes the answer is vibrant colors and bold fonts with clever 3d animations. let the use-case context tell you which one is right.
if your product through its brand language, exudes a sense of harmony even if is not fully uniform in all its product elements, it creates clarity on what your brand and product is actually about. the clarity clears doubts for your users and results in credebility for your brand.
The Design System - to support the process
After experimentation phase is over on a given part of the product, you want to build a system to lean upon, to access reusable your own design elements, to revisit your major design decisions, that allows you to move faster on building your product and increase the ROI on your design effort.
archiving and organizing your reusuable design elements -- icons, cards, buttons and navbars -- for quick access during product building
documenting your pivotal design decisions allows you to experiment and build forward in a way that compounds build efficiency over your future iterations. you should not need to spend your mental bandwidth to re-discuss the core design decisions during every refactor or while building a new feature.
the outcome of documenting, archiving and organizing your design decisions after a product-design sprint is a clear design language that emerges through the collective sum of your design decisions and makes your messaging tight-knit and complimentary.
Want to Connect?
Feel free to say hello for a brainstorming session or just casual conversation on the state of healthtech, crypto, or social clubs! I do free 15-min introductory calls to connect with interesting people doing interesting things, even those outside the tech industry. I try to help where I can - with product shaping & prototyping, user-research, brand-design and community operations.