How Empathy Elevates Product Design In An AI-Obsessed World

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Hannah Clark: It’s pretty beautiful how products come together, with each contributor playing a role to create something greater than the sum of its parts. And today, I want to take a moment to appreciate the role of design—the art form that forges a connection between the user and the product. A product’s design, in many ways, mirrors the structure of a human relationship. It sparks a first impression, it uses verbal and nonverbal communication, and it can only work if it presents itself in ways that resonate with whomever is interacting with it.

My guest today is Koji Pereira, VP of Design and Research at Sigma Computing. After his first design job in 1997, Koji has held design and leadership roles at companies like Google, Lyft, and Twitter, so his perspective on product design is rich and nuanced from having witnessed nearly three decades of industry evolution.

We dug into some of those changes, including the ways AI is influencing the future of design. I found it even more fascinating to discuss the elements of design that people outside the field rarely get to see. In particular, the role of empathy in the design process—from creating beautiful user experiences to leading design teams that define an era for their organizations. Let’s jump in.

Welcome back, listeners. I’m Hannah Clark with The CPO Club, and if you’re joining us for the first time, we are a community of tenacious product leaders here to share the weight of scaling your product. Our members are SaaS-focused PMs who genuinely love their work and are driven to help others succeed.

So if that sounds good to you, head on over to theproductmanager.com/membership. We’d love to have you as part of our community. And today we are speaking with Koji Pereira.

Koji, thank you so much for making time to be here.

Koji Pereira: Thank you so much, Hannah. Super happy to be here.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. It’s great to have you.

So can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up where you are today?

Koji Pereira: Of course. So my background quickly, I would say, started with graphic design, and I moved to product design very early in my career, and I started with my own company. So I actually had a delivery product back in 2000 and it was a pretty much a website at that time. And after that I joined Google, which I spent most of my career. I was there for pretty much 10 years.

Hannah Clark: Wow. That’s a lot of tenure at Google.

Today we’re just going to be talking a little bit about design and some of the ways that design kind of functions in terms of functionality and aesthetics, but also how to communicate design choices and defend the value there.

So how has your approach to design evolved over time? And what are some of the most significant changes that you’ve seen in the design landscape over the course of your career?

Koji Pereira: Yeah, I think design changed a lot over time. The way I like to see this is that design went through maturity stages where we started with, you know, back with graphic design and then we had this mix with technology with UX design and web design back in the days to then get to product.

My feeling is that right now with all the changes that we’re seeing in the market, a lot of the basics, we’re getting back to the basics that are super important. Like how do we actually think about design as a craft? How do we make sure that we grow individually in our craft? And how we make sure that what we’re building is unique to a specific company.

So to me, it’s like making the whole circle back to craft in my point of view.

Hannah Clark: Unless you’re actually in the field, there’s just so much that goes into it that people don’t really see past just what’s presented to the end user.

Let’s talk a little bit about research. How do you integrate research into your design process to just improve the overall usability and experience of digital products?

Koji Pereira: Yeah, research to me is a very important piece of design. What I would say is that research is basically how do you help to polish the problem. Well, how do you clarify the problem? And before you solve any problem, you want to make sure that the problem is clear, because if you get married with the solution too early, chances are that you might be solving the wrong problem or your solution is too quickly to get to the end goal.

So to me, what I try to do is make sure that the researchers and designers are working very closely and that the researchers are actually not only sharing their findings with the direct team, but with the whole company. So most of the places I’ve been to, what I try to do is set up something that has some recurrency, let’s say monthly research studies or weekly or bi-weekly ones that are live shared with the whole company.

So anybody can go open a link, see what our customers are saying, really understand what they’re feeling. We think that’s even sometimes more important, just building that empathy. And then I think that empowers a lot of the teams to come up with a solutions with their own times and have good discussions within the company.

So, another thing that I think is very useful for research is to get people in the field. Sometimes a little bit harder than, especially that we’re working, some of us are working remotely these days. But I still feel like it’s hard to replace the real life contact with users. So being in the field, talking with customers in their context of use, sometimes it will be their homes. Sometimes it will be their offices. I think it’s really invaluable.

And to me, it’s very important to understand all the details on that. Like how is the computer that they use? What is the device that they use? How’s the internet connection? Did they use your product on the go or they use in a desk while sitting in a noisy ambient or in a very quiet ambient?

I think all of that makes a lot of difference on your design choices.

Hannah Clark: You said a lot of interesting things there, but one thing that really stuck out to me was the idea of using empathy as a tool to make design choices and think about how users are feeling. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

I’m very curious kind of what the process is to develop empathy for the user. And like, how do you really find yourself in a place where you can get a holistic view of how a user is feeling or how something that you might do might make them feel?

Koji Pereira: Yeah, I think a good example of that was once I was working in a product for emerging markets and people were here in Bay Area.

And we had this trip for research to India and Brazil, and we decided that not only the designers and researchers will go to those trips, but also the leadership team would go, including engineers and product managers. So I think that changed a lot. I think it’s very different from looking at a report and understanding that, okay, this user goes through this and this issue versus going live where the users are and really understanding all the dynamics that I mentioned, including maybe different culture or like a different way to communicate a different way to use technology.

All of those things, they are actually crucial to make a product that has a big differential for a specific market or a specific group of people.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So how do you bring some of those visual design elements and aesthetics into the process in tandem with some of those more practical and user friendly experiences such as what you’re finding when you’re in the field and seeing what your users are actually doing?

Like, how do you respond to that with the aesthetics of what you’re developing?

Koji Pereira: I think research will help in everything, including visual design. I tend to think that it’s very hard to detach visual design from product design or UX in general, to me. It’s all part of the same thing, right?

If a product doesn’t look good or is not really appealing to you, then you just don’t feel like you want to engage with that product, or it actually might feel actually harder to use it. So to me, it’s very important that you understand, you know, as a designer, who is your customer? What kind of behaviors do they have and what kind of visual or aesthetic preferences do they have?

Of course, there’s ways where you can actually understand by just looking at a design, if a design is clutter or look bad versus some design that will look better, but those are general assumptions that maybe will apply for certain customers. It may not apply for a different type of customer. And I would say an example of this is Snapchat, right?

Snapchat always had a very bold stance with visual design and it was especially great for the market that they’re pushing for in years ago. I think now they changed a little bit the strategy and it wasn’t great for millennials in general. Right? Like I think millennials never really liked Snapchat that much, but a lot of the younger generations liked Snapchat for this many reasons, including the visual design choices.

Hannah Clark: Makes a lot of sense.

I’m going to switch gears a little bit. I’m going to talk about something that for some creatives might be a swear word and for some creatives might be their favorite thing in the world, but we’ll talk about AI just briefly. I know it’s been talked about to death, but I think at this point, anyone in the creative fields can see that AI has had a huge impact on the industry and it can replicate what’s been done in the past.

But a lot of the time, I think that most folks who are in creative fields and especially designers are really focused on what’s, you know, innovative, what’s new. What can we bring that hasn’t been done before? So how do you see AI impacting the future of design from a product design standpoint?

And where do you think that boundary between an AI design and the human creativity should be?

Koji Pereira: Yeah, I think there is maybe two or three ways to think about AI at this point in product design. One is how do you use AI to accelerate the product design process? And I haven’t seen a lot of that yet, honestly.

I think there’s good AI for images. There’s good AI for content design. But for instance, Figma is trying to bring AI to help product designers come up with designs. But honestly, at this point, it feels more like it’s just dropping new templates where you can use those templates to maybe quick kickstart something, but it’s not helping that much to me.

The biggest challenge with the design process is iteration, right? Like you never get it right the first time. You have to test it, you show to stakeholders, you get feedback, you address the feedback. It’s more like a, it’s a very long process. It’s not necessary that the process is, it’s not about the solution that it’s good in the first run. It’s more about the process of collecting feedback and addressing user feedback too, that really matters. So to me, that’s not being solved by the current, at least of current things that I’m seeing on AI field right now. It’s a more like a linear process.

And then there’s a second field, which I’m very interested on, which is how do you actually design for AI products? Because right now there’s a lot of AI products that are based on the chat model. Honestly, I think that’s just a shortcut. I don’t think the chat is the best way to interact with AI. It’s one way to interact with AI. Now, maybe there’s other ways, maybe there’s ways that you use chat, but you also use something else.

And you can see this kind of trend going on with products actually trying to incorporate other ways to interact with AI besides chat. So one example of this is Meet Journey. So Meet Journey started with a purely linear chat interface and now they launched an interface where you can actually have controls and you can fine tune things. You can pick one thing and then derive something out of that specific image and it’s working pretty well.

So I really recommend for people who are interested on designing for AI to take a look at the new Meet Journey interface.

Hannah Clark: That’s really good to know. I haven’t checked out Meet Journey in a little while since it was that chat interface, which I didn’t find that Meet Journey really nailed that chat interface the way that other products have. So I’m glad that they’ve made some changes there.

Let’s talk a little bit about some common misconceptions around design. So a lot of folks, this harkens back to what we were talking about at the beginning. A lot of folks seem to think that design is really just about looks and aesthetics.

But as you mentioned, it’s just, there are so many more components that go into design. Can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges that designers face around, you know, developing things for form and function, making sure that things work across different screen sizes and devices and other kind of challenges that, especially for folks who are maybe earlier in their career, might run into as they mature in their roles?

Koji Pereira: I think design is not done on Dribbble, that’s what I would say. You know, like Dribbble, nothing against Dribbble, but the idea of Dribbble is that you basically making things that look good without necessarily having a conversation or trying to understand where the technology can get you to or where the boundaries of a specific device or specific screen.

So most of the things that you see on Dribbble are not actually feasible. So what is design, it really is, in my opinion, is this hustle between what’s feasible, what is ideal, and what looks good, and what works well. So there’s a bunch of different things that you have to take in consideration and yes, you can use a formula.

You can try to apply all of those things all together, but honestly, all different situations, different companies or different teams will need different things and you have to adapt that and be very flexible. What I’ve seen a lot of the young designers, and I did that myself too, is to get to a framework or read a book and try to apply that one to one. And sometimes it will work, sometimes it will fail completely. So what is good design in my opinion is just being able to adapt that approach and come up with something that makes sense for your team, for your company, for your product and still gets great outcomes, which is pretty hard.

So you have to basically do a lot of negotiation. You have to really understand your customer. You have to make sure that you push the right levers. And I also let go of certain things that maybe are not worth picking. So understand what’s the right battles to pick. And getting to an outcome that you feel proud of and you make good impact is what makes good design, in my opinion.

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I would like to go a little bit further into what you mentioned about doing what kind of works for your team. And I’m thinking about kind of the intersection between product managers and UX designers and where things might get lost in translation, where product managers are trying to see things get done on the roadmap and designers are trying to respond to that.

What are some of the kind of challenges or communication breakdowns that you’ve seen throughout your career that, you know, PMs are mainly who’s listening now. So maybe maybe tips for better communicating with their UX designers.

Koji Pereira: Yeah, I mean, this is a classic thing, right? Like you see a lot of PMs debating with designers or trying to find the right way to work together, understand the limits of each discipline and also a lot of push and pull on when to launch something. Again, that’s the question that I love, but again, there is no recipe. I think I can do one thing with someone that will work perfectly. And then I get another personality that I need to change my approach totally.

So to me, being adaptable, it’s one of the keys and another key is not leaving behind your point of view. So if you balance those two things and find a way to make it work, then either if you’re a product designer or a PM, I think you’re good. Now, I can tell you that regardless of this, I am critic of what I’m seeing today in the market.

And what I see a lot is just rush, right? There’s a lot of rush and it’s rush, not only in terms of let’s get something quickly out of the door, but it’s just a rush on let’s get something out of the door that maybe it’s not great. And to me is I can sit down, have a conversation within 10 minutes and feel great about the direction.

Or I can sit down for two or three weeks and not feel great about a direction. So it’s not about the time. It’s more about are you confident that you’re getting out of the door with something that is good? At least good enough. If you get something good enough and you don’t have a lot of competitors, maybe you’re fine.

But if you have a lot of competitors, you have to get something out of the door that is excellent. It’s really something that people will look and the people will love and will decide to leave everything else behind. To get to that level, you need great people. You need confidence. Sometimes you need a little bit more time.

Hannah Clark: We had a conversation with Jared Spool at Center Centre, not too long ago, which was a very similar kind of sentiment. Basically the idea being that, you know, just okay, user experience is not changing anyone’s mind. It’s not winning anyone’s hearts. If you want your products designed to be like a growth multiplier, then you need to really care about those things really immensely. So I really agree with that. I think that makes a lot of sense.

When it comes to research that informs design, when you have a lot of research, do you find that can be constraining to creativity when you have a lot of parameters that you have to be restricted to? I personally find that constraints make me feel more creative, but what are some of the kind of tricks that you’ve used to make sure that you’re taking into account the research holistically when you’re developing a design?

Koji Pereira: I never came across a situation with researchers that I felt it was limiting the team. But what I seen as issues with research in the past is one, if the team feels like they are basically using research to double check assumptions that they already want to push forward. So basically like hidden agenda things, right?

Oh, I want to do this. And then can you please do research on that and just confirm that. And sometimes you see people like having side conversations are like, yeah, I actually want to push for this. Do you think we can get some feedback on it?

Hannah Clark: Confirmation bias.

Koji Pereira: Yeah. The confirmation bias. That’s one issue I see with research, not with the researcher itself, but with research within companies.

The other problem I see, this is more on the design side. Designers who feel like research will design solutions for them. Basically okay, we designed this and then you look at this thing, doesn’t look good at all and we test it and people loved it. And then to begin with, that’s like a very bad way to put out of a research conclusion, right?

Like you want more details about that. And I think when research come out as positive, we need to be skeptical and we need to ask questions and we need to feel like, okay, That’s great. This got some positive reaction, but why you got a positive reaction? Maybe other solution that we didn’t try could also get positive reaction or maybe not.

And then if you get some constructive feedback, that’s great. Like constructive feedback I think we should embrace all of that. Even if you research with people who are not necessarily your main customer. What I’m saying is that usually your main customer will be more exigent and a little bit more detailed and will require a little bit more of care than some, someone random get you get on the streets for research, if that’s what you’re doing. Which means to me that if someone in the street to give you constructive feedback, then your actual customer will give you even more.

So you should consider that as something that you need to act upon. And then don’t try to use this research to basically, again, confirmation bias or to say basically, okay, the design is like that because it’s what the customer liked. That’s not a great usage of research, in my opinion.

Hannah Clark: I have a kind of a related question, sort of. I am curious about defending the value of a design choice. So for example, if you have a stakeholder that doesn’t necessarily agree with your sense of aesthetics for a specific design choice, or maybe you’ve got an engineer who’s got like a very specific idea of, you know, how something should look in terms of logic, but perhaps you have a different idea in terms of the behavior of a user.

How do you approach those kinds of conversations or conflicts where design choice, you’re confident in a design choice, but I have a stakeholder who is not?

Koji Pereira: Yeah. So, you know, I, of course I started as an IC. I came to become a leader after that, like a manager and now in the leadership team. So my feeling is that, and I’m looking at my teams and my past as an IC too, having a leader who on the design team that actually you align with and help you to understand, okay, what is the principles for us as a company in terms of design?

What is good design for our company, is super important. And without that, it’s a little bit of an uphill battle because it’s more Oh, I think this is good. That other person thinks that’s good. Maybe another person disagree with everyone. So it’s a very hard conversation. But then if you have something written, if you have a leader who push for a specific direction, then everything becomes easier. So to me, what I would my advice for ICs is look up for leaders who will have a strong opinion about design and that you feel aligned with.

And for leaders, what I would say is make sure that whenever you get hired, that you have this type of conversations before you join a company. So it’s not that the company is hiring you to do some operational work, but not really putting you in a seat to define what’s the direct direction design direction for the product.

So for me, at this point, what I do is whenever I join a new company, I make that super clear in the beginning. Like I am not there to just manage people, right? Like I’m managing people, helping them to grow, but I also want to make sure that you’re fine, that I’m going to make changes and I gonna redefine or define what’s good design is for your company.

It’s a big deal, right? Like you cannot just hire someone that you don’t trust or you don’t feel aligned with.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, well, and I think that’s that’s what gives every individual company and brand that bespoke feel when you know, you’ve got someone who’s got a specific vision. It’s not, you’re just adhering to the brand standards that have been passed down from the previous leader before you. You’re really, you know, shaping it to what you think is going to work.

I love this kind of conversation. I think that yeah, design is one of those really fascinating fields that kind of touches so many different areas of product and of life. So thank you so much for joining us today, Koji.

Where can people follow your work online?

Koji Pereira: Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Hannah. Well, people can look up for me on LinkedIn. I think that’s where I’m most active these days. And yeah, I think that’s pretty much it. I’m not using much of the other networks at this point.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, me neither. Well, thank you so much for coming on and yeah, we’ll hope to have you back another time.

Koji Pereira: All right. Thank you.

Hannah Clark: Thanks for listening in. For more great insights, how-to guides and tool reviews, subscribe to our newsletter at theproductmanager.com/subscribe. You can hear more conversations like this by subscribing to The CPO Club wherever you get your podcasts.