Design Decisions is a weekly letter about how product teams decide what to build, what to fix, and what to leave alone.
Every issue takes apart one real product. A signup flow that loses people, a launch that is close but not ready, an interface that looks fine and still does not convert. I show the calls I would make and why, so you can borrow the reasoning rather than the answer.
It is written for founders and product leads at small, growing teams. The themes come back to five things my clients actually run into: product decisions and roadmap, the friction between design and engineering, getting from usable to converting, where Chinese and Western product expectations differ, and when a fractional design partner makes sense.
I am Bear Liu, a product designer in Auckland. About 16 years in, four of them at Xero. I now work with founders as their fractional design partner, which means senior design judgement plus hands-on product design, without hiring a full design team.
Two public audit samples and the full teardown library are at bearliu.com. Reply to any issue, I read every one.
