Over the years, I’ve come to see that every product I use carries design decisions locked into it, shaped by business objectives and technical constraints. Every design decision is made at the intersection of three forces.

User need. What the person using this product actually requires.
Business viability. Whether the product can sustain itself economically.
Technical feasibility. What the team can actually build, in the time available, with the technology they have.

These forces are always present and are frequently in tension.

Tim Brown popularised these forces at IDEO as Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability, the three lenses whose overlap defines a viable design opportunity.¹ The product triad uses different labels for the same work. That framing is standard and structurally accurate, but it leaves one thing underspecified: the designer’s role inside it.

Venn diagram with three overlapping circles: Heart mapped to Desirability and User at top, Head to Viability and Business at bottom-left, Hand to Feasibility and Technology at bottom-right, with design at the centre — The three zones correspond to Brown’s Desirability / Feasibility / Viability and the product triad of User, Business, Technology. H3 treats the same forces as three modes of practitioner engagement.

Most descriptions of design position the designer as a user advocate: the voice of human need in a swarm of business objectives and engineering constraints. But a designer who only advocates for users, without attention to business and technology, is not serving users well.

What design actually does is translation. It uses the user need as the anchor while considering business and technology aspects. Engineers translate business constraints into technical solutions. Product managers translate strategy into feature priorities. Every role in a product team translates something. Design’s translation is the one that keeps the user need from being lost inside the others. That is the specific contribution of design to any product team.

This is why the product triad matters to H3. The three forces correspond directly to the three parts of the definition in 1.2, and, as the next section shows, to the three H’s the framework is built from. H3 is the capacity to hold that tension.

Learn

Tim Brown, “Designers — Think Big!” (TED, 2009). The DFV argument explained by the person who popularised it.
Tim Brown, Change by Design (2009), Chapter 2. The full Desirability, Feasibility, Viability framework.

Do

Map your current project across all three forces. Where are they in tension right now? Write one sentence per force describing the specific constraint.

Check

Which force is your team currently underweighting? What is that costing the work?

1. Tim Brown, Change by Design, HarperCollins, 2009. Chapter 2 introduces the Desirability / Feasibility / Viability framing that made the three-force model standard in design practice. Brown’s argument positions desirability as the primary lens. H3’s position is that the three forces are peers in a tension the designer holds, with none ranked above the others. ↩

The TriadUser, Business, Technology, held simultaneously