6 Principles to turn a good digital product into a great digital product in 2025

For the last 15+ years I’ve helped both startups and big companies design and build digital products, through the peak of UX design and design thinking and into the modern era of AI development and no-code tools.

Over time, the methods of creation change, but the things that are difficult have always remained the same.

We live in a world now where going from zero to good can be done in days, not months, and prototyping an idea can be done in minutes rather than days.

But the real challenge lies not in going from zero to good, but in going from good to great. And in a world where everyone can create ‘good’, being great matters even more.

So what are the things that define a great digital product over a good one?

I’ve taken everything I’ve learnt over the last 15+ years and boiled it down to 6 key differences that great products deliver on where good products fail.

1 — Great products are opinionated

The best products, services and businesses now stand for something, or take a stand against something.

Take Strong Brand Social for example. Their intro workshop is called ‘F*ck the algorithm’ — and they have built a community of thousands who resonate deeply with this message.

Or take Cora from Every for example. Presented as ‘email for people who hate email’, they have an opinionated stance on what email should look and feel like, and they double down on it through the product experience.

It’s no longer enough to just do something well, you need to have an opinion on something, and build something that solves for that opinion as well as solving for the problem.

2 — Great products are aesthetic

The best products feel almost magical to use. And this magical, ‘aesthetic’ nature goes beyond just the visual and into the realm of ‘feels’, ‘vibes’, and the philosophical definition of aesthetics.

Great digital products deliver these magical, unique and compelling experiences through impeccable taste, and leaning towards art over function, and an embodiment of the cultural zeitgeist that ‘just feels right’.

This one is hard to measure, but examples of this done well would be products like Dot from New Computer, and Beem.

3 — Great products are tangible

Being tangible is about being immediate, clear and concise about what the product solves, and how it solves it, in as simple a way as possible.

It is about stripping back the frills, the words and the noise, and just existing in simplicity.

This is something that can take time and iteration to get to. Lots and lots of product development cycles focused on refining and removing things rather than adding and adding.

In productivity-land this is known as The One Thing, but it can be applied to products as well.

What is the one thing this product does, and what is the one way it does it, and why is that immediately better than any other solution on the market.

An example of a tangible product would be Uber (‘Go anywhere with Uber’), or AirBnB (‘Belong Anywhere’). They solve a problem in a clear, concise, simple, and meaningful way that is immediate to understand.

4 — Great products are emotional

Memory is formed through emotional experiences, and we are more likely to remember the beginning, end, and the most positive and negative parts of any experience.

Great products, use this to their advantage, and create memorable moments through positive moments in their product experience that connect emotions to product features.

Headspace does this incredibly well, by getting the user to do a breathing exercise during the onboarding process, and then following up by asking how it made the user feel (90% of the time the answer is ‘better’).

By doing this, you connect the positive moment with the emotion experienced by the user, and create a memorable moment that connects the emotion to the product in a user’s brain.

5 — Great products are noteworthy

At any given point of time there are movements and changes in culture and society across all parts of the world.

These changes create little pockets of opportunity. Sentiments that move back and forth, ebbing and flowing. Ephemeral feelings and information that wash over us as time passes.

This may seem a little wishy-washy, but the best products fit into these pockets of opportunity and amplify them.

They give these movements and sub-cultures a solution, and focus, or a space to gather around.

These products listen to the world, to their communities and sub-cultures, and to the people who exist in them, and create a dialog between them that is two-way.

No product can exist in a vacuum, it needs to engage with the people that it serves, and great products tap into something that is both of its time, and incredibly empowering for those who exist in that space.

Think of products like Bluesky and Cursor. They are positioned at the forefront of a movement, and create a focal point and community for those that exist in that space.

6 — Great products are elevated

Being elevated means being raised above something else. And great products do just that in their experience.

But being elevated in this sense doesn’t mean being above your competitors, it means having one singular feature or value that is so strong that it outweighs the negatives of any shortcomings you have.

It means doing something so well that it doesn’t matter if the rest of the product experience is just ‘ok’.

Products that do everything good don’t stand out in a world where everyone can create good. Doing one thing incredibly well is what leads to standout products, even if the rest of the experience isn’t at the same level of quality.

Take products like Screen Studio for example. It isn’t a general-purpose screen recording tool, but what it does do great, is visually appealing, beautiful screen recordings for very specific purposes — and it does them so well that the rest of the experience doesn’t matter.

Where to start

So where do you start if you want to take your product from good to great?

One way to start thinking about these is simply to write a list for each of these principles, and then ask yourself:

• Are we achieving this currently?
• If we aren’t, what is stopping us from achieving this?
• How can we rethink or change the things that are stopping our product from achieving this?
• Which of these solutions is the most impactful and should be prioritised?

Once you have ideas on how to achieve each, along with your top priorities for each, then you can get started on taking your product from good to great.

This is the hard part, and it isn’t always a straight line and often isn’t something that can be done on the first, second or even third try.

But keep at it, and iterate towards each principle, and eventually, you’ll start to see your product growing more and more.