Where Product Work Gets Messy
Most teams I talk with are not actually sure where the real problem is in their product and design work.
There’s more information than ever and AI gives you instant answers. Feedback keeps coming from every direction. On the surface, it can look like the team has everything it needs to move forward.
But once you sit inside the conversations, you realize people still are not sure what to trust.
That’s the part that feels different right now.
Teams are trying to figure out what matters before momentum carries the wrong thing forward. A prompt can generate ten directions in seconds. A model can clean up rough thinking. Analytics can explain what users already did. But none of that automatically creates confidence in the decision itself.
That's where I see things starting to break.
Yes, teams may feel like something promising on the table. Design sees potential. Product is trying to connect it to roadmap pressure and business goals. Engineering is already thinking about implementation.
At the same time, different feedback keep pulling the conversation in different directions. Some feedback feels important. Some metrics look convincing. A stakeholder has a strong opinion. Someone references a customer call. Another person is worried about deadlines or technical constraints.
The conversation are happening, but the certainty underneath it usually is not as strong as people want it to be.
That’s where teams start meandering. Not because people are bad at their jobs. (it's usually the opposite). Smart teams just end up surrounded by too many signals without a clear way to understand which ones deserve momentum.
Jake Johnson described that moment well:
We’ll have a solid idea, plenty of discussion, and then someone asks what the next step is. That’s usually where things fall apart because no one feels confident enough to say, ‘this is the direction.
I’ve watched that pattern repeat for decades.
Teams jump into concepts before the real need is clear. Research exists somewhere, but it doesn’t always land in the room when the decision is happening. Analytics arrive too late to guide the work. Stakeholders see the problem from different angles. And too often, the loudest voice wins because the clearest signal never shows up.
Why We Built Glare
We built Glare for ourselves first.
For more than twenty-five years at ZURB, we’ve helped teams make complex decisions under pressure. We built Foundation when the web needed a shared system for responsive design. We built Helio when teams needed faster signals from users.
Glare grew from everything we learned in between. Across thousands of projects, the same pattern kept appearing. The teams that moved forward weren’t always the ones with the most data or the longest research cycle. They were the teams that could turn what users were showing into decisions other people could understand and trust.
That became the foundation of Glare.
At its core, Glare connects three things that rarely show up cleanly in the same conversation:
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What users need
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What the business cares about
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How to measure the space between them
Most teams see pieces of this.
Researchers see the needs.
Designers see the patterns.
Product sees the goals.
Leaders see the outcomes.
Glare gives everyone a shared way to work from the same design signals
Why Signals Matter
A design signal is the smallest unit of clarity a team can use to move a decision forward. A signal connects what users do or feel with the direction the team is considering and the outcome the business needs to move.
That connection creates leverage. When signals are weak, work feels heavier than it should. Decisions stall. Opinions fill the gaps. Teams keep moving, but confidence drops.
When signals are strong, the work changes. Decisions get easier. Tradeoffs become clearer. Teams stop defending positions and start responding to what users are showing.
Erik Visnyak described the challenge clearly:
There is a challenge with bridging the customer demand signals at the top level with informing product roadmap decisions.
That bridge does not appear by accident. Signals need structure.
They need user needs, business goals, UX metrics, context, direction, and intuition working together. That structure is what makes a signal useful. Without it, data turns into noise, hunches stay private, and decisions become harder to carry forward.
Glare is the framework that holds those pieces together.
What Changed
For a long time, product and design teams were mostly limited by production.
Creating concepts took time. Research cycles were slower. Engineering capacity constrained how many directions a team could realistically explore. Decisions still mattered, but the pace of creation naturally forced teams to narrow focus earlier.
AI changed that balance.
Prompts can now generate flows, interfaces, experiments, and variations in minutes. Engineering can move concepts into production quickly. Stakeholders can participate earlier and more often. Teams can explore far more directions than they could before.
But generating more work does not automatically create stronger decisions. In many teams, the opposite is happening.
The volume of ideas increases faster than the team’s ability to evaluate them. Feedback expands. Opinions multiply. Priorities shift. More concepts survive longer because teams have less conviction around what should actually move forward.
As Ian Batterbee put it:
AI has made it easy to generate work quickly, but much harder to know what to trust.
That pressure changes how product and design work feels day to day. The conversation keeps going, but the decision doesn’t land.
A team may have:
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Promising concepts
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Useful research
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Stakeholder support
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Strong intuition
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Analytics
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AI-generated variations
but still struggle to answer:
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Which direction is actually stronger?
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What tradeoffs matter most?
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What evidence is reliable enough to act on?
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What should move forward now?
This is where teams begin losing momentum. Feedback accumulates without clear comparison. Prioritization becomes unstable. Decisions reopen repeatedly. Alignment weakens as work moves across product, design, engineering, and leadership.
The problem is rarely a lack of ideas, but maintaining shared direction while the work is still evolving.
That is the pressure Glare was built to address.
Glare helps teams structure how decisions take shape through signals, metrics, reviews, and shared evaluation patterns. The goal is not slowing teams down. The goal is helping teams move faster with stronger evidence, clearer tradeoffs, and more confidence in the decisions shaping what gets built.
Why This Matters More Now
The pressure on teams is only increasing.
AI is accelerating how quickly product and design work moves. More ideas are entering the system. More decisions are happening earlier. More people are participating in shaping product direction. That changes what creates leverage inside organizations.
For a long time, execution speed was the advantage. Increasingly, the advantage is how quickly a team can evaluate direction, align around evidence, and move forward without losing momentum.
That is why signals matter more now. The teams that succeed will not necessarily be the teams generating the most output. They will be the teams that can:
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Evaluate ideas more clearly
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Reduce ambiguity faster
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Connect user response to business outcomes
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Make stronger decisions while work is still evolving
Glare helps teams use AI, prompts, Skills, metrics, and signals without losing control of direction.
The goal is stronger signals, sharper decisions, and better judgment as the pace of work continues to accelerate. Not slower work. Sharper decisions.
Glare Is Still Becoming
Glare is meant to be used, questioned, stretched, and improved.
If something helps you make a better decision, share it. If something feels unclear, push on it. If you have an example, a disagreement, or a better way to explain the work, bring it in.
The framework will get stronger through use. The future we are moving into is faster, more automated, and more uncertain. That gives product and design teams a real chance to lead, but only if we can show how decisions connect to users and outcomes.
The work gets better when more people help make it clearer. Join Us.