PEOPLE ASK are you a product designer, a UX person, a researcher, a prototyper, or a product manager?

Here’s how I answer.

For many years I’ve been designing the context in which decisions get made, but I only came to this conclusion a few years ago after I read a book called Nudge by Richard Thaler. It was about behavioral economics. A week ago Thaler won the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences. Prior to reading Nudge I had read books and papers about Human-Computer Interaction principles and psychology and was briefly a member of the Association for Computing Machines (ACM) Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction (SIG-CHI). The ACM mainly made me jealous of those who attended SIG-CHI conferences in far-off places. HCI and psychology offered a fascinating set of theories such as Hick’s Law and Fitts’s Law that guide low-level product design decisions. How many options should go on a tool bar? How large should this particular button be?

But product design and product management thinking lacked a Grand Unified Theory that would tie all the various little ideas together to form one overarching, highly predictive, testable theory of what we do when we work at developing new products.

The terrain that Thaler outlines in Nudge is clearly a Grand Unified Theory that incorporates research from diverse fields including economics, HCI, and psychology to help predict and explain human decision making, in all its irrational glory. Understanding the irrational basis of human decision making is a key first step towards improving decision making, improving outcomes, and developing new products.

So, to get back to that question: what am I? I have planned and conducted discovery-oriented field studies using both qualitative techniques (participant-observer) and quantitative techniques such as random moment sampling and surveys. I’ve validated and invalidated product ideas through research and usability testing with users and customers, but I don’t consider myself to be a user experience researcher.

I can write a well-formed user story, know when and why to use acceptance criteria and ‘how to demo’ criteria, and I can prioritize epics and stories by business value, user value, and properly estimated complexity. I can lead scrum and agile teams as a servant-leader and I can define product and user experience metrics. I know why and when to use entry cohort analysis, and can point to examples of how I used entry cohort analysis in the past with good effect. But I don’t consider myself to be only a product manager.

I can design wireframes and high-fidelity mockups of software using AI or Sketch, and can prototype interactions, transitions, and animations (HTML/CSS, Origami, or InVision). I’m a competent visual designer who is familiar with design, art, art history, principles of typography. I know the difference between Russian constructivism and neo-brutalism and can talk about the role of technology in shaping both how we design and what we design (a Worfian hypothesis). But I’m not a visual design specialist.

I’m researcher, product manager, designer, prototyper, and curious person who likes to learn and solve problems.

But I get asked a lot “are you a designer or product person?” This question confuses me, because to me a designer is a product person, and vice-versa. You cannot design a software product effectively without having discovered, validated, and prioritized product ideas with real or proxy users. You cannot properly devise and prioritize a product backlog, without a grasp of people—their goals, needs, and preferences for visual and emotional design.

Product thinking includes tasks like validating the problem and the solution, prioritizing by value and complexity, planning iteratively, measuring, evaluating, systematizing, designing for change (often called ‘agility’). Design thinking requires an understanding of human factors and ergonomics, human psychology, behavioral economics, and the principles of visual communication and emotional design. It’s the combination of product thinking with design thinking that yields a holistic view of what a product or service can and should become.