What product designers can learn from filmmaking

In our view, the most transferable lessons from filmmaking happen before a camera rolls, in development: know why you are making the thing, say it in one line, treat your own life as research and check it, choose its form and its treatment on purpose, size the idea to the leverage you have, and outline every scene before writing the finished version. Each has a close product design equivalent, and each can be tried on a live project this week.

At Tcules, we hosted a workshop on 2 December 2023 with Arastu Zakia, an ex-product designer and startup entrepreneur from Ahmedabad who moved to Bombay to make films. He had spent five years in Bollywood by then, and he walked a room of product designers through filmmaking in the language of product design, starting from one hypothesis: "the process of making things is largely common across all domains". The quotes below are his words from the recording, each linked to the moment he says them. Where we map them onto product work, that is our interpretation, and it is labelled as such.

The six habits at a glance

Know why you are making it, and say it in one line

Arastu opened with need, which he called the single most important question before making anything, a film or a product. He said "most people end up asking how are you making something"; his question was why. "If you have a strong why, several hows will come to you".

He returned to it when he reached the script. A script's journey begins with the log line, one line, which a synopsis then expands into one paragraph. "The log line for a filmmaker is the North Star of a film", he said, and he tied the difficulty of writing that line back to his first question: "because that clarity was never there, that is why I asked why".

Interpretation. The nearest product artefact is a one-sentence statement of who the product or feature is for and what changes for them. Amazon's working-backwards practice, which Werner Vogels described in 2006, starts a product by writing its launch press release, because doing so "clarifies how the world will see the product". The log line is stricter: one line, kept in view as the reference every later decision is checked against. A line that describes a feature ("a dashboard for usage data") is still a how; a line that names a person and a change for them is a why.

Try this week. Before your next design review, write one sentence: who this is for, the situation they are in, and what will be different for them. Ask three teammates to write theirs without looking at yours. If the sentences differ, that is the conversation to have before anyone discusses screens.

Treat your own life as research, then check it

Arastu described a common belief that research is something external to the person doing it, and disagreed: "your life's greatest research is life experience". He was clear that he did not mean seeking out hardship. He meant the eye: "most people watch but do they see", and "do you have the vision to observe something that is happening in your life in a method that you can make a story out of". He went on to talk about traditional, external research as well, as the way to reach real depth in a subject.

Interpretation. For a designer, the noticing eye is worth training: your own irritation with a piece of software is a good source of questions. It is a weaker source of answers. A screenwriter writes for a broad audience that shares much of human experience; a product designer may be designing for work they have never done. Social psychologists Lee Ross, David Greene and Pamela House (1977) named the false consensus effect: a tendency to see one's own choices and judgements as relatively common. The Design Council's Double Diamond begins with a discovery phase meant to help teams "understand, rather than simply assume, what the problem is", by engaging directly with the people affected. Life experience gives you the eye; the people affected give you the evidence.

Try this week. Write down one moment this week when a product made something harder for you, as specifically as a scene: where you were, what you were trying to do, what happened. Then find one person who does that task as part of their job and watch them do it. Note where their scene differs from yours.

Choose the form before you write

Before writing a story, Arastu said, decide what form it will take: a feature film, a series, a short film, a documentary, docu-fiction, animation. "What form will it take is a very important decision to arrive at because the journey of all forms will be entirely different", from writing and pitching to production and release. He contrasted plot-heavy stories, which suit a feature film because a viewer who sits for two and a half hours needs a resolution, with series, which in his experience are pitched on characters and world rather than plot.

Interpretation. In product work the form is the shape of the answer: a new product, a feature inside an existing one, a change to a workflow, a piece of content, or nothing new built at all. As in film, the form changes the whole journey, including what has to be built, how it is released, who supports it and how it is measured. The UK Government's Service Standard asks teams to "consider alternatives to creating a service", such as publishing website content or running a campaign, and to scope a service "not too narrow or too broad". A brief can arrive with its form already decided ("design a dashboard") before anyone has asked whether it is the right one.

Try this week. For your current brief, write three different forms the answer could take, at least one of which is not new interface. Give each one line on what it would mean to build, release and support. Take the list to your next planning conversation.

Decide the treatment

Within ideation, Arastu separated the idea from its treatment: "what will be the treatment, the approach you will take to the idea that you have", which he called a very important decision. His example set Parasite beside Shoplifters, a film he described as a similar story told in a more art-house way. What he singled out in Parasite was how its treatment shifts genre as it goes, through satire, thriller, horror and murder mystery; he said he did not remember any other film doing that.

Interpretation. The product equivalent is design direction: the same problem approached as a guided step-by-step flow, a single dense screen for experts, or a conversation. It is easy to commit to the first direction and then test it alone. A study at CHI 2006 by Maryam Tohidi, Bill Buxton, Ronald Baecker and Abigail Sellen found that people shown a single design gave it significantly higher ratings and less negative feedback than people shown the same design among three alternatives. The same authors found that usability testing is "a means to identify problems, not provide solutions", so comparing treatments tells you what is wrong with each; choosing remains the designer's job.

Try this week. Take one screen you are working on and make three treatments that differ in approach, not decoration. Show all three side by side to two people who do the task, and ask what is wrong with each.

Size the idea to your leverage

"Single most important defining factor of Bollywood is leverage", Arastu said, and he applied it to ideation: "will you be able to write a Brahmastra and get it made right now? Do you have that leverage?" He was not dismissing the big idea: "make it 10 years later when you have that leverage, right now be smart on what you can actually do, and it's not a film specific thing".

He used his own path as the example. By his account, he spent five years directing shorts and writing a feature, series and more short films, making no money, before a self-produced short film led to a commission; as of December 2023 he was writing a film in which Rajkummar Rao plays Bhagat Singh. He credited the work he had made for himself: "because I had so many scripts that were never made but they were my own that the quality appealed to people".

Interpretation. The product equivalent is appetite. In Shape Up, Basecamp defines appetite as "the amount of time we want to spend on a project, as opposed to an estimate", and puts the difference simply: "Appetites start with a number and end with a design." Leverage adds what an appetite leaves out: the assets you can draw on, such as existing components, data the team already has and the trust of the people who decide. Scope the design to what you can get built now, and keep the larger version for when you have earned the leverage it needs.

Try this week. Before the next estimate, write the appetite: how much time this problem is worth. Cut the design until it fits. Put the larger version on a "later" list with one line on what leverage it would need.

Outline every scene before you build

"An outline is a numbered list of every scene in the film", Arastu said, and his examples ran one line per scene. "This is the skeleton of your film", and in his account generally the hardest and longest part of the whole process. Then he made the comparison for the room: "actually this is a very lean prototyping version of making a film". Only once the outline is locked is the whole story written out in prose, a document he also called the treatment, before the screenplay and the shooting draft.

Note the two uses of "treatment". In ideation it means the approach to an idea; in the script journey it is the full story in prose, written after the outline is fixed. In our interpretation, design direction maps to the first and a written walkthrough of a flow maps to the second.

Interpretation. Stephanie Houde and Charles Hill of Apple defined a prototype as "any representation of a design idea", whatever its medium, and wrote that "selecting the focus of a prototype is the art of identifying the most important open design questions" (Houde and Hill, 1997). A numbered step list is a prototype of structure. It answers the question of order and completeness (what happens, in what sequence, and what is missing) before any visual decision can distract from it.

Try this week. Write the flow you are designing as numbered scenes, one line each, including the scenes where things go wrong: no data yet, an error, a permission refused. Rearrange until it reads in order, then lock it before opening your design tool.

Where the analogy stops

Arastu's own sketch of the product design process ended differently from a film. After implementation, you measure the success or failure of the solution, "and then go back and make changes and that's a continuous circle". A film is locked at release; a product is not. Our interpretation: the film habits above are front-loaded, and in product work the log line and the outline are living documents, revisited when the evidence changes.

Leverage has a second meaning in his account of Bollywood: "if a star wants something it will be made and then no questions will be asked". That describes how power works in one industry; it is not a method to copy. In our view, a product decision made by rank alone skips the why that his whole talk began with.

The workshop, and the film made in under two hours

At Tcules, we host workshops and conversations with practitioners, and this one ended with making something. Arastu set the constraint, "it needs to be a one scene film", and gave the room five minutes to write it. The participants made Life of a Designer in under two hours, with a crew drawn from the room. The event page has the chapters of the full recording.

The captions on the recording are automatic, and several passages in Hindi have none. We quote only what the captions show, with obvious caption errors corrected (for example "house" for "hows").

The same habits sit under our Product Design work: we make the product argument explicit early, and we match each prototype to the risky decision, sometimes choosing a simpler representation over code.