# Design is the New Product

> What the past six months, from enterprise software at IBM to Agora Grove, have taught me about designing products.

By Antonio Lopez · September 21, 2026 · https://antonio.ac/thesis/design-is-the-new-product

“Marketing and branding are two words that I absolutely hate... marketing for me is something that you have when you don't have anything to really sell. What I've always focused on doing was trying to create products that people couldn't live without.”

— Tom Ford

[Video: Tom Ford on marketing and making products people want](https://antonio.ac/writing/design-is-the-new-product/tom-ford.mp4?v=4) (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shgOzq9XCX4&t=529s)

Signing up for the APM list was probably a mistake. I turned off the LinkedIn notifications so I could focus on school and my projects. Then I opened X, saw Google and Meta were opening their programs, and immediately went back to checking everything.

Meanwhile, I’ve been putting my time into local farms and a mission I care about. I haven’t written much about it, so if you’re here wondering what I’ve been doing, here’s what the past six months have taught me about designing products.

So far, it appears all the value in product is taking something deeply complicated and making it feel obvious to the person using it. That has followed me from entertainment to consumer apps to enterprise software at IBM to, now, Agora Grove.

At IBM, I wanted to build something from scratch. We had a short window, an ambitious idea, and plenty of reasons to pick something smaller. My thinking was basically, “F*** it, we’re only in California once. Let’s go zero to one.”

If you’ve seen the demo, you’ll notice the interface looks a lot like IBM’s. That was intentional. One of the first things I did was bring in IBM’s Carbon Design System.

Building our own components and arguing over how everything should look could have eaten weeks. Carbon gave us a familiar foundation and let us spend that time getting the product to work.

We had data pipelines to unblock, stakeholders to convince, and a deployment to figure out inside a hybrid cloud environment. People had to trust a 21-year-old with production access to software they spent tens of thousands of dollars on. They also had to trust that we could deliver the interface without a dedicated design team.

That was plenty to take on.

Using an existing design system was one of the most useful design decisions I made. It gave us room to take risks elsewhere. The interface needed to make an ambitious product understandable within the time we had.

With social dining, I had more creative freedom. Working on Jetset, I saw an opportunity to improve the experience, introduce new features, and give people more reasons to return.

I also ran into a harder question: how do you turn that experience into a business? Making a social dining app people enjoy and finding a viable model beyond advertising are two problems you have to solve together. Eventually, I shelved the project.

A few weeks later, I saw DoorDash’s reservation experience and had a very specific reaction: that looks a hell of a lot like what I designed.

The similarity was encouraging. I had independently landed on a similar answer to how that experience should work. It also helped me decide where to put my energy.

So, thank you to DoorDash for closing that door for me.

Agora Grove gave me a problem I wanted to spend more time on: making buying and selling local food feel as straightforward as the consumer products people already use.

Agricultural software has a look. Green, muted yellow, earthy everything. I think a lot of it is ugly. More importantly, I’ve seen shopping experiences that make buying perfectly good local food feel unnecessarily sketchy. The farm can do everything right and still send you to a portal that makes you hesitate before entering your card.

I wanted the care that went into the food to show up in the experience of buying it.

Booking an Airbnb was a useful reference. So was shopping on Instacart and the familiarity of native iOS interactions. Clear choices, responsive controls, movement that feels natural, and lots of attention to detail.

But unfortunately, what goes into that is much more than a pretty storefront.

At IBM, I’d learned how to get a mess of disconnected systems working together. With Agora Grove, I wanted to do that for farms and make operating their business feel as simple as ordering an Uber.

Uber is a useful example. As a rider, you choose where you’re going, pick a ride, and pay. As a driver, you receive a request, accept it, and follow the trip. Each person gets an understandable set of actions while a much more complicated system coordinates the experience.

All of the value is in bringing clarity to work that currently asks people to hold too much in their heads.

I wanted the user to be able to run their whole business from this thing and have it feel obvious. I knew how complicated that would be to build, but I’d spent enough time working through these problems over the years to believe I could take a stab at pulling it off.

I think some of the most interesting opportunities for this are in enterprise and operational software. We’ve spent years refining familiar consumer interactions. Meanwhile, plenty of businesses still depend on someone manually stitching information together before they can do anything useful with it, and don’t get me started on the interfaces of these ‘products’.

AI gives us more ways to classify that information, connect it, and prepare it for action, while our design determines whether any of that capability becomes useful to the person who needs it.

Today, we can build sophisticated systems but very easily hand someone an exhausting product.

So my advice is to spend more time focusing on how a component changes state, how an animation guides your attention, how much information appears at once, and, once again, whether the next actions are obvious. Those are the moneyball decisions, given that backend capabilities are becoming more commoditized. And from my view, people running small businesses deserve that same level of care.

Working with a farm in Davie, Florida, doing roughly $3 million a year, has made this concrete. But you have to pay attention because all the interviews and prototypes have not overtaken how important it is to turn ambiguous and many times complicated operational needs into something the people running the farm can recognize and use.

Working with this farm has made me want to take on harder problems, and I still have so much to learn. I want to work with people who’ll challenge my thinking and build things with me that none of us would have figured out alone.

And, ideally, something that makes some money doing it.