Bohan Xu

Not by accident. I needed to feel what breaks before I could design what holds. Engineering showed me where teams make trade-offs they'll regret. Product management put me in the room where decisions actually get made.

Most product problems are settled long before anyone opens Figma — a goal set without enough context, a handoff where meaning quietly evaporated. The interface is just where the damage becomes visible.

Not no structure. Just — teams where people don't stop thinking when something falls outside their job description. Engineers who care about the user. Designers who worry about feasibility.

Every team has people quietly holding broken structure together. They see the problems. They just haven't had the words for them yet.

A journey map can be one of the most powerful tools in a project — for alignment, for surfacing hidden fractures, for making the invisible finally legible. I've built ones that changed how organizations saw themselves.

I've also watched beautifully crafted maps get pinned to a wall and never opened again. The question is always: will this change how this team thinks? If not, it's decoration.

We optimize the button when the service is broken. We redesign the app when the policy is the problem. The design field has a habit of working just below where the real leverage is.

I'm drawn to the layer beneath the interface — where changes don't require users to do anything differently, but make the whole system healthier.

Every interface encodes beliefs about who matters, what counts as success, and whose experience is worth optimizing. I take that seriously — which is why I care about who's in the room when decisions get made, and who's absent.

I use Meadows' 12 leverage points to read systems. 3 Horizons to think about time. Not frameworks I cite — the way I actually think.