For the past several years, I’ve been exploring questions about the way organizations understand what they are trying to accomplish. It led me to ponder how that understanding gets shared across functions, and how it shapes the product decisions that follow.
As I look back now, I see a progression in my thinking beginning with the foundational framework I established with Whole Product Thinking, my Advancing Research 2025 presentation centered on Collective Understanding, and now to the ideas I’ll be presenting next week at Shift UX 2026.
It started with the Whole Product Thinking framework
My work on Whole Product Thinking began with an observation that teams often move too quickly into problem and solution spaces without developing a broader understanding of what they are actually trying to accomplish.
Customer needs are critical, but they are only part of the picture. Business goals, market realities, technical capabilities, operational constraints, resources, risk, and the ability to deliver and realize value all shape whether a product will ultimately succeed.
That led to the core questions in Whole Product Thinking:
What do we need to accomplish, and why?
What is needed to successfully deliver and realize value?
Where do we have gaps or potential blind spots?
What trade-offs do we need to consider given our resources?
The intent was never to prescribe another product development process. The Whole Product Thinking map is intended to help teams see the larger product system together—what is understood, what is assumed, what is working, what is disconnected, where dependencies exist, and where gaps or trade-offs need attention.
From User Research to Collective Understanding
At Rosenfeld Media’s Advancing Research 2025, I explored Customer Understanding and the challenges and opportunities we face as more “non-researchers” are involved.
Research and customer learning have become increasingly distributed. Researchers, product managers, designers, support teams, engineers, analytics teams, and others are all contributing different pieces of customer understanding.
Rather than focusing only on who should or shouldn’t be conducting research, I became more interested in what all of that knowledge was ultimately for.
One line from the presentation captured the shift:
Research isn’t about collecting insights. It’s about shaping how teams think.
That led to the idea of Collective Understanding: a shared and continuously evolving understanding built by connecting knowledge across people, functions, evidence, and systems so teams can reason about decisions from a more complete picture.
Collective Understanding was increasingly about how the organization creates, connects, and maintains the knowledge needed to make better product decisions over time.
AI raises the stakes
AI is making many parts of knowledge work dramatically easier. We can retrieve information, synthesize evidence, connect sources, and generate answers faster than ever.
But that doesn’t mean the underlying understanding is complete.
If the evidence is fragmented, stale, inaccessible, contradictory, or missing important context, AI can amplify that fragmentation just as easily as it can help resolve it. As the how becomes easier, the quality of the what and why becomes even more important.
That is the question behind the work I’m exploring now.
Toward Architecting Organizational Understanding
Next week at Shift UX 2026, I’ll be presenting:
Architecting Organizational Understanding: The New Frontier for Human-Centered Practitioners
The talk asks what happens if we treat organizational understanding as something that can be intentionally shaped.
How do we bring together the right people, evidence, operational context, and systems around important decisions? How do we create the conditions for Collective Understanding, independent of any particular technology?
Because technology will continue to change rapidly, the focus needs to stay on a more fundamental question:
How do we help organizations understand what they are trying to accomplish—and why—well enough to make better decisions about what comes next?
I hope you join me as I continue to explore these topics at Shift UX 2026. I’m looking forward to the in-person and virtual conversations around the future of UX. You can use my discount code: MCKAY-SHIFT26
Also, if you want to catch up, my previous presentations are available in Rosenfeld Media’s Rosenverse and can be accessed after creating a free account:
Advancing Research 2025 • March 11, 2025
Watch Now: “Coexisting with non-researchers: Practical strategies for a democratized research future” →
Rosenfeld Community Event • March 14, 2024
Watch Now: “Whole Product Thinking: Expanding Beyond Problem and Solution Space Thinking” →