Journal / Product
Product management and design of future products
At the UX Strategy Conference, I gave a ~44-minute talk on how to approach UX strategy and product development for long-term innovation — products that won't exist for another 10 years. The talk draws on my work as VP of Product Innovation at Telefónica Alpha, where we built future-facing products in the healthcare and mental health space.
Context: Telefónica Alpha
The talk opens with an introduction to Telefónica Alpha — the innovation unit within Telefónica focused on building entirely new product areas. Unlike traditional product teams shipping against near-term roadmaps, Alpha operated on a 10-year horizon, exploring spaces where the technology, market, and user need had yet to fully converge.
Healthcare — and specifically mental health — was one of the primary verticals. The talk uses this as the running case study.
Why healthcare?
A central part of the talk addresses a question that shapes the whole design challenge: why is healthcare so expensive? Understanding the structural and behavioural drivers of cost — not just the technical ones — is a prerequisite for designing meaningful interventions.
Key topics in this section include:
- Top 5 health behaviours that drive outcomes and cost
- The question "How do you feel?" as a design provocation — and how hard it is to answer accurately
- Mental health statistics: the scale of the problem, the gap between need and access, and why digital has a role to play
The long-term innovation problem
Designing for about-to-launch products is well documented. There are established methodologies: user research, prototyping, usability testing, iterative development. But how do you design and validate products that are only technically possible in 5–10 years?
The talk identifies three core barriers to long-term innovation inside large organisations:
- Silos — teams optimised for the present can't coordinate around a future that doesn't exist yet
- Technology knowledge gaps — designers and PMs need enough technical foresight to know what will be possible, without being paralysed by what isn't yet
- Uncertainty — the further out the horizon, the less applicable standard validation methods become
The role of AI
A dedicated section covers AI's role in future product design — not as a feature, but as a capability that reshapes what UX can do. The talk explores how AI changes the design space for mental health products in particular.
Designing 10 years out
This is the core of the talk. To illustrate what designing for the future looks like in practice, the talk uses:
- Black Mirror — as a cultural lens for exploring what future products might feel like if desirability is maximised without sufficient ethical grounding
- AI Girlfriends — a real-world product that arrived ahead of cultural consensus, used to examine how design fiction becomes reality
- Mood Score — a concept product: a persistent, passive emotional state tracker as a mental health primitive
From concept to prototype
The talk covers how to move from speculative concepts to testable artefacts — specifically using a bipolar disorder use case to show how a mood-tracking product can be prototyped and validated even when the full technical stack doesn't exist.
This section addresses the key question: how do you launch an MVP for a product that is only technically possible in 5–10 years?
The approach separates desirability validation (can we understand the need and test the concept?) from feasibility validation (can we build it?) — allowing meaningful progress on the former well before the latter is possible.
Techniques covered include design fiction, speculative prototypes, and early community-building around the problem space.
About the speaker
Remko Vermeulen — VP of Product Innovation at Telefónica Alpha at the time of the talk. Now Head of Product.
