Designing for Reality: The Work That No One Sees
We all love the iceberg analogy.
Every startup slide deck, design thinking workshop, and LinkedIn carousel has flashed it at some point.
“Remember, 90% is beneath the surface.” Has become a great catch line or a hook line.
But I’ve come to realise we throw this around without understanding its true weight. Because building – isn’t about acknowledging that there’s more work beneath the surface. It’s about understanding what that work is, why it exists, and what it demands of us as builders and as humans.
Most people design for demos. Nothing wrong about it.
They design for what investors will clap for. For what early users will screenshot. For what the team can show in Friday’s all-hands. Features. UI polish. Clean onboarding flows. Fancy micro-interactions. Crisp slide decks.
But designing for reality is different.
It is not about what people see. It is about what people depend on without thinking about it. The difference between admiration and trust is this: People admire what they see, but they trust what works when they’re not looking.
When you start to design for reality, the first brutal lesson you encounter is systems debt.
Technical debt is one slice. Systems debt is deeper. Every quick fix, every unscalable script, every half-baked integration to meet this sprint’s goals becomes silent interest that compounds. A few months later, your team spends more time maintaining than building. Years later, no one remembers why certain tables exist, why certain APIs got duplicated, why scripts run everyday 3 AM to keep the lights on.
But here’s the hidden truth: Debt itself isn’t bad.
Startups survive because of debt. The problem isn’t debt – it’s unacknowledged debt. Debt taken without a repayment plan. Because unacknowledged debt grows like mould in a closed room. One day, your engineering team wakes up and realises they’re custodians of chaos, not builders of leverage.
In life, the same principle applies.
Emotional debt. Decisions postponed. Hard conversations avoided. Self-honesty delayed. All these gain hidden interest. You don’t feel it when you’re sprinting. But one day, the burden becomes so heavy that forward motion feels impossible.
Then you encounter incentive misalignment.
In systems, it’s simple. PMs get measured on feature launches, so maintenance gets ignored. Engineers get measured on velocity, so testing and documentation get skipped. Ops gets measured on uptime, so they become blockers for releases.
Everyone optimises for what they’re measured on.
No one optimises for the system as a whole!
The same is true in life. You say you value health, but your calendar shows no workouts. You say relationships matter, but your screen time data says otherwise. Your stated goals and your daily incentives always misaligned. And systems – or lives – with misaligned incentives collapse, even if they look functional in the short term.
Then comes knowledge silos.
The single points of failure hidden in every company. The engineer who knows why payments break under specific conditions. The ops lead who remembers why that vendor got blacklisted. The product manager who understands the unspoken political minefields with a major client.
These people are invaluable. Until they become bottlenecks. Because knowledge trapped in people isn’t capability. It’s hidden fragility.
One resignation away from operational paralysis.
And in life, the same pattern repeats. You build silent dependencies on relationships, external validations, specific rituals, without embedding resilience into your inner system. You think you are strong because your life “works.” But remove one person, one job, one city, and your system collapses.
Then you realise that edge cases are not edge cases at all.
Most product designs focus on the happy path. The ideal flow. The clean user journey. But in reality:
Users enter invalid data.
APIs timeout unpredictably.
Schema updates break integrations.
Devices disconnect midway through critical flows.
People forget passwords, enter wrong OTPs, click buttons twice, close tabs mid-payment.
In production, chaos is not the exception. It is the baseline. If your system only works when everything works, it doesn’t work.
And in life, your edge cases are the moments that define you. Betrayals. Illness. Failure. Rejection. If your self-system only functions when life flows smooth, it is fragile. You haven’t designed yourself for reality. You’ve designed yourself for a curated highlight reel.
Finally, you realise UX ≠ UI.
Most people think user experience is beautiful design, elegant typography, and animations that ease friction. But real UX is reliability. Predictability. Speed. Accuracy. Graceful degradation under failure.
Users rarely message you saying, “Thank you for never corrupting my data.”
But they leave you forever when you do.
In life, the same is true. People may admire your intelligence, your charisma, your wins. But what they trust you for is your reliability. Your emotional consistency. Your integrity when no one is watching. The sense that when everything is burning, you remain grounded.
So what does it mean to design for reality?
It means building systems – and lives – that don’t collapse under chaos, because they were built with chaos in mind.
It means:
Designing not for launches, but for maintainability.
Prioritising boring operational excellence over flashy features that no one asked for.
Embedding knowledge into systems, not people.
Creating incentives that align teams toward user outcomes and system resilience.
Building observability as a first-class feature, because you cannot fix what you cannot see.
Treating failure paths with the same seriousness as happy paths.
When I reflect on the best builders I’ve worked with, none of them cared about applause. They cared about building unkillable systems.
They understood that the iceberg beneath wasn’t “more work.” It was the real work. The visible tip is only as strong as what it rests on.
The philosophical implication here is profound.
In an age optimised for surfaces – for screenshots, headlines, and applause – designing for reality is a rebellious act.
Because reality is messy. Chaotic. Unpredictable. It doesn’t care about your elegant mental models. It tests your system – or your soul – at its weakest points.
Most people spend their lives polishing the visible tip of their iceberg. Their features. Their titles. Their bodies. Their wealth.
But reality always tests what lies beneath.
Your patience when results are delayed.
Your resilience when plans collapse.
Your integrity when shortcuts are tempting.
Your humility when success arrives.
The hidden foundations shape the visible outcomes.
In my life, this insight has reshaped everything.
I used to think growth was about adding more features to myself. More skills. More wins. More impressive edges to my iceberg tip.
But now I realize: Growth is digging deeper. Strengthening what no one sees.
The beliefs that anchor me when everything feels meaningless.
The mental models that guide decisions in ambiguity.
The emotional self-regulation that prevents collateral damage in anger or fear.
The unspoken commitments to people I love, honoured even when no one is keeping score.
Anyone can design for applause.
Few design for reality. But it is in reality that life happens.
If your systems, your teams, your products, or your life itself collapses under stress, it doesn’t matter how beautiful the surface was. Users leave. Teams burn out. Relationships fracture. Dreams die.
The iceberg analogy isn’t a design cliché. It is a life principle.
Features sell demos.
Infrastructure keeps customers.
Systems thinking scales products.
But beneath it all:
Invisible truths shape visible outcomes.
Hidden foundations shape visible lives.
The parts no one sees are what keep your systems alive.
The parts no one sees are what keep you alive.
Design for reality.
Because only in reality does anything true endure.