Validating Financial Products with Sacrificial Concepts and Sean Dekkers | Episode #44

Sean Dekkers combines engineering, computer science, visual effects, storytelling, and product design. His early creative work included 2D and 3D production, compositing, storyboards, animation, simulations, art direction, and other techniques required by film and advertising projects. He later developed a more formal approach to design through work at IDEO and McKinsey, followed by roles at Google, Visa, and Digits.

At Digits, Sean led product design for financial tools at the intersection of small and medium-sized businesses and accountants. He spent much of his time talking with business owners and accounting professionals, identifying recurring daily problems, and working with experienced engineers on possible solutions. In this episode, he describes a product discovery process built around listening, intentionally disposable concepts, repeated testing, and gradual increases in fidelity.

What you'll learn

• Why storytelling can be as important as interface polish during early product work

• How sacrificial concepts help teams test a direction without defending a finished design

• Why Digits moved from broad interviews to sketches, prototypes, and eventual implementation

• How desirability, business viability, and delight play different roles in a product

• Why Sean speaks with at least 20 people before beginning a design project

Communicate the product before building it

Sean still uses skills from visual effects in product design. He creates product demos in video form with voiceover because a clear story can help secure funding, build team support, and make an early idea understandable. Illustration, 3D tools, and motion are not decoration when they clarify how a proposed experience works.

His career also changed how he defines design. At IDEO, he moved from seeing the designer primarily as a maker of attractive objects to seeing the role as a miner for solvable problems. He describes that search as an academic process that aims for consistency, clearer results, and less bias. McKinsey added a focus on whether the idea can sustain itself economically. Earlier visual-effects skills contribute polish and delight after the problem and business model are credible.

The order is important. Delight cannot rescue a product that does not solve a meaningful problem. Once the underlying solution makes users happy, color, motion, and other expressive choices have a stronger foundation.

Learn with sacrificial concepts

Digits begins broadly. The team talks with many users about the hardest parts of their day and what they would change with a magic wand. Once patterns emerge, designers create sacrificial concepts: low-fidelity product sketches, grayscale click-through mockups, or storyboards intended to provoke a useful response rather than prove that the team already has the answer.

Participants can rate how likely they would be to use a concept on a scale from zero to 10. Sean says the team repeats these conversations across a couple hundred calls, compares the response to different concepts, and doubles down on the stronger directions. Each week, the selected ideas gain fidelity until they become functional prototypes that resemble the intended product.

Only after the team develops substantial confidence that a concept addresses the chosen problem does engineering build it. Several products can move through this process at the same time, which lets Digits explore multiple opportunities without committing full implementation resources to every initial idea.

A sacrificial concept works because its roughness is intentional. If the team invests too much polish before learning, criticism can feel like waste and designers may defend the artifact. A disposable sketch keeps attention on the problem, the response, and what should change next.

Replace certainty with active listening

Sean identifies listening as a skill he had to develop. Earlier in his career, he was more likely to believe he already knew the answer. Now he spends much of his day listening intently and actively finding people who can explain the problem. He will not start a design project until he feels well versed in the space and has spoken with at least 20 people.

That threshold is not presented as universal statistical proof. It is a discipline that prevents him from beginning with only his own assumptions. The broader discovery process then adds hundreds of reactions to emerging concepts, so confidence grows through repeated contact rather than a single persuasive interview.

Finance gives the team room to create delight because many established experiences set a modest baseline, but Sean still insists on solving the core problem first. The team can generate many possible ways to make an interaction enjoyable and explore influences from other products. Relentless ideation is useful after listening has established what deserves attention.

The lesson for product teams is to separate expertise from certainty. Sean's broad toolkit helps him express, test, and refine ideas, but it does not give him permission to skip the people living with the problem.

Listen to Episode #44 for Sean's full conversation with Dwayne Samuels.