Build for Belonging.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve taken on fractional product leadership roles in the fitness space. I helped launch Final Surge 2.0, which connects structured training plans with Garmin and Apple users. I’ve been partnering with Wylder to help Race Directors and Running Influencers build communities that go deeper than a like or emoji comment.
Both of these apps do something I love—they are a digital organizer for co-located physical experiences.
Final Surge is a coaching app in which the most prolific users are coaching teams of runners in real life. The app is the conduit of information for the runner and the coach to optimize their performance both in training and on race day.
Wylder is an app for groups, clubs, brands, and influencers who want to chat, compete, and coordinate online for offline group runs and meetups, #IRL. Examples include: the coordination of a group run in the Salt Lake City foothills with filmmaker and Ultra runner Billy Yang with a live podcast recording after the run, as well as a group run coordinated by Tommy Lewis, of thatsrunnable.com in London, England, with a pint and conversation post run through Hampstead Heath.
Of all the apps I've delivered over the past 18 years of work, the best ones create space. Space for people to show up. Space for shared purpose. Space to move forward, together.
That’s what belonging looks like.
Interdigital Belonging
Let’s get philosophical for a moment.
Digital is dead, or at least the version of it that lived inside a single screen. What’s replaced it is something more ambient, more personal. When a disease is localized, it’s called an epidemic. When it becomes embedded in the system, it’s endemic. The same logic applies to the evolution of digital technology.
What began as a localized experience, tied to a single device or app, morphed through the power of Moore’s law, cloud infrastructure expansion, platform-agnostic services, and interoperable APIs. Growth to the point where digital experiences can now outlive any specific hardware.
Digital has become endemic to our environment.
We don’t just use digital tools anymore; we integrate them. We carry them with us across contexts, across states of being. They move with us from screen to skin to speech. This is what I mean by interdigital. Digital is no longer a separate experience; it is layer-by-layer stitched into the fabric of our lives. It extends our reach, our creativity, our memory, and our expression, and in that integration lies both danger and opportunity.
On one end of the spectrum, we’ve seen what happens when digital experiences are absorbed and create an addiction. Corporations have built revenue systems dependent on engagement, where the rate of dopamine release becomes the core KPI (Key Performance Indicator). The more a product can stimulate, the more it can monetize. The result is a slow erosion of our humanity by platforms that reward narcissism, amplify noise, and turn constant, shallow self-expression into the norm.
But what if we flipped that?
What if, instead of designing for more likes, more content, and more notifications, we designed for belonging? What if we simplified the inputs? What if we reduced the noise? What if we used digital infrastructure not to centralize attention, but to decentralize identity, and reconnect people to the real-world communities around them?
When I say “decentralized identity,” I don’t mean anonymity or fragmentation. I mean freeing people from the burden of being one version of themselves across every platform. Letting people be coaches in one place, creators in another, neighbors in a third—without collapsing all those roles into a single feed or profile. Identity, at its best, is relational. It’s contextual. It lives in the interplay between people, place, product, and purpose.
I believe great product design has and should honor that.
LinkedIn is an interesting case. If there’s one platform I’ve stayed consistently present on, it’s LinkedIn. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter/X have all been moved off of my phone, but LinkedIn persists. And in some ways, it’s become a trap.
On LinkedIn, I’ve felt the pressure to show up as The Professional. Not The Artist. Not The Human. Just Business Sam.™
Buttoned up, well-positioned, leadership-forward, appropriately vanilla, and I’ve had valid reasons to assume this posture. But lately, I’ve been reclaiming my voice. Being more open, more personal, and more honest. I realized I’d compartmentalized my identity on this platform so tightly that I was no longer bringing my whole self to the table.
That’s the danger. Decentralization, when cut off from coherence, becomes compartmentalization, severing the connective tissue between our roles. It’s like a body where the limbs all move, but none of them know where the head is going.
So yes, we need to decentralize identity, but not lose ourselves in the process. Sam the neighbor, co-worker, instagrammer, and father, though very distinct in their positions, should have a golden thread of what makes Sam, well, Sam. This isn’t Severance; we cannot be fragmented into isolated roles that never speak to each other. What we’re after is integration, not performance. Identity that adapts, not identity that splinters.
A more professional Sam on LinkedIn can be very different than the artist Sam on Instagram, or the Dad Sam at home… but if we are too different, we’ve lost ourselves in the process.
Designing for perpetual attention pushes us toward the performative, and the performative pushes us past decentralization of identity into compartmentalization of our disparate selves.
We are the actor, becoming someone else to play ourselves.
A healthy decentralized identity can live outside of digital space without being addicted to it. That’s why I love the idea proposed at the end of Ready Player One, where High-5, the clan in charge of the Oasis, introduces intentional disappearance: every Tuesday, the Oasis shuts down. Users are forced to figure out how to live through experience, not for it.
Building intentional disappearance into our product philosophy isn’t just a UX decision. It’s ethical. Maybe even spiritual. It echoes the ancient idea of Sabbath, a time when performance ceases, and presence returns. One day a week not to be optimized, productive, or public, but to be fully, quietly, and authentically human.
Lowry Pressly, in The Right to Oblivion, reframes privacy as “the right to be unknown rather than a right to control what is known.”
Philosopher Lowry Pressly calls this the right to be unknown, not just the right to control your information, but the right to “protect your own unknowability.”1 That’s the missing layer of belonging. In a world where everything is tracked, surfaced, and flattened into content, oblivion is resistance. It is room to breathe.
Belonging needs connection, yes, but it also needs privacy. It needs public intimacy and private depth. It needs presence and silence. We can’t build meaningful digital experiences if we never let people step away, recover, or be incomplete. Designing for belonging means creating systems that say: we see you, we trust you, even in the parts you don’t show us.
If belonging is being known, we must first know ourselves in the unknown.
A personal reflection.
One of the things I fear most as a parent is the hidden curriculum I’m teaching my kids about technology. Hidden curriculum is what’s taught implicitly, not in what we say, but in what we signal. I give my kids phones, and the youngest an Apple Watch, and I say, “Take it with you so I can contact you.” But what I’m also saying is: I don’t trust you to be on your own. I don’t trust the world to be safe unless I can reach you.
The hidden lesson: it is not okay/safe to be unreachable.
That’s a sharp contrast to the way I grew up. From fourth grade to graduation, I lived on a farm five miles outside a one-stoplight town. My parents worked, so I had thousands of hours to myself. No phone. No way to be contacted. No one was tracking where I was. Just me and the wide unknown. In grad school, working in Colorado, I’d take days off and go hiking in the San Juans alone, camping with no signal and no backup plan. The parent in me looks back on that and shudders. But I also know that it was in the unknown—in the oblivion—that I discovered who I was.
Who I am when no one is watching.
That’s what we’re losing in a pervasive virtual culture. Not just attention, but privacy—the kind of aloneness (boredom) that allows identity to form without a constant audience. This isn’t a rejection of technology; it is a reframing of the responsibility that builders of these experiences need to be held accountable for.
If the last twenty years are known for platforms that reward volume, maybe the next twenty years should be focused on apps that reward meaning.
Some of my favorite apps that I’ve used or produced don’t steal your focus. They give it back. They act as connective tissue, not center stage.
The future of Digital Product isn’t virtual. It’s more interdigital.
More integrated.
More grounded.
More human.
We don’t need more features. We need better rhythms. Smarter platforms that introduce the possibility of a deeper connection, not dopamine spikes and viral hits. Belonging isn’t about building yet another virtual destination; we have plenty of those. It is about creating space for people to find their way back to each other by means of digital connections, virtual meetups, as well as physical presence. We can’t continue to build for clicks funded by ads and call it progress.
If capitalism remains the only lens through which we build, then we’re truly sunk.
We’ve narrowed the idea of “shareholder value” to mean little more than increasing margins and revenue. But as I’ve argued throughout this manifesto, that approach is neither sustainable nor holistic. Capitalism is an economic framework, not a moral compass, not a societal blueprint. We have to find ways to increase the bottom line without resorting to bottom-level tactics.
And yet, we see it every day. Local news sites are clogged with clickbait and fake “sponsored” ads. By continuing this practice of shoving ads, disguised as news, into your feeds, you’ve eroded all semblance of trust with the users you intend to reach. When you manipulate headlines to boost engagement, don’t you understand that bait and switch just produces a wary user base? Why are we polluting journalism with disparate and seemingly desperate content?
When everything is optimized for attention, you punch a hole in truth, and it’s our trust in the system that seeps out.
Belonging doesn’t grow in that kind of environment. Belonging requires trust. It requires care. It requires an ethic that runs deeper than revenue projections and quarterly quotas.
Yes, belonging is hard to measure. It won’t always show up in your OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) or your Google Analytics dashboard. But when it’s missing, your product feels untruthful—hollowed out. No matter how fast you’re adding users, you’re losing them just as quickly through the back door. And attrition? That’s the easiest number to omit when building out those reports. Presentation theatre, is what I’ve called it in previous jobs, where growth is measured only by what gets added, not what quietly slips away.
Growth measured by addition will always lie. What we omit tells the real story.
All this to say.
I want to build products that invite people in and make them want to stay, not because we tricked them, but because we saw them.
- The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life by Lowry Pressly. https://bookshop.org/a/114321/9780674260528