Digital Products and the Places They Don’t Reach

I’ve spent most of my career working on digital platforms: scaling, simplifying, re-platforming, rethinking. The work is often complex, layered with legacy and ambition.

But in the past year, I’ve been spending more time in places where the language of “platforms” barely lands. Towns with no Uber. Shaky Telstra reception. Where a “user journey” means a dirt road after rain.

And it’s made me realise—so many of our product assumptions are built for lives we don’t live.

We design for the over-connected. We optimise for convenience. We chase frictionless futures that make sense on a whiteboard in the city but falter in the regions, in the real.

I’m not writing this to romanticise slowness or to bash big tech. I’ve helped build plenty of it. But I do wonder what would change if we brought product thinking into places that need something deeper than an app.

What would it look like to design:

• Digital tools that build resilience, not just scale?

• Platforms that help local economies thrive—not just extract value from them?

• Interfaces that respect people’s time, literacy, and context?

I think that’s the frontier we’re heading toward. Not just “AI for good” or “GovTech” or the next cohort of civic startups. But a reimagining of who our products are for—and how far we’re willing to walk with them.

And maybe, just maybe, the future of digital isn’t found in the cloud, but in the places we thought were offline.