The ‘Learned to Drive Before 2000’ Toggle: A Lesson in User-Centered Product Design

While traveling last week, I had an experience with a rental car that got me thinking about the role of Product Managers in shaping user experience. Product Managers aren’t designers, but they play a critical role in ensuring that the product experience reinforces core values, aligns with the needs of target customers, and ultimately drives product success. At the end of the day, Product Managers are measured by adoption—whether that's user growth, conversion rates, revenue, or Net Promoter Score (NPS). They are responsible for every aspect of how a customer engages with the product; including pricing strategy, ease of purchase, competitive feature parity, innovation, and overall usability.

Many Product Managers are quick to point to their experience design or UX teams as the owners of usability. But what happens when your organization doesn’t have a dedicated team for research and design? The responsibility doesn’t disappear—it shifts. As a Product Manager, you’re the CEO of your product. That means you own the full experience, whether or not there’s a specialist team in place. When resources are limited, it’s on you to advocate for the customer, understand their friction points, and ensure the product is intuitive and accessible. Usability isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a core driver of adoption.

I’ll leave out the make and model, but what stood out was how surprisingly difficult it was to make the rental car comfortable for me to drive. It took navigating through five different menus—each buried in a different section of the UI—just to disable features that, for me, were more distracting than helpful. Lane alerts, a camera embedded in the rearview mirror, overly sensitive collision warnings in the seat, and a flashy heads-up display all had to be turned off. These features may be well-intentioned, even valuable to some drivers, but for someone who didn’t learn to drive with them, they got in the way. And when you’re just trying to drive a rental 4x4 and look cool doing it, clunky interaction design becomes more than just a nuisance—it undermines the experience.

Now, looking at it through a Product Manager’s lens, there’s no doubt this vehicle was packed with features. I’m sure each one played a role—meeting government safety regulations, improving ease of driving, performing well in third-party safety tests, or supporting marketing claims about how safe the car is. In that sense, the Product Managers did their jobs. I’d also bet that each of those features was owned by a different PM or team. That’s not a flaw—that’s how organizations scale. But while each individual feature and its corresponding disable switch made sense on its own, the collective experience felt disjointed. The overall design lacked cohesion, and that’s where the user experience suffered.

The gap here wasn’t in the features themselves—it was in the lack of perspective on the user. Where the product management fell short was in thinking about individual features, not the broader types of drivers who might use the car. Designing for personas, not just functionality, is what bridges the gap between a feature-rich product and a truly user-friendly one.

For context, I’m a driver shaped by a very different era. I learned to drive around 1996—long before lane departure warnings, collision avoidance systems, or LCD screens embedded in rearview mirrors were a thing. My driving education came from real-world awareness, not tech overlays. My stepmother drilled into me the importance of checking my mirrors, knowing who was around me at all times, and always having an escape route if someone drifted into my lane. Meanwhile, my dad was in the passenger seat, grinding his teeth as I ground the gears on his cherished Ford F100 pickup as I struggled to master “three on the tree.” That’s the foundation of how I understand and experience driving—and it deeply influences how I interact with modern vehicle tech.

My takeaway from this experience - There should be a single toggle labeled “learned to drive before 2000” that automatically adjusts settings to match a more analog driving experience.

I’m not saying every car needs a “pre-2000 driver” mode—but this is the kind of thought process every Product Manager should embrace. It’s about understanding not just your individual product or feature, but how it fits into the broader ecosystem. When multiple features—often owned by different Product Managers—come together, the experience needs to feel intentional and cohesive. It’s the PM’s job to step back and think about how the full product experience lands for different types of user, not just how each piece functions in isolation.

To wrap up, here are some practical takeaways for Product Managers looking to create truly cohesive and user-centered experiences. These principles can help bridge the gap between feature-rich products and ones that users love.

• Design beyond individual features – A feature might make sense on its own, but how does it contribute to (or clutter) the overall experience?
• Account for age in personas – How someone learned to use a product—whether it’s a car or software—shapes how they interact with it today.
• Collaborate across product lines – Talk to the PMs responsible for adjacent features or systems. The user experiences your product as part of a whole, not in silos. Your users do not need to know about your org structure or product taxonomy and it should never manifest in the product experience.
• Stay observant and curious – Inspiration is everywhere. Pay attention to the everyday experiences around you and bring that awareness back to your product work.