If Everyone’s Using AI, What Actually Makes Your Product Different? Lazarev.agency Suggests A New Product Experience Design Concept
Every startup is now “AI-powered.” Every product page promises intelligence, automation, and personalization. The problem is when everyone uses the same technology, the technology stops being a differentiator.
If your product can be replicated in weeks using Cursor, V0, or any other rapid development tool, what’s stopping competitors from copying your entire value proposition before your Series A pitch?
The answer is a better experience design.
At AI INFRA Summit 2025, Kirill Lazarev, founder of digital product design agency Lazarev.agency, introduced a framework that addresses this exact problem: product experience design built on three layers — Data + Needs + UI.
This is about designing products users actually trust and remember in a market flooded with AI noise.
Forget the old playbook, it doesn’t work
There was a time when launching a startup meant assembling a team of six developers, securing VC funding, and committing to six months of intense development. Going to market took months, sometimes years. You iterated slowly. Big tech moved even slower. Startups played a simple game: build something functional and sell it to legacy companies too sluggish to innovate themselves.
Back then, users expected one “aha moment” per product. They arrived with a clear problem, used your product, thought “Okay, this solves my issue,” and were ready to pay. That moment of recognized value, value divided by cost, was the bare minimum everyone focused on.
Today, that’s insufficient.
Tools like V0 let people with zero experience build working prototypes in hours. Cursor functions like having 10 developers on your team. Product creation is faster, iterations are quicker, and time to market has collapsed.
Users trust you less. Easier access means more noise. More products means more skepticism. Functionality alone no longer earns confidence.
Because users arrive with expectations you didn’t set
We wake up every morning with expectations. What the day will look like. What we’ll experience. What others expect from us. Our lives are built on these expectations. They shape our decisions and guide how we navigate every interaction.
Users approach your product the same way. They arrive with pre-set expectations shaped by what they’ve seen, heard, or used before. These expectations are deeply rooted, and they determine how users perceive value before they even click a button.
This is critical: users come to your product with preconceived perceptions and expectations. These shape their entire experience before they start using it.
If your product feels generic, looks like every other AI tool, or behaves exactly like ChatGPT with a different logo, users will dismiss it. Not because it doesn’t work. Because it doesn’t feel different.
So, what is product experience design?
Lazarev.agency has developed a digital product design framework called product experience design. It consists of three layers that work together to create trust, engagement, and loyalty.
1. AI as the core
AI can’t be an afterthought. It must be embedded into the core of your decision-making, product logic, and experience delivery.
Most teams treat AI like a feature. They add a chatbot or a recommendation engine and call it transformation. That’s surface-level integration, and users can tell.
AI-first products are built differently. The entire experience assumes AI is handling context, adapting to behavior, and anticipating needs.
2. Mapping all pain points
Previously, teams zoomed in on solving one core pain point. The problem that brought users through the door. That’s no longer enough.
Today’s product experience must anticipate all the pain points a user may face throughout their journey. Every friction point, every moment of confusion, every decision that requires cognitive load.
This requires mapping the full user journey. Understanding where users hesitate, where they abandon workflows, where they need reassurance. Then designing solutions for those moments before users even encounter them.
3. By the default settings
Personalization used to be a nice-to-have feature. Now it’s expected by default.
With access to massive amounts of user data, your product will be judged on whether it:
Adjusts itself to the user in real time
Communicates through intelligent AI agents
Shares data across apps to provide a seamless experience
Why you need to use the Data + Needs + UI framework
Building great products is about the intersection of tech stack, the user interface, UX, and branding.
Lazarev.agency calls this framework Data + Needs + UI:
Data layer: Pre-customized for each user. The product already understands context, history, preferences, and behavior patterns before the user arrives.
Needs layer: Maps every pain point across the entire user journey. Not just the primary use case, but every secondary friction that could break trust or cause abandonment.
UI layer: The interface that brings it all together. Functional, intuitive, anticipatory, and emotionally resonant.
At Lazarev.agency, we’ve been working with AI since 2017, long before it became a trend. Our in-house expertise with GPT-based models and AI integrations powers dashboards, personalizes experiences, automates functionality, and generates insights. Every product we design reflects data-driven thinking.
Remember: AI won’t fix a generic product
If your AI product feels like every other AI product, users won’t care how sophisticated your model is. They’ll move on to something that feels built for them.
The future of the market leaders are those who design the best experience around it.
That requires understanding user expectations before they articulate them. Mapping pain points across the entire journey. Building personalization by default. And integrating AI as the foundation.
This is product experience design. And it’s what separates products that survive from products that scale.
About Lazarev.agency
Lazarev.agency is a San Francisco Bay Area digital product design studio that blends AI UX, deep research, and polished product strategy to help startups and enterprises launch smarter, faster, and more scalable products. With 120+ global awards and $500M+ raised by clients, we design interfaces that clarify complexity, drive adoption, and unlock real growth.
