Most digital products claim to be “user-centric.”
They talk about empathy.
They optimize for experience.
They promise to “put users first.”
And yet, interacting with many of them feels less like being respected — and more like being managed.
Not helped.
Not empowered.
Managed.
Respect assumes agency. Management assumes compliance
The difference is subtle, but important.
To respect a user means:
- assuming they understand their goals
- trusting them to make decisions
- giving them room to act — and to leave
To manage a user means something else:
- steering behavior
- reducing choice
- guiding outcomes while preserving the illusion of control
This starts to feel familiar once you begin to design products with exit in mind, like we discussed in Designing for Exit Instead of Retention. Respect assumes users can choose to finish and move on. Management assumes they will stay.
Control disguised as care
User management rarely looks aggressive.
It shows up as:
- “helpful” nudges
- default settings that are hard to change
- friction placed only on exits
- constant reminders framed as support
Individually, these things seem reasonable. Even caring.
Collectively, they form a system that assumes the product knows better than the user — and acts on that assumption continuously.
This pattern becomes especially clear when you look at how retention metrics can subtly push teams toward interface choices that keep users there even when they don’t need to be — a dynamic we explored in Why App Retention Metrics Encourage Dark Patterns.
That’s not malicious design. It’s incentive-driven design.
When products optimize behavior instead of value
Many modern products are optimized to shape what users do, not to help them accomplish what they want.
That shift is often invisible, because it hides behind metrics:
- retention
- engagement
- frequency
- time spent
Once those numbers dominate conversations, design decisions follow.
At that point, the product stops serving the user’s goals and starts serving its own.
This is where product thinking intersects with deeper questions about autonomy and trust: trust isn’t just sentiment or transparency, it’s about how the system treats users when outcomes are ambiguous or costly. That was the heart of our exploration in What We Mean by “User Trust” (And What We Don’t).
When a design assumes the product knows better than the person using it, respect fades. What’s left is management.
Management scales better than respect
Respect is contextual.
Management is systematic.
At small scale, teams can afford nuance. They know their users. They respond individually.
At large scale, nuance is expensive.
So products replace judgment with systems:
- rules instead of conversations
- flows instead of choice
- automation instead of accountability
Management scales. Respect doesn’t — unless it’s deliberately designed into the system.
Trust erodes when users notice the pattern
Users may not articulate it immediately, but they feel it.
They sense when:
- choices are being guided
- exits are discouraged
- defaults favor the product, not them
Over time, this creates distance. Not anger — resignation.
And once users feel managed rather than respected, trust quietly disappears. They don’t complain. They disengage.
That slow fade is not a metric failure. It’s a design failure.
Respect is a design constraint
Respect isn’t a tone of voice or a UX buzzword.
It’s a constraint.
It shows up in what a product refuses to do:
- refusing to obscure exits
- refusing to overload users with prompts
- refusing to treat attention as a resource to be captured
Products that respect users are comfortable with users leaving. They assume that if they did their job well, users will come back — by choice.
Designing for exit isn’t just a philosophical stance — it’s a practical constraint that keeps products honest.
Most products aren’t built this way
That’s the uncomfortable part.
Managing users is easier than respecting them.
It’s measurable.
It aligns with growth incentives.
It feels safe in dashboards.
But products built around management inevitably lose something: credibility.
They may grow.
They may retain.
But they stop being trusted.
And in the long run, trust is harder to recover than any metric is to inflate.