Don’t worry, I am not mad at you…

Design distills business requirements and customer needs, synthesizing them with technical capabilities and constraints, then filtering that through usability and aesthetics, to manifest a cohesive solution that is feasible, viable, and desirable increasing the overall value to both the business and the customers.

At any point in the last twenty years, if you have read or listened to anything from designers about the practice of design, that should sound all too familiar.

But do you believe it?

Do you think that design creates value? Or makes products better? Does design impact top-line revenue?

Now, ask yourself those same question again, but this time instead of design, ask them about engineering, product management, and marketing: Do you believe those professions create value? make products better? impact top-line revenue?

After talking to hundreds of people face to face about this, I would bet that you agree value creation, quality, and revenue are impacted by engineering, product management, and marketing. But, while you may have worked with a designer or two who contributed to a product’s success, generally speaking, you’re not clear how (or if) the profession of design really impacts value, quality, or top line growth.

Don’t worry, I won’t get mad at you if that’s the case: you see, I am blame the profession of design.

The act of design (little d) is to take abstract ideas, things like business strategies and customer requirements, and turn them into something tangible; transforming ideas into artifacts that can be held, touched, and experienced. These artifacts represent one or more potential futures, that in turn can be evaluated against each other and the desired outcomes. Allowing for rapid iterations to both the artifacts and even the strategies. Design plays the same role with technology, creating prototypes that demonstrate the capabilities within a range of contexts that are safe and ensure the technology’s successful adoption; Changing the technology from merely feasible to something desirable and highly useful.

Not unlike unlike the “many worlds” interpretation of Schr?dinger's thought experiment, business strategies and technologies are both full of infinite possibilities, design opens the box; Design determines the deposition of the potential. But unlike Schr?dinger, the same box can be opened a thousand times by a thousand different people with a thousand different results. Take GenAI, everyone has their box, and they want their box to contain the prize; that is their cat is not only alive but its the best damned cat you have ever seen. While all of these boxes contain the same potential, it is only by opening the box—that is designing the specific solution, that the fate of their efforts is determined.

Here is the tricky part; do you need a designer — that is, do you need someone who is professionally trained as a designer, to do that? To open the box? To design your solution? No. But then you also don’t need a professional product manager to manage and sell what comes out of that box. Nor do you need an professional engineer to write the software for what comes out. Those things can be done by anyone with a passion and access to the internet, just like design. And yet, for a CEO, the idea of someone writing code who is not a trained developer is inconceivable. Likewise, having someone not officially designated as a product manager, manage what is pulled from that box, is frankly seen as irresponsible. And yet, the design—that transformation point from potential to reality, from idea to value, is most often left to whomever opens the box rather than a professional.

And that brings us to why I blame the design profession.

The profession of design has done very little to create a preconception about design beyond the superficial, ensuring that CEOs never consider allowing someone who is not a professionally trained designer to open the box, to determine the deposition of it contents. While an argument exists that it is the person and not the role, the fact is there is a strong pervasive, preconception of which roles deliver value and which do not. (Check your answers above.) It is that shared preconception that determines hiring priorities, project staffing, development processes—but more importantly it determines who is there when the box is opened. And design as a profession has done very little to ensure it is an invaluable member of that cohort.

And because they are there, engineering, product management, and marketing, not only determine the fate of the box’s contents, they define how things will proceed, the processes for applying their skills and experience, and defining success and metrics by which their efforts will be assessed. And without design’s being there at the moment of determination, its contribution—and the evaluation of that effort, is defined by others.

So then what is holding design back? What is keeping design from being part of the cohort that opens the box? Indeed why is design not opening the box? Here is a hint: I don’t think its the other folks in the cohort… I think its us. I think design needs better leadership, better self awareness, and a lot more self-respect.