Design talent is a distraction

Why does design need to be in the boardroom when it can occasionally run the boardroom? Why aren’t there at least a few more designers running Fortune 500 companies? I don’t have an answer for that, but I do know a couple things: I think of myself maybe as a designer, but I’m not a designer the way most of you are, but I designed our business model... See more

On the other hand, design could also become a commodity. Designers will tend to disappear or remain a high end job that you will find only in large organisations or in certain categories where design matters.

the design field (digital or otherwise) has struggled for decades to achieve an invisible, and dare I say, imaginary seat at the table. In our efforts to get business to take us seriously, we have distorted the true value of design, which is what makes it unique in the first place. The true value of design, however, was never to find a single solut... See more

On the one hand, design could become one of the few key differentiators in product building and every team with more than 10 employees will have in-house designers.

Design is hope made visible.

You can live your life as the result of history and what came before, or you can live your life as the cause of what’s to come. You choose.

When talent doesn’t hustle, hustle beats talent. But when talent hustles, watch out.

When you work only for money, without any love for what you do in and of itself, your work will lac... See more

Collapse the talent stack every chance you get . As I reflect on the teams I’ve led and hundreds of start-ups I’ve worked with, there is a consistent unfair competitive advantage i’ve witnessed when the talent stack was collapsed - when the lead designer was also the product leader, when the front-end engineer was also a designer, when the designer... See more

Designers are taught that their job is to represent the people who will use our products. We "empathize" with them and put their needs at the center of our decision-making process. As companies scale up, their priorities and incentives become less and less aligned with the people using their products. Bad things happen as we stop solving people pro... See more

And though it's useful to be able to tell them apart, design is about strategic and tactical work happening together. At the heart of many stubborn design projects and unimpressive outcomes are people coming in with an incompatible mental models; overplaying strategy or tactics, and neglecting the other.