Design talent is a distraction

Your organization may not be ready for design, good or bad. Design-aware employees can organize brown-bag lunches and evangelize at the water cooler. Your organization will remain design-resistant unless its leaders think in a goal-directed way about its users (and customers). Consider reading some of the fundamental design books if you're a leader... See more

To design is to make decisions for others. Because it involves an exchange of power, however slight, design is best understood as a moral pursuit.

To avoid feature bloat and ruining the core experience, is your organization capable of sorting through a flood of design ideas and synthesizing and evaluating them holistically? Do you have the development talent and leadership to implement a good design that includes evaluating visual design, usability, and design strategy from an objective and l... See more

Appealing to everyone is impossible. If you make something that aims to be good across a broad range of capabilities, you are choosing not to be exceptional at anything in particular. That might be the right compromise for your audience, but it’s definitely a compromise.

Good design is opinionated. Good design is choosing the right compromise for yo... See more

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

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

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

As I discovered, talent and drive aren’t enough. If anything, talent can make finding ideas feel more daunting because it increases the number of available opportunities.