Have Product Leaders Cut Designers Out of the Design Process?

Have Product Leaders Cut Designers Out of the Design Process?

The Problem

Sounds strange but it happens all the time.

Most Product Leaders may not even know this is happening or may have inadvertently created a process where this happens.

In corporations, there’s a tendency towards silos where they pool designers into design groups or worse internal design agencies. They assign designers to products and features using the just-in-time process used in car manufacturing. Sometimes they call this a “center of excellence” model but it doesn’t produce excellent products. The output suffers from the “Game of Operator” where downstream participants create a different product than the one the initiators wanted.

Startups have a different problem. They tend to have CEOs and Product Managers with strongly held opinions who employ designers solely to visualize out their ideas. These top down solutions evoke the philosophy of “build it and they will come.” But no one comes and the eventual iteration cycles are spent in engineering where it is most costly.

These bad behaviors stem from a definition of design that is too narrow. And from a belief that design can be applied at the end like painting a room. (What if you let designers help you shape the room?)

So how do you expand the design process to involve designers sooner and more often?

The Solution

The solution is collaboration. But...the solution is not just solving the problem together. The solution is learning about the problem together. 

When the Designer learns directly from business owners about the business needs, they feel the pain that the business feels. When the designer learns directly from users about the customer problem, they feel the pain that the customer feels. When the designer researches competitive solutions and experiences new technologies directly, they feel the potential for opportunity directly.

This is called developing context. And when you develop context in your designer, you don’t need to write down as much (which saves time). You don’t spend so much time explaining your thinking since you both learned the context together. You get more productivity since the designer has contributed to the idea itself, not just the execution. You get another point of view from a valuable employee which makes the end result better.

If you haven’t developed context in a while, note that it will take several design cycles to develop the trust and muscle memory so that your designer will volunteer opinions. And it may take several cycles to develop insights from this growing context.

Some Product Managers do so much deep thinking on their own that their designers and engineers can’t participate on even intellectual ground. This type of Product Manager may think that the ideas from the team are not relevant enough. This can be fixed.

The transition period as you develop context is when you go slow to go fast. It doesn’t last long (a few weeks) and the positive effects last months.

The Pitfalls

Note that more collaboration has some negative side effects to look out for. For one, collaborative groups should challenge each other’s thinking more often. These discussions will be deeper than color choices and button placements. 

This could lead to interpersonal disagreements and arguments that create bad feelings. For Product Leaders, the key is to be aware of this and facilitate discussions to keep teams focused on problems and customers. 

One tip is to spot when conversations devolve into “me vs you” debates about whether my solution is better than yours. Healthy discussions stick to the business need, the problem at hand and the customer who is affected. This is referred to as Discovery Framing (a topic for another day). With great framing of the problem, teams can make decisions using a framework and not rely on their personal sales (or bullying) skills.

Another negative effect is more perception than reality. This is the belief that using designer time upfront in the design process will take too much time. In the end, the designer will have to ask all of these questions and develop context anyways. So why do it the hard way by always trying to catch up. Why not do this work up front and together so that there’s less rework and churn.

There is also the persistent underinvestment that many companies make in design. They start with engineers, layer in Product Managers and then try to split very few designers across too many teams.

The Joy

So invest in design. Bring your designers out of the silo. Pair them up with a Product Manager at the start of every product discussion.

And coach your designers to develop a point of view. Give them the space to influence the product direction, not just the visuals. And do this before you start the coding.

You’ll prevent wasted time and engineering rework. And in the process you’ll turn your designers from hired hands to business owners creating much better products that produce much better outcomes.