What’s left for design?
Why Designers should become Product Managers
Something has been happening in the tech industry for a few years. A subconscious land-grab and slow, steady descent into a world where design isn’t done by designers. A systematic down-skilling of the entire profession.
For a long time, probably, design has been in a tug-of-war between a technical problem-solving profession and an artistic and creative pursuit of aesthetics. Obviously the two go hand in hand but still there’s a continuous discussion about what design really means.
In fact there’s a kind of technicalisation of design, a move away from defining and closer to assembling the building blocks. Maybe this is a by-product of the reskilling of another profession — the full stack developer. Who of course can exist, but in reality that usually means deprioritising front-end. A job slowly becoming a designer’s responsibility. See the evolution of figma, the popularity of tools like framer and webflow.
But while this has been going on, so has something much more interesting and, depending on your point of view, worrying. I’m not sure where it started (I have my suspicions, but that’s a conversation to have in a darkened room out of prying eyes and eavesdropping ears).
That is the democratisation of design. On the surface that doesn’t sound like a terrible idea. Upskill people to be able to make design decisions, empower non-design people to be involved in the creative process. Sounds great. Solves a lot of headaches. But it also devalues the nuanced skill or ability to solve problems at a creative level.
Delivering services is a team sport. Most of us have moved on from “I’ve done my job, so you do yours, then they can do theirs” and now, ideally, we all do what needs to be done for the greater goal.
So where are those skills going?
Producting our way out of design
I am a designer by trade. But over the past 5 years I’ve spent more and more of that time working in design management or product roles. Taking my first PM role felt weird. I wouldn’t identify myself as a product manager, but actually over that time what i recognised was that the things I had missed as a designer I was doing as a PM.
I was making decisions about what users need to achieve their goals, I was prioritising them, I was sketching them and articulating it. The only thing I wasn’t doing was laying it out in a design tool. Making the aesthetic decisions. But then those were things that I was contributing to and signing off. Which at least for my team was comfortable, i hope, given my background.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with some excellent product managers in my career. But I have never met a designer without a PM horror-story. Usually someone taking up a seat and stealing credit for a designer’s hard work.
But in reality designers are less and less empowered to actually make those impactful decisions.
At this point it’s probably fair to say that I’m talking about design at scale in large organisations. Things are more than likely different for smaller businesses and boutique designers. I personally know people who design and build amazing looking websites themselves and never work with PMs. But let’s face it: the money and the stability are in big organisations and the structures and problems that come with them.
It is a Product Managers role to plan. To think about a roadmap. To communicate with stakeholders and teams to give them cover to do a good job. But more and more it feels like, at least in my experience, that means removing big decisions in favour of freeing someone up to “do the pictures”. That’s not to belittle the visual design of a product but we’ve all grown up in an industry that touts “form follows function”. Meaning, what the thing looks like is not as important as what it is or how it works.
The result is a working pattern that is telling designers “no no, this is my decision to make and it’s more important than the work that you’re going to do”. Yes, simplified, but also the reality.
This isn’t an attack on Product as a discipline. It’s an important one. As a designer I don’t want to plan the roll out of a huge piece of technology. But I do want to be present if not responsible for how we solve a user’s problem.
A good PM that is doing their job, and a good designer that is doing their job, are two sides of one coin. One structures, and plans, and prioritisies, the other explores and defines. A PM will distill research and discovery into practical tools that a designer can explore. Then together they can decide what comes first.
If a team is built up of segments of a dial, that dial has shifted. Which is fair and entirely understandable. But I want to advocate, not for turning the dial back, but for reassessing what those segments are.
The solution? I think designers need to explore Product Management as a career move. Not everyone wants to manage people but I don’t think that senior IC levels are the only solution. Maybe they are to some, but there needs to be another viable option.
Again, no beef with technical product managers or those that chose product management as a career on day one, but why not designers. Why not see product as an extension of design, and not a counterpart?
It’s easier said than done. I know. But growth isn’t easy. It doens’t mean hanging up your design chops, it means understanding that our role as designers has changed. If we want to keep that seat at the table and to be understood as more than people who make rectangles on bigger rectangles then why not join them, because we’re never going to beat them.
So what is left for design?
Honestly? Not much, if you ask me. The over componentisation and this shift to remove big decisions from designers isn’t going to end. And with AI improving and tools getting more powerful the more menial tasks of design will be out of the window too.
What will be left?
Hopefully a creative and design led product industry. Or at least better representation.