I would argue that those companies are as successful as they are because they have designers that are focusing more on what those businesses need than on how perfect every pixel is going to look.

I’d argue that one of the fundamental roles of a designer is to focus on the needs of theirs users toward the end of solving meaningful problems that impact those users.

To suggest that Google is as successful as it is today because its designers focused on business needs seems especially foolhardy. Google’s early designers were largely technical and needed to be so to be successful in a company that was so engineering driven.

Designers who code employee their technical knowledge in order to ship their designs faster, better communicate with the engineering teams with which they are partnered, and also in order to understand the technical limitations of the space in which they are designing.

I’m completely for designers better understanding the businesses they work for and the users they are designing for. I’d argue a designer couldn’t really be successful without that knowledge. To suggest however that understanding how to code and understanding user and business needs are in competition with one another and that focusing on one precludes the other seems patently false.