Nice article Joshua Taylor — I would suggest that to be most helpful to a business designers need to understand both, coding & business. It is exactly by understanding how your input & output work, where & how they will be used, that you can “design for success”.

Knowing how developers will implement your designs and designing to make their job easy to match your output, to be efficient in transfer over network is just as critical as understanding the business why for products and features.

This applies to all roles — not just designers. A good CTO will understand everything about dev, ops, QA, but also marketing & sales and other business functions.

A good CMO will need to understand marketing, but also sales, product, design & business functions.

The more of these individuals a company has that understand how each other work & what they need to be successful, the better the company will do.

Just my 2¢…