Designers, Don’t Underestimate Failure at Work

Experiencing and observing failure at work is highly undervalued skill for a designer to have. It’s priceless to have gained hard-earned professional insight, and almost all expertise and maturity depends on how to manage the risk of failure of all shapes and sizes.

Consider what your response might be to the following situations:

• A development team that’s so focused on project delivery it ignores fundamental errors informed by user testing that requires additional effort to fix
• A massive disconnect between what consumers and providers want, with your product providing value for both audience groups.
• A misalignment between your product and technology leads about priorities and overall objectives for the project
• One’s professional inability to deliver critical design solutions that meet both business and customer needs

You might argue that these are all different things, but they share a common trait of being treated as failures.

It’s easy to dismiss these things as inconveniences, externalities, or problems outside our immediate scope of influence, or dismiss oneself as an outcast or impostor, but I think designers have a unique vantage point from which they can help to unlock value for themselves, with and for others.

However, if a designer to cannot understand the underlying nature of failures, how does one assist in designing solutions for it – across…