Member-only story

The Battle Between Shipping and Perfection: A Designer’s Dilemma

Andy Budd
The Design Coach
Published in
4 min readDec 6, 2024

--

Designers, let’s talk about an uncomfortable truth. For many of us, the joy of our craft lies in creating work that is not just functional but exceptional. We love unearthing hidden user insights through research, challenging assumptions, and asking the kinds of questions that lead to elegant, transformative solutions. To us, this feels like the very essence of design: solving the problem in the best way possible. But here’s the rub…

In large organisations, the goal isn’t always to deliver the best thing. It’s often just to deliver something -something that works well enough to ship.

To be fair, this isn’t because stakeholders don’t value quality. It’s because the real challenge in these organisations isn’t perfection-it’s inertia. Projects in big companies are like heavy cargo ships in a busy harbour: it takes immense effort to get them moving, and once they’re underway, steering them in a new direction is slow and difficult. The focus is often on keeping things on course, not necessarily optimising for the best outcome.

Why Perfection Gets Lost in the Shuffle

Let’s zoom out for a moment. In big companies, shipping is not just a step in the process; it’s an Olympic-level feat. Every project competes for attention and resources…

--

--

The Design Coach
The Design Coach

Published in The Design Coach

Moving from designer to design leader is surprisingly hard. In this publication, design founder, speaker and leadership coach—Andy Budd—discusses the challenges of design leadership in all its messy, glorious detail.

Andy Budd
Andy Budd

Written by Andy Budd

Design Founder turned investor, advisor and leadership coach. Author of The Growth Equation. @Seedcamp Venture Partner. Formerly @Clearleft @LDConf & @UXLondon.

No responses yet