Ship Valuable, High-Quality Product at Pace
This statement seems about as generic and basic as they come, but I increasingly find myself coming back to it as a north star for orienting conversations I’m having with designers about how to navigate their careers at this moment.
Should I become a design engineer? Is Figma still ‘the’ thing? Which AI tool should I use next? What should I do about the lines blurring between design and
All perfectly reasonable questions. But the answers often carry so much organisational context, and vary so much between companies and individuals, that any universal answer feels short-sighted at best.
What I like about the statement is that it doesn’t mention design, or any job title, at all. It works just as well for an engineer or a PM, and that’s sort of the point. It’s the outcome we all share, wherever the lines between us end up.
Holding your title lightly can help. It’s a useful shorthand for your background, but an increasingly blunt description of what you actually contribute. The same goes for your tools.
I once worked with a principal designer whose main design tool was Google Drawings. Seriously! It blew my mind at the time. But they knew how decisions got made, how good work got shipped, and where the design system was robust enough to lean on in the final stretch.
I’m sure no one has Google Drawings on their design tooling bingo card for this year. And I don’t recommend adding it! But it’s a good example of the north star in practice. Here’s how I think about each part.
- Ship. Static rectangles looking good in Figma is one thing, but customers actually using the product is what really matters. Not shipping for six months is a problem, however good the work looked in review.
- Valuable. It helps customers do something they care about, or helps the business become more sustainable. Ideally both.
- High-quality. There’s a lot of talk about ‘craft’ being important now. It always has been. But craft doesn’t just live in design files, it’s in how the product feels in customers’ hands, knowing that the details were carefully considered, and that the experience feels intuitive, native and dare I say ‘delightful’ to use. High-quality could even mean removing parts of an existing product if it helps improve the overall experience.
- At pace. With AI tools all over the place, this is increasingly a given, but too much of the focus is exclusively on pace without deep consideration for the other three, which is where AI slop is most likely to rear its head.
So, if you find yourself going in circles on one of those questions above, run it back through the north star. Should you become a design engineer? If it gets good work to customers faster, maybe. If it’s mostly about the title, probably not.