Dear John Maeda, You’re Wrong.
So, I don’t have many Medium posts, primarily because I’m way too busy to write consistently. That said, when I’m passionate about something, my fingers get to moving, so here goes…
Over the weekend, my friend Lea Alcantara sent me the article featuring John Maeda in Fast Company entitled, John Maeda: “In reality, design is not that important” by Katharine Schwab. What resulted was an hours-long text conversation about design, from the perspective of leaders and the real role of design within the Tech industry.
This article noted the substantial impact Design has to a business’ bottom line while still asserting that Design should not have a seat at the executive table. In it, John asserts that design should have a secondary role, a support role, to PM and Engineering. He uses the metaphor of actors stating, “design should be like a supporting actor or actress to the leading characters in a tech company—developers and product managers.” Furthermore, he cautions that becoming design-led means designers become forceful with an “I’m the boss mentality.” This is all within the first 4 paragraphs… Ultimately, John believes that being design-led organizations lead to weak products that are beautiful and useless.
👏 WHERE 👏 DO 👏 I 👏 BEGIN…
- Let’s define design. In tech, we are Product Designers, this is an important distinction because it is our responsibility to understand the end-to-end experience. We are consistently considering user behaviors and patterns, design systems, technical limitations, and business goals. This includes partnering with Research on generative and evaluative studies, working with PM to understand product/business needs/goals, and Engineering to grasp tech feasibility and constraints. True Product Designers never work in silos, they never create in ignorance and they never design for the sake of designing.
- Leadership is not a one person show. One of the biggest fallacies that oozes throughout this article is the implication that design-led means design-only. Contrarily, John sees PM and Engineering as leading together? So if he is ok with the duo, then why not the trio? Now, his rationale for this, it seems, is the notion that when design leads it tends to say, “get out of the way, I’m the boss.” The intrinsic fallacy of his argument is that PM and Engineering can co-lead (basically) without puffing their chests, but Design can only be [or makes it self] the sole leader on top.
- “Worrying too much about whether design has enough influence over a product or a company distracts from the real vision: making great products that solve people’s problems.” This is literally the job of Product Designers: to consider the user, understand their needs, design solutions, validate those solutions and get them shipped. Again, these aren’t done in a silo, but in partnership with Research, PM and Engineering. Our job is to maintain the focus of the user and their experience — that is not subtractive, it’s additive.
True Product Designers never work in silos, they never create in ignorance and they never design for the sake of designing.
I’ll just sit this right here…
The companies in our index that performed best financially understood that design is a top-management issue, and assessed their design performance with the same rigor they used to track revenues and costs. In many other businesses, though, design leaders say they are treated as second-class citizens.
Design issues remain stuck in middle management, rarely rising to the C-suite. When they do, senior executives make decisions on gut feel rather than concrete evidence.
Designers themselves have been partly to blame in the past: they have not always embraced design metrics or actively shown management how their designs tie to meeting business goals. What our survey unambiguously shows, however, is that the companies with the best financial returns have combined design and business leadership through a bold, design-centric vision clearly embedded in the deliberations of their top teams.
Ok, let’s take a pause.
While writing this, something has become extremely clear—John Maeda doesn’t understand the role of Product Design, specifically in tech. So John, I’ll speak to you directly—I’m going to make a few assumptions that you’re free to correct me on in whatever fashion works best for you.
John, based on your bio and LinkedIn, you’ve never been a Product Designer nor have you worked on a Product team. I know many people from Automattic and it’s a progressive company, but one can assume you’re not actually involved in many product conversations. So, I believe your thoughts are both from a place of privilege and ignorance.
We do not have the “I’m the boss” mentality, we have have the “include me” and “is this best for the user?” mentality.
Product Design leaders are consistently negotiating with our PM and Engineering counterparts, but we can not effectively negotiate without power/influence. That said, design-led is not the absence of operational excellence — it is in addition to it. We are often one of the few disciplines that must consistently consider the ecosystem with every decision we make. This becomes more true as we rise in leadership. We don’t ship features or aesthetic, we ship holistic thoughtful products for our users, not for the sake of design. We do not have the “I’m the boss” mentality, we have the “include me” and “is this best for the user?” mentality. If you’ve ever actually engaged with a design organization within tech, you’d see we spend most of our time working with PM and Engineering to consider the user, not just what’s technologically expedient.
Product designers are not graded on how many features we ship, like many engineering teams, but the quality of the feature and its impact on users. Product Designers are not only focused on aesthetics and experience, but impact—meaning we have to be thoughtful of, and seek out, metrics, telemetry, feedback, user sentiment, etc.
We drive hard on high-quality experiences, and we define quality as Usability, Usefulness & Craftsmanship. Meaning, if an experience is not useful or usable then it doesn’t matter how beautiful it is, we won’t ship it.
— Jeremy Jobling, VP of Product Design, Zillow Group
Now John, you used the example of the company Jawbone, and the failure of their product Up, as evidence for how unviable design-led products are. You noted the influencer who stated its beautiful design, but buggy software to reinforce your assertion. A fallacy once again: if the company had standards of operational excellence to create a bar in which they agreed at that point the product was ready to ship, then maybe it would be a success right now. The presence of a design-led culture does not reduce the importance of PM and Engineering leadership.
Strong tech leadership needs the natural tension that occurs when PM, Design and Engineering get into a room. PM driving business need and metrics, Design the user experience and Engineering the tech feasibility. Without those three on equal footing, the product ultimately suffers. The image below, which illustrates this point, was posted by Airbnb’s VP of Design, Alex Schleifer, in his article “Defining Product Design.” Ironically, he’s mentioned in this Fast Company article for his 2015 feature “Why Airbnb’s New Head of Design Believes ‘Design-Led’ Companies Don’t Work” (I have a whole other bone to pick with that one…).
It is not a competition for the top spot, but a cooperative of leadership.
John, I’m sorry, but you’ve fallen into the trap of every other powerful man of privilege who is asked for their opinion on things that are tangentially related to their work, and yet you have no idea what you’re actually talking about. As a result, you prop your lack of knowledge up on anecdotal assertions, with little to no concrete evidence to back your claims.
You have no idea how detrimental this Fast Company article is to an industry full of design leaders trying to do the right thing for both users and businesses. For those who look up to you it’s disheartening and for those who partner with you it’s undercutting. Let’s not forget the designers in your company.
Additionally, if I put my DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) hat on, you are using the same tropes that men of power use, “there’s not enough room at the top.” As if power, leadership and influence are only a pleasure of the few, while everyone else’s role is to be supportive of that power as to not distract from or, to use your words, “steal the scene from the leading characters.”
“With great power comes great responsibility”—and it’s your responsibility to do your research, just like a Product Designer.
Best,
TB
