designer

“If the product manager and the designer are not available to be there during your product, their products test, cancel the test. They need to be there.”

“Any of your favorite products or companies, it's a very different animal. You know, you've got, you've really got true peers. They're not there to, the developers aren't there to just implement your dumb ideas. They are there to help you come up with a great s…”

“While the engineers definitely own feasible and the designer definitely owns usable, valuable and viable, which are two of the hardest things to do, that's the product manager.”

“As a PM, you're kind of in the center, facilitating all these different trade-offs. And when you go into design, you kind of have to ignore some of those other aspects to really be insistent on pushing on the best experience possible. Like, just kind of suspen…”

“I would say managing designers is harder than managing product managers.”

“I know designers spend all this time making wire frames, and I'm like, that's the lamest use of time ever. Just get some whiteboards, go into the room with your engineers, and start making some marks together, and that just works better.”

“I think I agree with my friend Ken Norton on this and that you shouldn't probably start in product. Go be an engineer or be a designer, you know, work, get to know businesses”

“I think designers, the expectation is that they'll be more Business oriented, right? Design as a means, honestly, to an end. I think that's trending and probably for the better, I think the best designers I've ever worked with are also like exceptionally savvy…”

“So I love bringing design upstream. Like that's, in fact, that's probably been the cheat code of my career as a product leader, as has just been disproportionately empowering design throughout the process.”

“You have two t-shirts. You have the design t-shirt and you have the like marketplace t-shirt or whatever, you know, cross-disciplinary team that you work on because both are really important communities to build for slightly different reasons.”

“One of the things that I believe has, you know, a necessary part of building a high functioning Organization is that one, you know, building together is important. So like having engineers and product managers and designers be together, have shared goals and a…”

“I think designers in the Valley are very, very frustrated with the product development process, not to say the product managers, but they're extremely frustrated. And I think a lot of designers feel like they're compromising many designers.”

“Well, I think it especially works for designers that way, because designers are really good at giving feedback. Like, it turns out that not everyone is good at giving feedback but yeah, designers are awesome at that.”

“And so it's easy, I think for a PM to say, that's not my responsibility. I define the requirements, you know, Have a menu group that goes to the next level. Designer, engineer, figure it out. No way. Like, that's fully on you, and you better be involved in tho…”

“Most people I would say under invest in design point blank. And when you get to a certain scale, maybe things change, but like truly, I don't think most teams have experienced what it feels like to have a really high design ratio and what that actually does to…”

“At the end of the day, you should be adding as many constraints as reasonable in order to let engineers and designers come up with the most creative solutions for whatever you're trying to do.”

“I've seen so many times where there's been a PM, engineer, designer, like whatever role, they cannot make it work at company A. And then you see them five years later, just killing it in company B. And you're like, did they change as a person? Did they get sup…”

“Like what Snapchat has done And I think Apple to the same extent is that designers run the show. And I think that's led to some very novel products coming out from both of those companies.”

“And in five to 10 years, I think the lines between product managers and engineers and designers are going to blur because AI will enable product managers to build prototypes, to build designs, designers to build a pro like Figma already has their Figma AI.”

“And the way to cut down on time, and I think this is a mistake people make a lot of the time, is when time is being pressured downward, a lot of times engineers, PMs, designers, they will cut on quality rather than cutting on scope.”

“Every designer codes. Imagine if every designer codes and not, and I don't just mean HTML. I mean, like running the app locally, going into the place where that view is rendered to make that thing look the way that they want it to look or whatever. Right. I me…”

“The thing that I will say about to keep in mind for PMs is there's always a tendency on PMs to want to draw something and then try to give a sketch to a designer. And I would caution them against that. Sometimes they have to draw themselves so they can think i…”

“People need to understand that they're advocating for ideas and not for themselves. And when I talk to a lot of designers, it may be true for PMs. I hear a lot of people say that they're reluctant to post on social media or on LinkedIn or something. Cause like…”

“I think in this world where software can be created more easily, design matters so much, and designers matter so much. I think designers are going to be the leaders of the future, and I think that more designers need to step into that leadership role”

“The trend that we've been seeing for the past five years is a trend that it's gonna accelerate the next five years. And that's a shift to emergent of roles. I just think that we're seeing more designers, engineers, product managers, researchers, kind of all th…”

“It really changes the process once you have the ability to explore this option space in a bigger way, and PMs are no longer saying to the designer, hey, can you draw this thing out for me? That frees up designer time to go explore more deeply the stuff they ne…”

“We S we changed the organization. So all engineers report into one single team. Now all designers report in one single team and their single head of engineering, single head of design, et cetera.”

“I see vibe coding As a skill being added to a lot of job descriptions for designers, for product managers for marketers, which I think is a really interesting shift.”

“If I was a betting man, as they say, I'd bet that the next class that wins are designers, because We're training these tools to be more clear, to be better, to make better technical decisions. I don't think we will train them just yet to be, make better emoti…”

“Both engineers and PMs, 70% of people said they are enjoying their job more. And about 10% said they're enjoying their job less. Designers, interestingly, Only 55% said they're enjoying their job more, and 20% said they're enjoying their job less.”

“Whether you talk about someone who used to be a PM or someone who used to be a designer or called an engineer, the skill is more like being a CEO now, which is what are we building and why? And to be a successful engineer, that trait's critical to be a success…”

“I think all of the roles are merging. PMs are doing some engineering work, engineers are doing PM work, designers are PMing and also landing code.”

“If you look at the traditional tech org, org structure, you know, designers really are producing visuals. They're not really producing the product direction or the strategy or the vision or, you know, net new That new innovation, right? They're really responsi…”

“We don't allow designers to get stuck on specific products or verticals. For very long. We like to make sure people are rotating through different parts of the product to bring new ideas and fresh perspectives and also to avoid getting bored.”

“In the early days, my view was not that we don't need PMs. My view is that designers should do that work. So that's essentially you know, what we would say to our designers, which was like, you know Hey, if you need PM support, why don't you just do it yoursel…”

“And I think today, you know, a lot of our designers are now shipping code, which is extraordinary, right? And that's a really big and really meaningful change in terms of the way that the design works here at Snap and the way the creative process works.”

“I think people who have true agency and they understand that the world around them is malleable will do great. And the folks who stick to what, tell me really, what does it mean to be a PM? What does it mean to be a designer? And like, what's my job as an engi…”

“In a previous life, I led design and product at GitHub and GitHub designers before LLMs contributed to GitHub. I think in the top contributors to GitHub itself, like, 10% were designers.”

“Like now, not only engineers with, we also have designers, PMs, everybody on the Clark code team checks in code.”

“A lot of designers right now are very anxious about their roles. You know, I've got this other generalists doing design. You've got engineers doing design, product staff doing design, but I'm actually pretty long on design or designers because they tend to hav…”

“What you're seeing here. Is that no one is a promoter of their role in tech right now. Not even founders who are by far the happiest, happy-go-lucky people in, in tech right now. Founders would not recommend their roles. Neither would people in sales or go to …”

“We are seeing that designers and researchers are the most negative. And just to clarify what I mean by that, what you can see in the slide is that when it comes to AI identity shifts, designers and researchers are the highest in feeling either destabilized or …”

“I have found that PMs, designers, data scientists are able to get farther in the product development life cycle before engineering really needs to be front of the line in unlocking things than was true a couple years ago.”

“Hiring so many PMs infantilizers The engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to, because there was always a PM to babysit them.”

“If you talk to most engineers or even designers, they will remember the great PMs that they've worked with mostly because they've worked with so many bad ones.”

“And kind of surprisingly, designers and user researchers are just the most unhappy on every dimension, like every actual dimension. They're the most overwhelmed, the most anxious, the most, the least optimistic, the most worried the most tired, also the least …”

“And as designers, I think that, you know, you come here, we look for people that are, don't have a background in AI, but are, like, really curious about the tools and how it can work.”

“I do still think that, and maybe this is thinking about it from like a slightly larger company perspective, but I think you do still need people that have certain responsibilities, right? Because if you have one person that's expected to design, to rally a tea…”