Chief Design Officer isn't a "best designer" position, it's a "promoted through the roof" position where you actually do less work. Phil's current Apple Fellow title is the same.
The "realest" position is SVP, which admittedly no designer currently is.
Since I currently have a co-founder with design skills who champions user experience, I'm for that.
I'm also all for inspiring leaders. But in the startup context, I think the job of "designer" is as dangerous as its technical equivalent "architect". As Schell points out, design is a pervasive concern, just like software architecture is. A CTO who fancies himself chief architect is likely to drive off good talent, because talented people want to solve whole problems, not mechanically execute somebody else's vision.
I think the same applies for the visible sorts of design just as much as it does for the under-the-hood design: if everybody cares (which requires feeling empowered to make things happen) you'll get a better product.
Yes thank you, great point. I've definitely seen the organizational leadership push designers to be more imposing, and that's a big problem. I think that a lot of VPs struggle to justify the cost (salary) of designers because it can be difficult to identify the contributions/value when you aren't intimately involved in the process. Because of this they want to see someone who they think will really take the reins and make the investment worth it. This is IMHO a big mistake, but it's the best explanation I can think of to explain what I've seen in the past. I think there's also sometimes an idea that engineers and designers are inherently in conflict and engineers will ruin things if not kept in check and dominated by a strongly opinionated designer. I think this largely stems from Apple and the Jobs/Ive era, but regardless, in most software I've been a part of this is a mistake. That sort of domination/conflict-based "teamwork" does not lead to the results they think it does.
Jony Ive had been the CDO for years and the results weren't great. It's not that Jony Ive isn't a great designer. It's just that it's difficult to judge your own work, no matter how good you are.
What they need, more than a CDO, is someone who they have to run every design by, someone (EDIT: with an impeccable eye) who is not afraid to say no. In other words, someone who can fill the role Steve Jobs used to play.
I, for one, nominate the great John Siracusa, for this job.
Having dated a graphic designer who ran her own firm...biz people don't seem to respect design. It's an slight hassle afterthought to many biz people. It's a cost center that they don't really understand...but don't realize they don't understand... because they think it's easy.
Steve Jobs was actually different. He put design first and foremost and did great things.
Hopefully the COO recognizes he's out of his element and doesn't try to half-ass design going forward.
Many go into management, as you say. In my experience the best managers were never even remotely the best designers in terms of pure raw talent. That is sorta secondary to your question, and just kinda my own personal inject. At the same time though, I think it supports the idea that staff/principal/"Distinguished whatever" titles for design serve a use case. In fact, some BigCos have adopted that model similar to Staff Software Engineer, etc. FAANG/FAANG-adjacent types. I think Amazon, Slack, Discord have staff+ level designers. I don't know the official job requirements, but I'd assume 7-10+ years of real actual digital product design work.
I imagine we will see more of that. People like me who have been around a while or longer are getting older, and not all of us want to pivot to management. Can't even imagine doing it!
I've been in this industry for ~10 years, and am getting pretty burnt out on it. Lately though things have been better. If you stick around in the field and find an answer to this question...reach out and let me know? :) Best of luck!
I sort of agree and disagree with it. I think they need someone like jobs with design taste and product / user focus in mind. More like a Chief Product Officer.
Proper design is about melding form and function. You're just talking about 'form' designers, who would be better termed as artists.
You're also just grabbing Microsoft and Google as being designer-free in their successful years, which is patent nonsense.
> In the end engineers build great high tech organizations
Again, nonsense. Engineers alone did not make Apple the behemoth it is today. The designers made their unusual products desirable. And the Apple marketing cohort never get their props for the incredible job they did in making a computer company funky. Then there are props to the Apple staff who did magic with their supply chain. You think engineers are the most essential part of a great company? Try to run a company when your business folk can't close a deal to save themselves. History is littered with superior engineering designs that failed in the marketplace. Doesn't matter how good your engineers are if their stuff doesn't sell.
Frankly, fuck this "my job is more important than yours" dick-swinging competition. In today's economic-rationalising environment, few jobs aren't essential.
"Anyone who makes a decision about how the product should be is a designer. Designer is a role, not a person. Almost every developer on a team makes some decision about how the product will be, just through the act of creating the product. These decisions are design decisions, and when you make them, you're a designer. For this reason, no matter what role on a development team, an understanding of the principles of design will make you better at what you do."...While I agree with Jesse Schell, what we are highlighting, the potential for designer founders, is not mutually exclusive with your concern...there are many ways to get design done eg Jared Spool lays out some types (I am by no means advocating for one size fits all), but I am saying that having a strong design leader may help your team (the best ones don't have to control every little detail, they empower others), it's like having an editor eg http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/technology/what-apple-has-.... my major issue with design thinking and make everyone a "designer" so easily is you lose a bar of quality, craft, and professionalism that you want everyone to aspire to be...just like you'd want your CTO to inspire other developers to work with him/her, you want a designer founder to do the same...great talent attracts other great talent... It makes sense that a prerequisite for a tech company is to have a founder with technical skills. The same heuristic should hold true if you want to consistently ship well designed products like Pinterest, AirBnB and Path. Why not have a co-founder with design skills who champions the user experience?
> I think there is a difference between a designer and a UX designer.
Then your vision of the design world is quite simplistic. Having studied both CompSci and Design Engineering at college, I can tell you that design can be very complex, and the term “Designer” is as abstract as “Computer Scientist”, where you have distributed systems researchers, back-end devs, Ops, database administrators, release engineers, QA Engineers, and thousands of specialities.
The design field is HUGE (go and visit IDEO), ranging from mere Graphic Designers (what you've reflected as "PSD Designer"), to UX/UI Designers (those building human-computer interfaces ), to Design Engineers and Industrial Designers that have a solid base of engineering (physics, maths, materials, CAD/CAE, ergonomy, etc) and are able to shape tangible as well as non-tangible products.
Leading Designers [0] usually belong to the latest group... Pininfarina (Ferrari's Designer), Philippe Stark (who worked closely with Steve Jobs crafting his Yatch but also does graphic design and a lot of other design specialities [1]), Jony Ive (leading the iDevices industrial design but also the UI), Dieter Rams, etc.
100% designers only happen at the very bottom or with design teams. A hands-on design dev knows what's simple vs complicated and can design for it. They will easily outmatch a single designer.
I know he is just one example, but his success does reinforce a hunch of mine.
I never quite understood why the typical tech company product organization is so obsessed with finding the perfect graphic designer, instead of the perfect engineer.
Stick with me for a sec, I feel like I’ll draw a lot of heat here.
Good designers absolutely do good design work, and that’s wonderful! It just hardly ever, or does not at all, translate to how the product is actually built. At worst it leads to implementations being ad-hoc literal translation of high fidelity screenshots (of the perfect design!) that becomes impossible to maintain.
You could say the designer and some group of engineers are supposed to work together to build a “design system” and, well it might work, if you have good leadership. Not-so-good leadership will at worst not let engineers do this because it’s “not delivering value to the user!”, and decent leadership will let this happen once but ongoing maintenance will never happen.
So. What was the point of hiring the designer again? Having worked with companies, they do try to hire this “engineer who designs” all the time, and they constantly say things like “I know they’re a unicorn but maybe we’ll get lucky” but I think they would be surprised what a group of seasoned engineers in their field would be able to do design wise. Most web content does the same thing the same way nowadays anyway, you’re actually better suited copying UX that people will be familiar with :p
Great design is much less subjective than people think. A good creative director will be able to look at a portfolio and recognize quality, much like a tech lead can look at someone's code and see if it's good.
I think there's a similar thing happening with designers that happened with engineers over the past several years, moving from a "idea guy" plus implementation engineers towards everyone looking for a technical co-founder.
The "realest" position is SVP, which admittedly no designer currently is.
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