And what design has to do with that? If your product does not solve a real problem it is not worth to exist with or sans design.
If it does, design is important.
>>"tl;dr: both how it looks and how it works are secondary to what if offers the customer"
The product (App/Pizza/Car/Suppository/Whatever) still needs designing; i.e. a problem exists that needs solving. However you want to phrase it, a problem is solved by designing, be it using established patterns or generating new solutions. How it looks and how it works should be intrinsic to what a product offers. None of the elements are mutually exclusive.
I disagree, engineering is how it works, design is about interaction between the user and tech-object.
People nowadays tend to put too much emphasis on design vs. engineering, without design you have a bad working tech-object, without engineering you have no tech-object at all.
Don't think that I regard design as non important, I think both have their place in inventing and manufacturing.
While I agree that pg's example is a bit extreme, the point still stands. At the beginning stages, great design won't determine the success of the product. Having customers will. So time and money is better spent in other areas. This isn't to say they won't come to you eventually when a better design is needed. Great design is still important, just not at the stage this company is at.
Design is way more important than just what things look like. But it contributes to a product's success in ways that are sometimes hard to measure. That's why engineer-driven company don't understand it and engineers (as a sweeping generalization) usually hate it.
"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." so yeah as dennisvdvliet pointed out design is very important to your product.
Design is the most important part of your product if you are not creating a new market because that's the only way you can differentiate your product. Everybody is going to have the same features and what you are really selling is your design.
When you launch a new product into a new market, the features (i.e. what it actually does) end up being slightly more important than the design. The design is obviously still important, but probably not the most important part of your product.
P.s. I really like the retro-beach lifeguard metaphor for customer service.
Good design requires understanding the problem at a much deeper level. A big company can rip off the design, but without that understanding, they really have nowhere to go. I think that's been most evident with Apple, but it happens anywhere you find good design.
(In the sense that design is how something works and not just aesthetics.)
Is design the thing that matters most in your product? Does the product solve a problem that has not been solved for lack of good design in other products that took a jab at it ? If not, I'd say focus on what matters most now even if it doesn't look that pretty.
We have that problem in our backlog; it's an ML platform but CSS is not why most ML projects fail.
We make it do something valuable, then make it pretty.
There's general misrepresentation throughout this conversation and the article that design is merely a veneer that you either choose to implement or not at some point.
Design is about solving problems, and a design led company/individual adopts a certain mind frame that often tends to contrast that of the engineer.
If you're designing a consumer product and your engineered concept works so well that you can actually consider whether or not you 'design' it, well, lucky you.
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