A product designer’s job is not to design

Over the years, I’ve learned that a product designer’s job is not, in fact, to design. It’s to help move value efficiently to the customer and company.

“When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”

We designers tend to want to solve problems with Figma, Miro, and other design tools. We sometimes assume our job is to:

1. Receive design tasks
2. Create stuff in a design tool
3. Pass designs off to the next part of the process

Now, don’t get me wrong—this is valuable. At the same time, there are other ways for designers to deliver value. And if we take a broader view of our responsibility, we can usually serve the customer and the company more effectively.

A broader viewpoint

Sometimes it’s actually better if we skip all the pixels and vectors and prototypes. Is there an improvement to the customer experience that can easily be “designed” with a conversation or a written document? In many cases that will deliver value much more quickly than trying solve the same problem with artifacts from a design tool.

And sometimes the most effective way for us to deliver value takes place after we’re done with our design tools. The truth is, when a design is being built it’s closer to delivering value to the customer. So things like engineering support, design QA, and user testing can be more valuable than producing new designs. But if we view our job as producing designs, we may prioritize making new designs over things like answering questions from engineering.

Designers are wizards

Now, of course—one of the ways we bring special value to the company is our special skills with design tools. We can use those more effectively than most other employees. So we shouldn’t lose sight of our special abilities. We just also shouldn’t forget there are other ways we can bring value.