The Rise of the Product Planner

Are in-house designers, “designers” really?

Since going independent a few months ago, I’ve been shocked by how different my job is now compared to how it was just a year ago. I’ve spent the last 10+ years working in-house at various tech companies of different sizes. This whole time I’ve been following the doctrine that design agencies often abandon a project at the handoff point and the “real work” happens in-house. However, now that I have hindsight on my side, it’s easy to see that so much of what in-house designers do at traditional tech companies isn’t design at all, and yet we insist in bending the word’s definition to fit the job description.

It’s true: the in-house designer tends to have a fairly design-y role relative to other roles in a tech company, but the large majority of the time spent at work as an in-house designer is in fact not utilizing design skills. Another way of saying this is; you don’t need a design education or even design skills to excel at the majority of the responsibilities of an in-house designer. This is exacerbated as the organization grows and by the advent of design systems, which removes quite a bit of creative thinking from the job. Like switching the material from clay to LEGO.

A friend told me that a good analog to this is the distinction between an Urban Planner and Urban Designer. What in-house Product Designers do is closer to what Urban Planners do, where the key skills are communicating and negotiating policies.

Perhaps it’s more appropriate to refer to in-house Product Designers as Product Planners and reserve the Product Designer title for roles that primarily focus on design.

If Product Designers are actually Product Planners then who’s actually designing the products at these companies? I’d argue that most design thinking comes primarily from two avenues:

1. Small teams that don’t play by the same rules as the rest of the organization (aka the exception, not the rule)

2. Outside design companies that are contracted to inject design thinking into the organization which then the planners turn into “policies” (again, that process isn’t primarily design-driven)

In my experience, a lot of what is perceived as “design output” from traditional tech companies is actually marketing (launch moments, demo reels, all the presentation bits), which is largely done by outside agencies. The rest is copy/pasting established patterns — that doesn’t require design thinking. Rarely, we have truly creative and design-forward products come out of tech companies, which are almost always coming from small teams that manage to operate differently than the rest of the organization. This is rare and short-lived: if successful, these products are then swallowed by the rest of the organization and subsequently ruined.

Of course there are exceptions, but it’s important to know these are just that: exceptions.

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Imagine 10 Product Designers lined up, some of them work at Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Figma and Airbnb others work at design agencies like Frog, Instrument, and Work&Co and the rest are freelancers. Each of their day-to-days will be very different despite of using the same title of Product Designer. The freelancers will spend most of their time thinking about stuff that the in-house designers almost never think about.

We could splinter the title into its components: UI Designer, UX Designer, Content Designer, Icon Designer, etc. But I’d be willing to bet there is still a meaningful distinction between any of those roles when they’re in-house.

If you focus on the word “designer” you start to open it up to an even broader pantheon: Graphic Designers, Industrial Designers, Fashion Designers. What does a Product Designer actually have in common with a Fashion Designer? Do they actually spend most of their time utilizing shared design processes aimed at different industries like their titles imply? If you focused on the in-house designers you could argue that a Product Designer at Microsoft has a ton in common with a Fashion Designer at Gap, since they both do a whole lot of planning. If you squint, you can see the similarities. After all, working at a corporation like that makes you a business person first, and designer second.

Under that lens, in-house Product Designers are business people with a splash of design.

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Ok, so in-house design is more business-y. So what? Call them whatever. A job is a job. Who cares?

The problem is that I didn’t get into Design because I wanted to be primarily a business person (maybe you did?). There were other paths available for that: I could’ve gotten an MBA if that’s what I was going after. Instead, I (and I suspect, a lot of people who are design-inclined in their youth) was allured by a different set of values encompassed by the craft of Design: creativity, beauty, utility, expression, exploration, innovation, and a fair bit of testing boundaries. Most of which are virtually absent in an in-house environment.

Over the last couple decades, we started seeing the shift of respected design agencies joining in-house teams. Sofa, Hot Studio and Teehan+Lax joined Facebook; Rally joined Stripe; and most recently, Ueno joined Twitter. For some, this signaled that if you wanted to do creative work like those agencies did, you didn’t need to join an agency, you could join a tech company in-house like the very same agencies you admired ended up doing.

And so we tried to shoehorn design values in the in-house environment which is largely unconcerned by them, especially when contrasted with business goals and behaviors. The end result is an industry that is frustrated and confused. “Why is my job not creatively fulfilling? I thought I did everything right?!”

The one exception to this is in the wonderful world of startups and early-stage teams since they don’t yet know what they will become. Most of them will grow up to be just-another-tech-company, which will find success in operating under rules like the ones we’ve explored so far.

A few of them will pave the way to a new type of organization with new building blocks. Maybe instead of the typical product/engineer/designerplanner triad there will be new models that invite new roles and responsibilities. Maybe designers can aspire to a career more similar to film directors than to business people, where they get attached to a project for a finite amount of time (the time it takes to design, not plan) and then, once the project is out, they hop to a different one (without fear or guilt). Maybe we’ll lean further into the agency model where design is cultivated in a creative environment and hired to come in an inject creativity into an otherwise intrinsically uncreative environment (business) Or maybe nothing will change at all and this is just another ill-informed blog post pontificating about the future (sadly not the first or last)

If there’s any takeaways is that the world is big, life is long, and many things can be true. I’m still enjoying navigating it and making new (to me) discoveries that change how I reflect on my past and how I charge towards the future.

If there’s a spectrum between a Product Planner and a Product Designer, where do you see yourself currently? Where do you want to be?