Working with designers

I love working with designers, in part because (unlike managers and product managers) they’re culturally different from engineers. However, having more than one designer on a team is asking for trouble, and I have complicated negative thoughts about design systems. Design is a strange role Designers demonstrate their value immediately. While working on some feature, I’ll typically put together some placeholder UI that I’m reasonably happy with. I then show it to a designer, who strokes their chin and says “hmm, I have some ideas here”. They then go away and produce a mockup UI that is not just clearly better, but better in ways I could not have imagined. There aren’t any other roles at a tech company where you can see the value at a glance. Designers are an unusual role in other ways, too. Engineering managers, product managers, and engineers all come from broadly the same stock: technical, detail-oriented planners. We are people of the spreadsheet. In fact, many managers and product…

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