The introduction of AI prompting tools are throwing up questions as to the role of designers within product organisations.
Karri Saarinen's1 helpful framing of the problem applies both to product and marketing.
Our industry is not very patient, and once you start building designs directly to production as the default, the culture and organizational reasons to consider problems, concepts, and intentions start evaporating. We start devaluing the why behind our designs in favor of output.
He leans in with a good reminder2, that without a clear understanding of the problem, chaos can ensure when creating a solution. He has two warnings.
Trying to solve multiple problems for multiple people
If asked to work on something, I start with: is this a real problem? What if we don’t do this? Who defined the problem? It sounds philosophical, but what I’ve found is that the most common reason design projects drag or fail is that the problem wasn’t clear. People won’t agree on solutions, because they have different problems in mind. The solution becomes a compromise of many different problems, instead of a clean solution to one major problem. This compounds when you have too many stakeholders.
Discussions and feedback primarily revolve around a solution, but in many cases the underlying cause of a weak solution was the unclear problem.
You’re always going to have stakeholders, if not colleagues, then customers. You have to understand whether feedback is true because the solution isn’t good, or because people don’t agree on what the problem is.
Costly iteration in the wrong direction
My feeling is that without that context and goal built in, you might be iterating toward a direction, but not one that was chosen intentionally.
This is a common critique of Scrum. The danger of getting lost in delivery without a clear "context and goal" is all the more prevalent with prompting tools.
Co-Founder of Linear
Design is More Than Code, Karri Saarinen