Crack a few eggs…
Adding two eggs to boxed cake mix doesn’t make you a Baker…
…bandaging a scraped knee doesn’t make you a Doctor…
…subtracting, adding, or multiplying numbers doesn’t make you a Mathematician.
So why would having a idea for a product or access to a GenAI tool, make you a designer?
The simple answer, it doesn’t.
No Baker, Doctor, or Mathematician ever felt their profession was at risk because of a boxed cake mix, first aid kit, or a handheld calculator. Indeed, most would likely laugh and never give a second thought to those statements. Designers, however, are surprising insecure when it comes to their standing as profession. Many have long feared, and even fought against practices such as Participatory Design, Design Thinking, and now their new source of anxiety: Generative AI.
The only thing designers need to fear, is themselves.
Someone shows up at their Doctor’s office, claiming to know both the nature and treatment of their malady. No one observing this expects the Doctor to take this person’s opinion at face value. The Doctor, likely after rolling their eyes loud enough for everyone in the waiting room to hear, will still run a thorough examination before making any final determination. If tests are needed, the Doctor will make the call, not the patient. In the end the patient may refuse the tests, or even the treatment, but the neither the patient of the Doctor has any expectations the diagnosis will be negotiated. Frequently Doctors will offer their patient a range of alternative treatments, in order to accommodate the realities for the patient (these can again be rejected by the patient) but that doesn’t reduce the Doctor’s creditability as the expert in the room.
Why should interacting with a Designer be any different? Why are so many Designers willing to negotiate their point of view, or worse abandon their point of view altogether and let the problem persist? From experience, it frequently comes down to the designer failing to either understand the business, or to present their work with confidence and creditability. In my opinion in both cases the root cause doesn’t lie with the Designer but rather with their Design Leader.
Everyone need more of these…
You can tell how much support a designer gets from their leadership based on how they discuss their work. Designers with weak or inattentive leaders tend to struggle to articulate their work effectively. They often have no motivation to learn their company’s business, or in some cases even how their products/technology works. These designers may come across as self-effacing, flustered, or overly apologetic—even preemptively apologizing for their designs. Or worse overly confident. If you’re seeing yourself in any of that, seek a strong mentor outside your organization. Avoid superficial mentorship programs; instead, find someone who can guide you in leadership development, even if they’re not in your field.
By contrast, designers with empowering leaders exude confidence (which is different from arrogance). These Designers present their work with clarity and authority, backed by data and strategic foresight, and framed by a solid business context. They address potential challenges ahead of time, ensuring their designs are well-received. These designers often go on to secure leadership roles themselves, as they understand how to navigate both design and organizational dynamics.
To become this type of designer, you need two key things: knowledge and objectivity—both of which can be cultivated with the help of a strong mentor.
Knowledge: Understand your business—how it operates, generates revenue, and sets priorities. Learn the company’s politics, culture, key players, and decision-making processes. This requires access, which strong design leaders can provide by empowering their team and working within the organization’s power structures.
Objectivity: Evaluate what you’re designing in terms of its impact on the business. Focus on numbers, trade-offs, and the factors that will make the design successful. Design can improve any product, but knowing where to focus—whether it’s the user experience, technical infrastructure, or go-to-market strategies—is critical.
Mentorship plays a crucial role here, teaching designers how to apply their knowledge and objectivity in real-world settings. Designers often default to observation and inquiry, but to lead effectively, they must take control of the narrative. In design discussions, this means steering the conversation toward topics like revenue, engagement, and growth. Avoid letting the discussion veer into superficial details like colors or typography—those decisions should already be driven by design and branding guidelines. If someone raises these issues, redirect by asking whether it’s the most pressing concern, or offer to discuss it later (and deprioritize it).
When designers master this approach in their own discussions, they naturally extend it to broader contexts, showcasing their expertise and leadership across the organization.
Cakes are fluffy: Design is not
I have written in the past that while everyone designs, not everyone is a Designer. By that I mean everyday we all make conscious choices how to arrange a set of constituent parts to achieve a desired outcome—whether its planning our week, setting up a “camera ready” home office, or preheating the oven and greasing the pans before cracking those two eggs into a mixing bowl. With GenAI tools it is easier that ever to generate results that meet our needs. But design is about creating positive, consistent outcomes for others not ourselves.
There is over a 100 years of academic research and applied practice behind the field of industrial design, graphic design has an even a longer pedagogy. The first university programs for Human Computer Interaction were established over 40 years ago. The science of ergonomics and human factors goes back to the 1940’s. All these design professions share the same structured approach to design education, and they all rely decades of codified practices with tangible and demonstrable results.
Formal design programs teach how to meet other people’s needs, with a eye toward sustainability, scalability, and with a sense of taste. Focusing on the details, to make it graceful, self-evident, and desirable. More importantly experienced, professional designers not only achieve that success in the immediate context but are able to scale their designs ensuring they will be successful in many other settings over time, achieving longevity and reducing obsolesce. Designers study perception and psychology to know what drives desirability, they learn how to express emotion and convey value, trust, and durability through static and dynamic forms, experiences. colors, scale, texture, etc.
That said, I recognize not everyone has the opportunity to attend college. Like programming or product management, design is a field where skills can be developed through practice and self-learning—assuming there is strong mentorship from a master Designer. Which is why Design Leaders play such a critical role in the journey; They must help the Designers on their team build their knowledge, objectivity, and confidence to ensure their thinking is clear and on target, and that they can articulate its value, manage discussions effectively, and communicate their ideas with authority within the boundaries of the organization’s decision-making processes.
We own our narrative
If we don’t, then we relinquish that to the care of others. Today the profession design suffers from oversubscription; In the early 2000s, design gained prominence as companies recognized its value in enhancing products, brands, customer experience, and profitability. In response to growing demand, anyone with a creative spark and basic graphics skills or knowledge of web tools were hired. Managers surrounded then with enough scaffolding in the form of design systems, user research, competitor analysis, enabling them to perform passably. This is also why designers fear generative AI: it can currently replicate this level of design work.
However, over the past 20+ years, consumers have become more discerning, recognizing and expecting high-quality design that engages and connects emotionally. Many products fail because they lack this connection. This requires a set of skill the majority of these runoff designers and generative AI don’t possess.
Design is a profession, not a skill acquired through an online course or a brief bootcamp. Leaders in the field must recognize this distinction and differentiate the different types of designer with their peers and, more importantly, to executive leadership. To the degree there is any current confusion between the value of a professional designer compared to individuals with untrained opinions and access to (generative) tools—falls squarely on the design leaders to clarify.
It’s time for the profession to take our narrative back and to hold each to account.
Now, who wants cake?
