Researchers are prototyping. Designers are shipping code. PMs are building working demos. Every role on a product team is absorbing skills that used to belong to the role next door, and AI is doing most of the folding.
And yet designers still spend too much time explaining what they do (ahem, do engineers and PMs have to do this?).
How many times have you explained design to someone who was never going to be persuaded by an explanation?
Explaining the value of design is a dead end. Let’s stop trying. Nobody comes to respect a discipline through hand waving explanations. There’s a softer, more effective approach. Go work inside another role for a while. You learn how your colleagues think, what’s important to them, and the challenges holding them back. You will become an ambassador for design without pitching.
I’ve seen this happen at Google. Despite employing more designers than any other company on Earth, Google is still an engineering led company. Design can often feel like an outsider.
As a contractor with Google, I met designers across many of its teams. The ones with the most influence had almost all spent time as a product manager. They came back with a sharper view of the business and of how their colleagues work, and with alliances that made every cross-functional project easier afterward. Their careers moved faster for it.
Niyati Gupta took that path. She earned a design degree inside one of India’s largest engineering institutes, at a time when, in her words, “nobody understood what it was.” Next she went to Carnegie Mellon to research health information for low-literacy users in rural India. Then on to Autodesk, building molecular visualization tools for scientists. And at Google she worked on truly inspiring projects on the Next Billion Users team. These days she’s at Netflix, where she designs commerce and partnerships.
“I call my career one long experiment of trying new things, experimenting, failing, learning, and putting myself in uncomfortable situations and just being okay with that.”
She has a name for the pattern. “I call them my personal learning loops.” The biggest one took her out of design entirely, and it taught her where influence comes from. It’s not from a title, but from relationships and the experiences you share with cross functional colleagues.
Her career path has lessons for all designers struggling to be relevant in their org and build a career they can be proud of.
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1. The Google approach, try being a PM
Google has a unique PM rotation program that builds relationships and skills.
