The good, bad and ugly of a designer in the crazy business world | by Darren Yeo

Amid downsizing, designers must blend business thinking and embrace a “UX foxhog” approach to stay relevant

This article is written for in-house designers in large corporate organisations. They deal with colleagues who don’t always share the same knowledge and skills. They also have to navigate difficult settings, especially when they are in the minority. Freelancers and designers from agencies may gain some insights into the life of an in-house designer but might not immediately identify with some of the examples.

Having complete design teams doesn’t seem to gel well in 2023 and 2024. We’ve seen the early layoffs in early 2023 when tech companies readjust their headcount in a post-pandemic world, but even towards the end of the year, companies continue to downsize. Perhaps the most telling sign is IDEO’s cutting of a third of staff and closing of offices as the era of design thinking ends. More recently, Spotify cut 1,500 jobs, equivalent to 17% of its workforce, to become leaner.

As reported in The State of UX in 2024, titled “late-stage UX,” Caio Braga and Fabricio Teixeira share the growing concerns of shrinking power and headcount in design. Whether downscaling comes from market conditions, manpower oversupply, or the recent advancement of AI automation, the future of design teams seems to be to do more with less.

At this point, I would like to clarify that design shouldn’t be seen as a broad category of people. No doubt design thinkers play an important role in making quicker decisions as a team, but we must recognise the technical toolset (not skillset or mindset) of mainstream designers. They aren’t marketing or business people turned design evangelists, but practitioners who have chosen to spend their 10,000 hours purely on making something more usable and beautiful. They are diverse in talent, ranging from coding to digital sculpting to animation. Their evidence is seen on every physical, service, or digital product, provided it was given to a skilled designer in the first place.

Sadly, business folks can’t see this value, and it is partly the designer’s fault. This is because…