Craft
paulstamatiou.com
paulstamatiou.com
At big companies, this is mostly a management issue.
Questions like these are common 1.) Is this person part of the design team or engineering team? 2.) Who does this person report to, and how is his sprint planned?
And, as a company grows in size, managing people becomes a more important issue than focusing on minor product details.
Is what you’re describing the role of a product manager?
In games a Product Manager doesn't really exist as a specific role generally and is distributed between the Production and Design teams.
Something I've found challenging is that in my projects and pricepoints, it's felt like there is no time for craft. Always harried, always spread thin. Never enough budget to do much more than burn through code. And working with clients who barely know what they expect, so it's hard to confidently spend time on design polish while the chance of concepts being rejected on a whim seems quite random. I'd be the first to accept that these are likely self-inflicted situations through misguided quoting/positioning and lazy process.
I have many side projects, and craft is a difficult thing there too. We typically preach getting product in front of people as soon as possible, to hone from there. But when, as an individual or small team, do you get time to absolutely polish your login screen, as one example? You're generally adding requested features or fixing pain points. I see a login screen from Stripe or similar and think of the teams and meetings and testing that probably went into it. Obviously as smallfry, we can take a shortcut and copy what they've settled on, but that's not exactly craft.
Maybe when I retire I'll have time.
I love the spirit of the article, and heartily applaud it.
That said, I do realize that, for many folks (most of them, actually), money is the only metric that matters,
“But look at all the money I’m making!” or “Your project is a failure, because it doesn’t make money!” are frequent refrains, in tech.
For me, development of product is a craft, and a labor of love. It has to be good, because I can’t live with myself, if it’s not.
I posted an excerpt from a book I read, here, once, that is apropos:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28086786
But back to the topic at hand. I also enjoyed this book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1035377.Software_Craf...
But I feel like larger companies systematically resist this kind of care. Through removal of agency (approval processes, splitting stakeholders across teams, top-down assignment) and through sprawling product complexity that leaves people no time to give attention to all the details because there are simply too many.
I think I just can't ever work at a large company. I care too much.
The novelty value of these images is gone and they’re just visual noise now, like banner ads or mailing list signups. In the spirit of the post, when in doubt, simplify your content — and AI-generated illustrations should be the first to go.
It is easy to talk about the importance of quality with high premium products in mind. But what about low budget products for the masses? Can we say more about this than the cliché that quality might perhaps be cheaper in the long run?
Designers should be fired.
The best apps in history have been built by hackers with a great aesthetic sense.
Somehow we have lost this today.
What you seem to be getting at is "hackers with a great aesthetic sense" - and what makes a hacker, then? An engineering background? A computer science degree? Most designers have some understanding of the platforms they're working with. Could they invert a binary tree on a whiteboard? Write an LRU cache? Scale a system to a million DAU? Usually not, but you don't need to do that to build a proof-of-concept application that people fall in love with.
A designer may be a hacker, just as an engineer may be.