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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

Design never had a seat at the table to begin with. The very idea of having design goals is largely anathema to most companies, they could never imagine actually letting a product dictate organizational proceedings.

The goal is to make money, not make a product. To make money, you figure out where to jam a lever in, then pry as much cash flow as you can from it. This is why people are worried about SEO rather than UX.

Design does not work as a competing voice in a cacaphony. It has to be the only voice, the main voice. Design is the table. That was what Jobs understood, that's what he built into his company, that's why Apple is still killing it.

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"It has to be the only voice"... what?

I'm a product manager at a tech company, and the job is listening to that cacophony & prioritizing. Sometimes that's design, sometimes not. It's not black and white

Program managers* make poor designers, at least in my large company. They often have no training in UX, and all their UX experience is mixed with other stuff that tends to cloud it. Having real UXDs doing the product design is much much better than "design by PM" (its like, do you want your PM to write code for the product also? of course not!)

* I know there is a difference between program and product mangers, the latter being more focused on marketing.

Edit: keeping it classy with the downvotes, clearly I struck a nerve (more citations in child post).

If you think the only difference between project and product managers is "the latter being more focused on marketing," you must work with some terrible product managers...

At my company this is true [1]. I personally don't get to work with product managers (who work in biz dev mostly and do not work with developers/researchers/etc...), only program managers.

From wiki:

> Diverse interpretations regarding the role of the product manager are the norm. The product manager title is often used in many ways to describe drastically different duties and responsibilities. Even within the high-tech industry where product management is better defined, the product manager's job description varies widely among companies. This is due to tradition and intuitive interpretations by different individuals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_manager

I only mentioned it because I was intentionally talking about project managers, who are often confused with product managers anyways, e.g. see:

https://www.linkedin.com/grp/post/42629-100151081

[1] http://www.quora.com/What-does-a-Microsoft-Product-Manager-d...

The goal is to make a great product that makes money. Its not one or the other. Design by definition sits in the middle of business requirements and user needs. Otherwise its just art.

A great product will make money. Otherwise it wasn't a great product. You can make money without a great product, but you can't have a great product that doesn't make money. Therefore design comes first, business requirements comes second, otherwise your offerings are mediocre to bad. Like my Nexus 5.

There's this trend amongst big companies these days, particularly Google and Amazon, to come up with products that don't solve any of their customer's problems. The way these products happen is business requirements gain priority over design ideals. Someone looking at a spreadsheet looking for places to jam a lever in is choosing product direction.

This seems like a narrow definition. A product can be great in the sense of solving an important problem brilliantly but be ahead of its time or not well marketed or not economical to produce.

To me, solving a problem really well is what makes a product great. Making money is certainly related, but it's a distinct challenge.

>you can't have a great product that doesn't make money.

You're speaking as if the open-source movement never existed.

Separately, this is a troubling view of the world in a moral sense.

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