I have a confession to make. As a young Design ‘pioneer’ in many tech companies, I always felt like I had to deal with some sort of unfairness: all I wanted to do was ‘design’ — have the peace of mind to solve business problems by making cool things, in some fun, efficient, collaborative way — but I had to spend most of my energy advocating for obvious best practices and processes across the entire company. I often wished someone could remove that burden from me and just let me do my thing.

我要坦白。 作为许多科技公司中年轻的设计“先锋”，我总是觉得自己不得不面对一些不公平的事情：我想做的只是“设计”-放心地通过做一些很酷的事情来解决业务问题，以一种有趣，高效，协作的方式–但是我不得不花费大部分精力来倡导整个公司中显而易见的最佳实践和流程。 我常常希望有人可以减轻我的负担，让我做我的事情 。

Why did they hire me just to leave me entangled in their organisational problems? Why the reality inside small/medium European tech companies was so different from the San-Francisco-books? For example, why was I constantly justifying or explaining my presence? So. Many. Questions.

他们为什么雇用我只是为了让我陷入他们的组织问题中？ 为什么欧洲中小型科技公司的现实与《旧金山手册》如此不同？ 例如，为什么我要不断证明或解释自己的存在？ 所以。 许多。 问题。

With time, I figured that my real mission was to become the epicentre of change those organisations needed to embrace a Design mindset — but honestly, I was completely unprepared and untrained for it.

随着时间的流逝，我意识到我的真​​正使命是成为那些组织必须接受设计思想的变革的中心-但是，老实说，我对此没有充分的准备和培训。

So I went through phases: I started learning about all areas of the business, I violated my introvert self and claimed my seat at every meeting, started advocating for design best practices and spent days writing essays about them to ‘convince’ the rest of the company. At this point, I thought I was finally enlightened and accepted my new role.

因此，我经历了一些阶段：我开始了解业务的所有领域，侵犯了自己内向的自我，在每次会议上都占有一席之地，开始倡导设计最佳实践，并花了几天时间撰写有关它们的文章，以“说服”其余的领域。公司。 在这一点上，我认为我终于得到了启发，接受了我的新角色。

Beautiful. Fast-forward to today and looking back, I’m just starting to realise how much creative energy I wasted because Design wasn’t already at the core of those companies and decided that all this is frankly unacceptable. We have a problem with the current state of Design.

美丽。 时光倒流到今天，回首过去，我才刚刚开始意识到自己浪费了多少创造力，因为设计还不是这些公司的核心，因此坦率地说所有这些都是不可接受的。 我们对设计的当前状态有疑问。

Disclaimer: When I say “designers” in this article, I refer to roles in Product Design, User Experience Design, User Interface Design, Interaction Design and similar. When I use the unspecific word Design (instead of Design Thinking or other buzzwords), I refer to the philosophy that’s the baseline of all these disciplines, but that can and should be adopted by anyone, without the need for those words to be part of their job titles.

免责声明：当我在本文中说“设计师”时，指的是产品设计，用户体验设计，用户界面设计，交互设计等角色。 当我使用“ 设计”一词(而不是“ 设计思维”或其他流行词)时，我指的是作为所有这些学科的基础的哲学，但是任何人都可以并且应该采用这种哲学，而不必将这些词纳入其中。他们的职称。

Design is a mindset and not just a discipline that manifests itself in a variety of roles. And surely it has nothing to do with making things prettier. It’s a very ambiguous word, unfortunately. But now you know, it’s a way of working that invests many different disciplines, and that has very strong principles at heart. For Design to be effective, a company needs to believe in and commit to those principles.

设计是一种心态，而不仅仅是一门可以在各种角色中体现出来的学科。 当然，这与使事情更漂亮无关。 不幸的是，这是一个非常模糊的词。 但是，现在您知道了，这是一种投资许多不同学科的工作方式，并且具有很强的原则。 为了使设计有效，公司需要相信并遵守这些原则。

Unless someone still has doubts that we are all makers of things, that we should build products together, with our users in mind, basing our decisions on a learn>iterate>measure cycle, and feel an enormous ethical responsibility on our shoulders… in 2020, Design should be one of those words we absorbed, like ‘digital’ or ‘interactive’, that became so obvious that now can be safely omitted.

除非有人仍然怀疑我们都是万物的创造者，否则我们应该在铭记用户的基础上共同打造产品，将我们的决策基于学习>迭代>衡量周期，并在肩负着巨大的道德责任……2020年设计应该是我们吸收的那些词语之一，例如“数字”或“互动”，这些词语变得如此明显，以至于现在可以安全地省略。

(Sorry, I’m gonna say it…)

(对不起，我要说...)

Companies should just be born with a Design mindset at their core.

公司应该以设计思维为核心而诞生。

Yet, Design is still not obvious at all, and I see companies making terrible mistakes, wasting their money and energy. Integrating Design teams is still a mystery.

但是，设计仍然一点也不明显，我看到公司犯了可怕的错误，浪费了他们的金钱和精力。 整合设计团队仍然是一个谜。

Why is it so hard to embrace Design and why is it so hard to handle designers (so much that most of them will go through an existential crisis at some point)?

为什么接受设计如此困难，为什么要与设计师如此困难(以至于他们中的大多数人会在某个时刻经历生存危机)？

I tried to bundle up some advice from my point of view. Some ways to avoid the most common pitfalls.

我试图从我的观点中收集一些建议。 避免最常见陷阱的一些方法。

1.检查您的操作 (1. Get your Operations in check)

OK… Some companies are just dysfunctional and bad at management and operations in general. Those companies will just hire the wrong people and screw their careers. Or maybe they’ll hire the right ones, but lose them along the way. With pretty bad foundations, they will fail to effectively share their vision, empower their people and leverage their potential to achieve their business goals. It means that the same existential crisis that a designer can feel, will also be felt by an engineer, a Marketing or BD person.

好吧……有些公司只是功能失调，一般来说在管理和运营方面都很糟糕。 这些公司只会雇用错误的人并破坏他们的职业生涯。 或者，也许他们会雇用合适的人，但一路走失。 如果基础不好，他们将无法有效地分享自己的愿景，增强员工能力并无法发挥潜能来实现业务目标。 这意味着工程师，市场营销人员或BD人员也将感受到设计师所感受到的同样的生存危机。

创建结构和支持 (Create structure and support)

Companies that want to hire their first designer, or their 100th, should think about the experience they’re creating and the growth paths they’re making available for that human being. Did someone listen to their aspirations? Do they have what it takes to help them thrive? Do they need a special onboarding process? To be able to create a design team, or scale an existing one, companies must have a solid, tailored framework to support them.

想要雇用第一个或第100个设计师的公司应考虑他们正在创造的经验以及为该人提供的增长途径。 有人听过他们的愿望吗？ 他们有什么需要帮助他们成长的吗？ 他们是否需要特殊的入职流程？ 为了能够创建设计团队或扩展现有团队，公司必须有一个坚实的，量身定制的框架来支持他们。

雇用/建立团队时要有策略 (Be strategic when hiring/building a team)

Building a great team is like making a band, it’s essential you put people in the right roles.

建立一支优秀的团队就像组建一支乐队，至关重要的是，要让人们担任正确的角色。

This means being intentional and strategic about every single role, being specific and transparent in defining their responsibilities, and involving the right people in the hiring process.

这意味着 故意的和战略的 关于每个角色， 具体而透明 在确定他们的职责时，以及 让合适的人参与 在招聘过程中。

A Product team with missing or overlapping key roles, unclear responsibilities and consequential nonsense process, will only generate unwanted drama that will spread like a virus, and ultimately, will prove to be highly inefficient.

一个产品团队如果缺少或重叠关键角色，职责不明确以及随之而来的废话程序，只会产生像病毒一样传播的有害戏剧，最终证明效率很低。

了解团队动态(基本上，成为一个好的领导者) (Understand team dynamics (basically, just be a good leader))

Most of the companies out there are not prepared to manage designers in relation to other key roles, mostly because they lack the understanding of the best practices to create a truly empowered team.

大多数公司不准备与其他关键角色相关的设计师管理，主要是因为他们缺乏对创建真正授权团队的最佳实践的理解。

Companies are made of wonderful human beings, therefore, each company is a universe on its own, with its own ever-evolving ecosystem, underlying rules and magic chemical reactions. Even hiring the five smartest people doesn’t automatically equate to success, as unexpected team dynamics can come in the way of great work. All that is expected from managers/leadership is to truly care, listen and monitor those dynamics to create the conditions for each member to unlock their potential. As Nicole said:

公司是由出色的人组成的，因此，每个公司都是一个独立的宇宙，具有自己不断发展的生态系统，基本规则和不可思议的化学React。 即使雇用五个最聪明的人也不会自动等同于成功，因为出乎意料的团队动态可能会妨碍出色的工作。 经理/领导层所期望的是真正地关心 ， 倾听和监视这些动态，从而为每个成员创造条件以释放他们的潜力。 正如妮可所说：

“Your goal as a manager is to 10x the people around you by empowering them to do their best work.”

“作为管理者，您的目标是通过授权他们尽力而为，将周围的人扩大10倍。”

2.了解什么使一个有能力的产品团队 (2. Learn what makes an empowered Product Team)

Young designers might not know: even great companies are not necessarily knowledgable about Design. I found out pretty soon that even those that claim to be Agile ninjas, often don’t know how to deal with designers, let alone how to build effective Product teams. That’s partly because ‘Design’ is a forever-evolving, fluid and often misunderstood term no one can be bothered to keep up with, and partly because designers often fail to bring clarity into these contexts (more on that below).

年轻的设计师可能不知道：即使是伟大的公司也不一定对设计知识。 我很快就发现，即使那些自称是敏捷忍者的人，也常常不知道如何与设计师打交道，更不用说如何建立有效的产品团队了。 部分原因是“设计”是一个永远发展，流动且经常被误解的术语，没有人会被困扰，并且部分原因是设计师经常无法在这些环境中引入清晰性(更多内容请参见下文)。

In a glimpse of design-maturity, I thought that was fair:

瞥见设计成熟度，我认为这很公平：

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

“雇用聪明的人并告诉他们该怎么做是没有意义的； 我们雇用聪明的人，以便他们可以告诉我们该怎么做。”

— Steve Jobs

—史蒂夫·乔布斯

…But someone forgot to mention that limbo where companies won’t fully trust those smart people or give them the necessary autonomy, support or resources to make an impact.

…但是有人忘了提到这种困境，即公司不会完全信任那些聪明的人，也不会给予他们必要的自主权 ， 支持或资源以产生影响。

Today, I would expect the leaders at any company trying to hire Product Designers to have a good understanding of what an empowered Product Team looks like.

今天，我希望任何试图雇用产品设计师的公司的领导者都能对授权产品团队的面貌有一个很好的了解。

Marty Cagan perfectly explains the difference between (real) Product Teams and Feature Teams. Three simple components make up real Product Teams:

Marty Cagan完美地解释了(实际) 产品团队和功能团队之间的区别。 三个简单的组件组成了真正的产品团队 ：

[…]they are cross-functional (product, design and engineering); they are focused on and measured by outcomes (rather than output); and they are empowered to figure out the best way to solve the problems they’ve been asked to solve.

[…]它们是跨职能的 (产品，设计和工程)； 他们专注于成果 (而不是产出)并由其衡量； 他们有权找到解决他们所要解决的问题的最佳方法。

Feature teams are those teams that are not empowered and only exist to serve the business, delivering features, occasionally projects, provided to them in the form of a roadmap.

功能团队是指那些没有权力但仅能为企业提供服务，提供功能(有时会以路线图形式提供给他们的项目)的团队。

Use Marty’s definitions to understand where you stand.

使用马蒂的定义来了解您的立场。

In an empowered product team, the product manager is explicitly responsible for ensuring value and viability; the designer is responsible for ensuring usability; and the tech lead is responsible for ensuring feasibility. The team does this by truly collaborating in an intense give and take, in order to discover a solution that works for all of us.

在授权的产品团队中， 产品经理明确负责确保价值和生存能力 ； 设计者负责确保可用性 ； 技术负责人负责确保可行性 。 团队通过真正的付出和付出来真正做到这一点，以发现对我们所有人都有效的解决方案。

I strongly believe that to create meaningful work, the presence and the healthy dynamics within these three roles is really not negotiable. Anything else just isn’t Product Design.

我坚信，要创造有意义的工作，这三个角色中的存在和健康动态确实是不可商议的。 其他什么都不是产品设计。

3.准备改变观念 (3. Be ready to change the mindset)

Companies that are new to the design world, but are curious to enter it, should know that just adding one person that’s skilled in some design discipline is not enough to quickly reap the benefits of a Design culture (assuming that’s what they want in the first place). The habit of approaching a problem from a design perspective is a much larger transformation that entails involving the whole team, getting uncomfortable, restructuring, giving up some control, potentially working with methods never used before. Above all, sometimes it means shifting perspective towards users or the common good, and away from the business, which, yes, can be scary.

刚接触设计领域但又对进入设计领域感到好奇的公司应该知道，仅仅增加一个在某些设计领域内熟练的人员不足以Swift获得设计文化的好处(假设这是他们最初想要的)地点)。 从设计角度解决问题的习惯是更大的转变，需要整个团队参与，变得不舒服，进行重组，放弃一些控制权，并可能使用以前从未使用过的方法。 最重要的是，有时这意味着将视角转向用户或共同利益，而不是业务，这是很可怕的。

4.比较期望 (4. Compare expectations)

Every company is implementing its own interpretation of Design, and that might be OK, as long as it’s clear for everyone what that is.

每个公司都在实现自己对设计的解释，只要每个人都清楚这是什么，那就可以了。

As designers, we can easily and rightfully feel invested with the huge responsibility of executing a design ‘transformation’ when it was never our company’s intention to undertake that journey. It’s important to align on the meaning of ‘Design’ from day one and clarify what everyone’s expectations are. I’m talking about meeting as soon as possible to discuss:

作为设计师，我们可以轻松而合理地承担执行设计“转型”的巨大责任，而这并非我们公司的意图。 从第一天开始就必须理解“设计”的含义，并阐明每个人的期望，这一点很重要。 我正在谈论尽快开会讨论：

• What’s the purpose of this company and what’s its vision for the future (note: two different things)? What’s the current plan to execute that vision? How do they think Design will contribute towards those goals?

  该公司的目的是什么，对未来的愿景是什么(请注意：两件事)？ 目前执行该愿景的计划是什么？ 他们认为设计将如何为实现这些目标做出贡献？

• What’s their understanding of Design and what structure and processes do they have already in place to support it?他们对设计有什么理解？他们已经采用了什么结构和流程来支持设计？

• What risks are they willing to take and what changes are they willing to make to facilitate a smoother collaboration with the Design team in order to achieve those objectives?

  为了实现这些目标，他们愿意承担哪些风险以及愿意做出哪些改变以促进与设计团队的更顺畅的协作？

• What is expected from your role? and from your team? How will they measure your success?

  您的角色期望什么？ 和你的团队？ 他们将如何衡量您的成功？

• What’s the final decision-making process?最终的决策过程是什么？
• Etc.等等。

That’s a conversation in which designers can provide a lot of input. What’s important it’s not taking anything for granted.

那是设计师可以提供大量输入的对话。 重要的是，这并非理所当然。

5.如果您是设计师，则应提供清晰的说明 (5. If you’re a designer, you should provide clarity)

Of course, the responsibility for a good relationship lies with both sides. Before we talked about companies not providing autonomy and support to their employees; now we talk about employees that for whatever reason are shying away from taking ownership and making decisions.

当然，有一个良好的关系，就在于双方的责任。 在我们谈论公司不向员工提供自主权和支持时； 现在，我们谈论的是员工，无论出于何种原因，他们都回避了拥有所有权和做出决定。

Designers must learn to pitch the business value of design and become more conscious of their role of ‘gatekeepers’ of what we are bringing into the world. We have to protect this role and gain credibility through our actions. Assuming our value is obvious to everyone or simply refusing to embrace the unexpected political aspect of our profession is a mistake. We can try to work with already ‘design-savvy’ companies that can make our life easier, but really, the essence of our profession lies in the effort we make every day helping those companies become more conscious of their impact on other human beings. That can be done at any company, with any proficiency level.

设计师必须学会推销设计的商业价值，并更加意识到自己对我们带给世界的“看门人”的作用 。 我们必须保护这一角色，并通过我们的行动获得信誉。 假设我们的价值对每个人都是显而易见的，或者仅仅拒绝接受我们职业的意料之外的政治方面是错误的。 我们可以尝试与已经“精通设计”的公司合作，这可以使我们的生活更轻松，但实际上，我们专业的本质在于我们每天都在努力帮助这些公司提高对其他人的影响的意识。 可以在任何水平的公司中完成。

Designers can also improve their position through knowledge — Most of my frustrations were due to the fact I couldn’t distinguish between what was normal and what was just dysfunctional. If you can recognise what’s was going on around you, you’d have more elements to make better choices such as ‘fight or flight’.

设计师还可以通过知识来提高自己的位置-我的大部分挫败感是由于我无法区分正常情况和功能失常之间的事实。 如果您能识别出周围发生的事情，您将有更多的元素可以做出更好的选择，例如“战斗还是逃跑”。

We are makers of things and we own the processes to make those things. In 2020, we have the shared ethical responsibility to do it right.

我们是事物的创造者，我们拥有制造这些事物的过程。 在2020年，我们有共同的道德责任去做正确的事。