The Real Work of Design

A Familiar Story

You’ve been here before.

Your team spent weeks polishing the flows, sweating over the details, and developing a design that you’re proud of. The reviews were positive. The craft was solid.

But then the company shifted priorities. The feature was deprioritized. Or maybe the launch went ahead, but the outcomes you cared about never materialized. The work dissolved into the ether, while a hastily assembled “quick win” got all the spotlight.

It’s a familiar story. If you’ve worked in design for any length of time, you’ve probably felt the sting of watching your effort collide with organizational reality.

It leaves you asking: What’s the real job here?

The Job Within a Job

When people talk about becoming a better designer, they typically focus on craft and process. You learn methods, best practices, and frameworks. You’re told that if you master the tools and apply the right workflow, good things will follow.

But in practice, design is a discipline of navigating people, politics, and priorities. It’s about working inside organizations where incentives don’t always match your values, where being “right” doesn’t guarantee being heard, and where layoffs rarely cut from the top.

The real work of design isn’t just making better products. It’s learning how to thrive within the messy systems that surround them. This book is about those systems.

My Goals With This Book

There are many, many books about how to hone your craft as a designer. Perfecting your craft, while important, will only take you so far in your career, and it certainly won't help you overcome the challenges that seem to be near-universal to the design profession. I wanted to write a book that talks about everything that surrounds the craft, all of the messy details that tend to be ignored by other books. I wanted to give the advice that no one else was giving.  

Who is this Book For? 

While this book was written with designers in mind, much of the information here can be equally valuable to people in many different roles across the tech industry. Product managers, engineers, and others may find the knowledge here valuable. This may also be a handy guide for anyone looking to understand more about designers, where they're coming from, and how they approach problem-solving. 

This book will help you with:

• Learning to thrive within the messy systems that surround products
• Why focusing on “the right way” to do design isn’t that helpful
• Understanding how to add new value to your work
• Realizing that your career may not follow a neat design-ladder trajectory, and why sometimes the best next step looks nothing like a “design role”
• Learning to how and why a company's business model should impact your design choices
• Finding your North Star—your values, your reasons—and letting them guide your career decisions
• Growing influence and building consensus when most people’s minds are already made up 
• Connecting your work to profit without betraying your craft

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