The Brief: Microscopes and telescopes

0:01This is an audio version of The Brief. The monthly dispatch from Design Better. Microscopes and telescopes. A friend and former colleague called me recently to catch up and get my perspective on an important question. See, he leads a product team at a major tech company, and the design team had just been moved under him. He's an exceptional product thinker with a sharp grasp of engineering systems and shipping processes. But managing designers, that's definitely new territory. Where should design really fit into our workflow, he asked me. What struck me most was that he asked at all. Too often when design moves under product and a reorg, it becomes a service function.

0:45Something to be brought in after the big decisions are made, to polish the edges, you know, add the visuals, and make things look good. And that, of course, sells the value of design way short, and my friend sensed it. He didn't want design to just support the work of engineers. He wanted it to play a part in shaping the product. That's the way it should work. So I shared what I've seen in organizations where product and design truly thrive together. It starts with recognizing that engineers and designers bring fundamentally different perspectives to the table. Engineers are microscopes. Designers are telescopes.

1:25engineers tend to be focused on the here and now they're driven by efficiency elegant problem solving maintaining code and building resilient systems they often operate on short feedback loops they're fixing bugs optimizing performance closing tickets it's urgent high stakes work especially when you have to stay late on a friday night to fix something urgent you need that tight focus when the fire alarm is going off. Designers, on the other hand, are more tuned to experience, patterns, and consistency. They think about how interfaces feel over time, how a brand holds together across surfaces, how a customer moves through the experience, not just in one moment, but across their whole journey.

2:11Their work often lives in ambiguity, requiring exploration and reframing before landing on a solution. These different perspectives aren't in conflict. They're actually quite complementary. I told my friend to think of engineers as microscopes and designers as telescopes. Engineers zoom in to understand near-term issues, because precision and speed matter when you're shipping to millions of users. Designers, on the other hand, zoom out to see the broader ecosystem, because coherence matters when you're building something people want to come back to again and again. They're different time horizons.

2:49But here's the catch. Most companies dramatically over-index on the microscope. They fixate on short-term goals. Quarterly OKRs, sprint velocities, shipping the next feature. It's like reading a newspaper through a straw. You get sharp details, but you miss the full story. There's real danger to this singular myopic approach. We lose our bearings when we stop looking to the horizon. Marty Kagan of Silicon Valley Product Group once told us, most teams are what I call feature teams. They're just there to design and build features that the executives usually are the ones coming up with. We need both instruments, the microscope and the telescope.

3:34We need to look down at what's right in front of us, but we also need to look up at what's coming over the horizon. When organizations treat design as a strategic partner instead of just doing finishing touches, they unlock a different kind of innovation. Design helps you see around corners, imagine new possibilities, and build for the future, not just for the next release. And the data backs this up. McKinsey's Business Value of Design report found that companies that tightly integrate design into their strategy and operations grow revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their peers.

4:13Build the right thing, don't just build the thing right. When design and engineering are integrated early, at the problem definition stage, teams are far more likely to build the right thing, not just build the thing right. I encouraged my friend to lean into the superpowers of both sides of the team and make them both aware of how they contribute. To celebrate the short-term, bug-squashing brilliance of engineering while also creating space for the long-term horizon scanning thinking that design brings. Because the future belongs to leaders who can do both. Zoom in and zoom out. Microscope and telescope working together.

4:53And here's the thing. Even if you're not a design leader, understanding how design and engineering relate and how their perspectives complement one another is still a powerful thing to know. It gives you the language to advocate for design. It helps you bridge disciplines that often operate in silos, and it enables you to guide your team or organization towards better decisions and better products. When you recognize the unique strengths that designers bring, not just as pixel polishers, but as systems thinkers, pattern recognizers, and experience architects, you can start to unlock the full potential of design.

5:31That's when design starts driving business outcomes, not just interface outcomes. It's not about where design reports on the org chart. It's about where it shows up in the conversation and who's helping it get there.

5:45Aarron Walter:Learning new languages and ways of thinking. Cross-functional teams don't always falter because they fail to value each other's skills. Friction can also happen because they speak different languages or even have an entirely different way of thinking about the problems that they're solving. Sarah Seeger is an astrophysicist who studies exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system that might harbor life. When her publisher approached us to pitch her coming on the show to talk about her book, The Smallest Lights in the Universe, we weren't quite sure what our audience of designers and creative technologists might take away from her stories.

6:18Aarron Walter:Quite a lot, as it turns out. Because her work crosses so many professional boundaries, Sarah has become an expert in learning different professional languages and finding common ground. A core part of those skills comes from a willingness to invest time in learning about new domains. I think it's not just in science, but also from what I see from the outside in so many startups. Like if you have a great idea, you want to pursue that. And you can bring in other experts, it's true. But in order to lead that group, in order to make it happen, you yourself need to have some deep conceptual knowledge on the topic.

6:49I still do now pursue these new topics. And now we have the internet, there's online classes. It's a lot easier, I think, to pick up a new skill, to learn a subject or refresh on one that you might have learned something about before.

7:02Aarron Walter:Learning new skills is even easier than when we spoke to Sarah several years ago. Designers can vibe code functional prototypes with tools like Lovable and Cursor, and developers can vibe design with tools like Subframe. Each team can now bring designs and prototypes to the table to foster better communication and collaboration. But experimentation also means being open to failure and occasionally looking a bit foolish in the process. I think there's a certain sense of willingness to take a risk and to fail and to look bad. There's a lot of times when, I won't say I don't know what I'm talking about, but let's say it's in chemistry.

7:36And the other people, they know I'm not a chemist. And they're not expecting you to be an expert on it. But you know that you might ask a question or say something that just seems really dumb, because it might be. You have to be willing to put yourself out there in order to make the idea happen. So again, it's like that tension between how much do you want to do this and how much are you willing to risk?

7:54Aarron Walter:It's not only new languages and skills that we need to learn to work well with our colleagues. Sometimes the people we work with have neurodivergent ways of thinking, as we've discussed in prior issues of the brief. In Sarah's case, she was diagnosed with autism late in life at the age of 46. She found that creating an autism rulebook for herself and the folks she works with helped her get over some of these challenges. I'm still figuring all of that out, to be honest. I do try to mentor some younger people who are also on the spectrum. and what we end up having to do is, I hope it doesn't sound too extreme for you, but we end up creating a rule book, like how to interact in certain situations because in the world that I live in, it's very black and white and it's cut to the core.

8:37So in this world, there's no small talk. There's no being nice to people, not because you're mean. It's just like not a thing. It's not necessary. Just sort of want to cut to the chase and just talk about what really matters. And what goes along with that is a kind of abruptness and it's a perceived coldness and rudeness. So we have to work around that because it doesn't foster a good feeling situation that motivates other people. I think being aware of it is the first step to making it better.

9:03Aarron Walter:Engineers often zoom in on the microscopic details and designers search telescopically for broad perspectives. But the magic happens when we create translation layers between these different ways of seeing and when we give everyone permission to switch instruments occasionally. To read and share this episode with friends and colleagues, visit designbetterpodcast.com. And while you're there, you can become a premium subscriber, which will get you access to the brief newsletter in your inbox every month. Plus, ad-free episodes, extra episodes every month, and so much more. Just visit designbetterpodcast.com.

9:46Amen.