If there is one painful theme from the past couple years, corporate Design is apparently in a heap of trouble, with countless examples of design groups being dissolved, huge layoffs, and lots of trouble for seasoned designers struggling to find jobs across a wide variety of creative specialties.

Here’s my hypothesis — “design is dying” because of:

1. Weak or non-existent product management that shortchanges the future and therefore the ultimate return-on-investment of design
2. An endemic of creative egos, where everyone now thinks they’re a creative genius yet who are actually lacking any sort of innovation process experience to capitalize on quality design

Let’s ruminate:

DESIGN IS DYING – WEAK PRODUCT MANAGEMENT?

Across businesses large and small, old or new, I’ve seen a severe lack of savviness or process expertise in the fundamental act of product roadmapping. You can identify bad product roadmapping typically at these two extremes:

Extreme 1: The product roadmap is at the whim of a startup founder, or SME owner, or some corporate HiPPO (highest-paid person’s opinion). The roadmap is whimsically ambitious, whipsaws around wildly, and largely exists in denial of reality for resourcing.

Extreme 2: The product roadmap is at the mercy of the sales team, who are acting as order-takers for the customers and force the product and manufacturing teams to act like short-order cooks. The roadmap is really nothing more than a task list looking a quarter or two ahead and lacks nearly any long term strategy.

These situations are covered up with lingo like “responsiveness” or “flexibility” or “ability to pivot”. But if you had a competent process in the first place for aggregating ideas, exploring them, de-risking them, then prioritizing them for ROI – you wouldn’t have such wasteful, profit-draining product dev fire drills.

DESIGN IS DYING – CREATIVE EGO FOR EVERYONE?

The past 3 decades of the Internet have created a society of “makers” and cult followings of “wannabe makers”. Instant DIY-everything. Teens who become overnight media barons. Vapid talking heads who are instantly “influencers” for millions. The lowering of nearly all technology barriers to any type of art, design, engineering or production. You used Canva to make a birthday card? Now you’re a “graphic designer”. You picked a paint color for your bathroom? Now you’re an “interior designer”. Uploaded a video to Instagram? Now you’re a CMO.

So guess what? Every ambitious, smart leader whether they are in startup or climbing a corporate ladder thinks of themselves as a “creative”. The Dunning-Krueger effect rears its ugly head: Organizations are now loaded with dilettantes who think the professions of Design, Product and Marketing are easy, obvious and frankly far more fun and glamorous than their thankless tasks in Sales or Operations or Finance.

You can recognize these people as they have no real distinction between their opinion and their professional recommendation. Professional recommendations come with a foundation of information, exploration and justifications for the challenge at hand. Opinions come out of thin air.

SO WHAT?

Product Management turbocharged with strong Design capabilities results in a strong Innovation Management Process. A strong Innovation Process Management function should fundamentally be focused on profit, not revenue. No offense to all the other business functions, but no other business function cares about profit. Revenue is too addictive. Short term cashflow is too critical. A strong Product Management function serves as a critical checks-and-balance across an organization, demanding holistic decisions focused on profit.

Design as a function will be useless if the fundamental core of a business – Product Management – has no process for methodical foresight or power to check the rest of the organization.