post: design dictator

Author: robinrendle

notes/design-aint-a-democracy.md

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+---
+layout: layouts/note.njk
+title: Design ain’t a democracy
+date: 2024-07-30T15:30:48-07:00
+city: San Francisco
+country: California
+extract: Democracies are the worst way to build a product.
+---
+
+Democracies are the worst way to build a product.
+
+This is the reason why most tech companies are slow and ineffective:  managers aren’t really there to make decisions, set a vision, or settle disputes. These sorts of organizations are designed explicitly _not_ to make decisions as there’s no one you can point to in an organization who can say yes or no to an idea.
+
+So what happens is tons of back and forth about competing ideas or competing projects instead of building things (building should be hard, decisions should be easy and if that’s not the case then it’s management who’s to blame). And this leads to all sorts of wacko pseudo-scientific ways to prioritize tasks and even whackier ways of measuring the success of a product (NPS, questionnaires, etc. etc.) 
+
+What I’ve sort of realized slowly, painfully, over the years is that great design can only thrive with a dictator/director—a single person who can say yes, go, ship ship ship.
+
+Think of any great video game of the last 10 years and each of them has one thing in common: they all have a director who owns every decision. Elden Ring, for example, is one of the best games ever made because yes there were ten thousand talented engineers and artists busting their ass on it but also because there was one person at the top who was responsible for every tree, mountain, and valley in the environment. Someone who set the standard for quality, someone who could channel all that talent, and someone who said “no, try again” or “yes, perfect.”
+
+When it comes to products and software organizations in Silicon Valley, no one really decides anything. Ideas emerge but because no one owns the product, progress is painfully slow.
+
+So when I look back on the last three years of my career and see what tech companies have built and then look at the video game industry and what they can churn out in three years—Shadow of the Erdtree puts us all to shame—it’s clear that the problem is how these companies are organized. 
+
+(These companies are designed to be managed, not designed to build great products.)
+
+Product teams at tech companies are built like democracies and that means there’s no one to go to, no one to pitch brave ideas to. Instead, the product has to be collectively agreed upon by dozens of people—and in my experience great products can’t emerge from a conversation with two dozen people in it.
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+That’s because democracies are the worst way to build a product—and great design requires a dictator.
+
+