Anyone who loves creating products is never satisfied. There are always more customer needs to meet. More innovation to deliver. More problems to solve. More rough edges to polish. The perfect is the enemy of the good and every great designer/product person knows this, so eventually you do have to ship/launch. And preferably sooner rather than later. But the vision of how completely you want to tell the story of your product never shrinks. It only grows. And telling that story is your job as a designer, but it’s almost never your job alone. That can be challenging, but it can also be good.

Customers hear your story from articles in the press, from friends’ recommendations, from advertisements, from trying the product themselves. Every interaction tells your story. And the marketer in your organization is typically responsible for all the storytelling that doesn’t involve designing the product itself. The brand, the ads, the tone, all these things that the marketer is responsible for make up the promise. They are out there every day making promises to the public. In the best world the marketers and the product folks (the designers and engineers) are thick as thieves. The promise is something they came up with together. The marketers go and hone the story and the product folks hone the product itself. That product, in our case software, is the delivery of the promise made by the marketing. The promise and the promise’s fulfillment go hand in hand. And they should be conceived from the same genetics. But that’s not reality in many organizations.

Reality is something more along these lines. (And yes, I know that it’s actually a spectrum and there are many variations.)

Situation A – Marketing Rules the Roost

In these organizations, marketing defines the product, the ads, all of it, and then tells the product folks what to create. Sure, they involve the product folks early on, but the product folks are the tail and the tail does not wag the dog in these organizations. In fact, the bulk of the design talent (if not all of it) is over in the marketing group. The engineers are relegated to the strictly technical roles.

Situation B – Engineers are the Currency of the Realm

In these organizations, typically high-tech companies, the engineers are kings. Everyone else is second class. Ultimately the engineering group checks the code into the build and decides what the product will be. Do YOU want to argue with that surly engineer who’s worked here for 20 years and written 80% of the codebase by himself? (And yes, it’s always a “him”.) The designers are also-rans in this organization. The marketers are there to dress up whatever the engineers deliver. Sometimes the marketers generate lots of documents trying to convince the engineers what to build. This is usually done with limited efficacy.

Designers have the opportunity to rise above this dichotomy by partnering intelligently. In a previous post we talked about how designers can partner with engineers who want to make great products. In high-tech companies where the marketers have limited say over the product the designers can become their biggest advocate even if the engineers are keeping marketing out of the process.

Situation C – The Dream

In this world the product designers partner with the marketers from day one. They collaborate on the story they want to tell the customers. The designers have enough leverage in the engineering organization and technical know-how that they know what can and can’t be built in a reasonable timeframe with the technology available. The marketers bring the product people into the brand and advertising discussions (usually strictly marketing’s own domain) as they know that these things need to be designed together. The logo is not something to be jammed in an empty rectangle on the screen the day before the product launches. (I’ve seen this happen firsthand.) The brand, the identity, the tone of the language, the aesthetics, the collateral visual elements, even the audio cues all come from a singular story and a shared pantry that the marketing department and the user experience designers pull from. And in this world, the promise and the delivery of that promise are harmonious.

This doesn’t guarantee success, but it’s certainly better than a promise unkept, or a great product never discovered because of a lousy promise.

Marketers in situation A are less likely to want to partner to this degree because they only have things to lose. They’re already in charge. But in high-tech companies, the opacity of the engineering process often leaves many marketers as peripheral players in the politics of building the product. That’s where a designer has an opportunity to insert themselves. In many of these companies the marketers only sense of impact is in how much budget they have to spend on the marketing of the product (be it for research or outward bound messaging). Designers who understand this dynamic and are willing to take on some of the marketers work on the side will have the advantage in bridging the divide and creating The Dream situation. You heard me right… do design favors for the marketers. They have limited budget and much of it is spent hiring people JUST LIKE YOU. Do some design work for them on the side and they will be your best friends.

But user experience designers must speak the language of marketers in order to have a chance. They must understand the dynamics of their business, and the metrics used to measure the business’ success. In other words, the designer must not only embrace the technology of their medium but the economics of it. The designer that can straddle those worlds and deliver designed solutions that factor in both sets of requirements into a product that people love is the true User Experience Design Leader.