Presented with the "LinkedIn for AI" problem, the designer's first step isn't visual design. It's product strategy: clarifying the core objective (e.g., matchmaking, certification), identifying the target user groups (job seekers, employers), and defining what "a good match" even means in this new context.

Investing in upfront industrial design saves millions by preventing the development of the wrong product. By rigorously defining user and business needs before engineering ramps up, ID increases confidence and reduces the risk of costly pivots or building a product nobody wants. Every answered assumption is a unit of risk removed.

Designers once felt like imposters, but the profession grew rapidly, championed by figures like Steve Jobs. Now, design has a "seat at the table" and is recognized as a critical differentiator and a core business process for problem-solving, not just aesthetics.

The design firm Herbst Product operates on the principle that elegantly solving an irrelevant problem is a total failure. This emphasizes the supreme importance of the discovery and definition phases in product development. Before building, teams must ensure they are addressing a genuine, high-value customer need.

A common misconception is that user research involves asking customers to design the product. This is wrong. The process is a clear division of labor: customers articulate their problems and pain points. Your team's role is to then use its expertise and resources to devise the best solution.

The core job of a software designer is to make products that look good and work well to drive sales, a principle from industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. This requires a holistic understanding of users, the medium, and business impact, mirroring the original practice of industrial design.

AI-generated design falls short because it cannot integrate the myriad of constraints top designers handle: business goals, cultural context, brand emotion, and system-wide consistency. AI will eliminate drudgery, freeing designers to focus on this higher-level, holistic, and creative work.

Don't design solely for the user. The best product opportunities lie at the nexus of what users truly need (not what they say they want), the company's established product principles, and its core business objectives.

Design is often mistaken for aesthetics, like choosing a border radius. Its real function is architectural: defining the simplest possible system with the fewest core concepts to achieve the most for users. Notion's success, for example, comes from being built on just blocks, pages, and databases, not from surface-level UI choices.