Death by Bureaucracy

A lot of companies have great designers. And most of those companies still ship poorly designed and poorly executed products.

That does not mean the designers are bad.

The gap between the quality of designers on your payroll and the quality of the product you ship is the bureaucracy you are carrying.

But that gap is not just about blockers or approvals or “other teams.” It is about whether the setup around design allows great work to survive the journey from intent to output.

Hiring great designers is not enough. You have to build the conditions where their skills can turn into real product outcomes.

The companies that get this right — Linear, Perplexity, early Spotify, early Airbnb — all had something important in common. They created cultures where designers worked at the level of implementation, not just intention. They were not handing off specs. They were shaping the product directly at the point of creation.

At Spotify, designers often prototyped in code and collaborated inside engineering repos. At Airbnb, the design team built a custom React library tied directly to Sketch, making production UI a natural extension of the design system. Perplexity designers ship coded prototypes that often become the actual product. Linear runs the entire company with a minimal gap between design and engineering. Designers build. They test. They ship.

So what is special about this setup? What do these companies get right that others don’t?

A few things that companies that ship good design to users (not just design in design files) do a few things differently:

• Design has direct access to product strategy, not just execution
• Feedback loops between product, design and engineering are fast and direct
• Teams are structured to ship together, not hand work off
• There’s ample room for taste along with hunger to bet on strong opinions
• There’s sufficient space afforded to obsess over details without getting blocked by shipping pressures

This kind of setup does not happen by accident. It happens when companies make deliberate choices to reduce the distance between design and delivery.

You can solve for skill by hiring well. But to unlock that skill, you have to reimagine how your teams actually build.

You cannot keep running traditional waterfall flows. You cannot expect world-class design to thrive in a system where it gets handed off, watered down, and shipped by others. You need to build a system where designers are empowered to own outcomes, not just input.

So if you are seeing a gap between the potential of your design team and the quality of what gets shipped, you should ask: Are the designers set up for success? Or are we unintentionally living in a system where good work gets lost?

You can hire great designers and still end up with bad products. That is not a talent problem. It is a systems problem.

You need to create the right setup where craft can influence what ships. All the way till the end.

Design leadership should actively review what the current path of design work to the user looks like. What are the failure points? Where do decisions become blunt? Where are good ideas getting lost?

The larger your company gets, the more this matters. Because scale magnifies process debt. It slows things down. It adds distance between intent and impact.

Getting the pixels right is not the hard part. You already have designers who can do that.
The hard part is setting up a system where their work has a direct path to the product.

That is what good design leadership is for.
Not just to critique the work, but to protect its path to the user.