Nothing to show
Good design is paid for in time before anything ships. Most organisations won't pay, and most of them are right.
Ask any organisation’s leaders whether they want world-class customer service and of course they’ll say yes. Their values statements tend to be less definitive though: of the 465 companies I collected for Values Explorer, 284 don’t bother mentioning the customer at all. Lip service costs nothing, but writing it down costs something. Truly budgeting for great customer service is where almost everyone stops, because the distance between good enough and world-class isn’t a straight line: that last stretch costs more than everything else before it. Design has the same curve, and I’ve spent most of my career watching organisations stand at the bottom of it describing the top.
Here’s what the peak looks like from inside:
- Figma was founded in 2012 and launched in 2016
- The iPhone took about two and a half years from the start of Project Purple
- Linear spent a year in private beta before it was ready to launch
- Dyson’s first cyclone took five years and 5,127 prototypes
- A Pixar film takes four to five years
None of these organisations is slow once something exists; Apple ships annually and Linear ships weekly. The price these organisations paid isn’t pace, it’s the time invested before anyone commits.
That time is spent on iterations that get thrown away, or an idea held open past the point where a roadmap would have closed it or pinched it off as an MVP. Kano put the qualities that make a product remarkable on a separate curve from the ones that make it adequate, and that curve isn’t straight either: the cost concentrates at the end. From outside the design team, the end looks exactly like nothing happening.
Which is why nearly everywhere declines to pay the full bill. Salaries, even if they’ve taken a hit recently, are covered, but the real cost of better-than-good-enough design is a visible stretch in which nothing ships, inside a business that reports in quarters, or raises money on its momentum. Continuous delivery is built for good enough: the sprint exists to ensure that nothing stays open long enough to become remarkable.
I’ve been the person asked to defend six months with nothing to show, and every month you spend a little more of the credibility you built by shipping, in rooms where nobody has ever had to hold a thing open that long, and credibility spent this way doesn’t come back when the work lands.
Don’t go thinking that just removing deadlines will result in marvels. Time is necessary but it’s not sufficient: Magic Leap, Humane and Juicero each had years as well as stacks of money. And honestly, for most businesses design is simply a hygiene factor, where bad costs you but good past a threshold earns you almost nothing. So good enough for many organisations is the correct answer rather than a failure of nerve. It’s fine.
What the organisations that paid for the top share is something besides time: a founder or patron who chose to carry the cost personally. Jobs. Dyson. Erwin Braun behind Rams. Dylan Field at Figma. Most organisations don’t lack the will. Nobody inside them is permitted to carry it, or has the courage and the capital to hold that position through adversity.
My advice is small and discomforting. If you have power in an organisation and don’t want to hold that position, please stop loudly claiming the top of the curve while silently budgeting the bottom. If you’re serious, the price is set by visible periods where nothing ships, with a named person who’ll defend it when it doesn’t. If that’s not for you, say good enough is good enough and learn to mean it. It’s a respectable position, and considerably cheaper for everyone involved than pretending.
Name the person in your organisation who could spend a year with nothing to show and keep their job. That’s the acid test.