Discovering Common Ground in Tech


The stereotype is so pervasive it’s become a tired joke: designers want impossible things, developers say no to everything, and both sides roll their eyes at each other across the conference table. We’ve built entire careers around this supposed incompatibility, treating the designer-developer relationship like an inevitable conflict requiring constant mediation.

But what if this whole narrative is wrong?

The Myth That Costs Everyone

The biggest lie in product development is that designers and developers are fundamentally different types of people who approach problems in incompatible ways. This myth serves no one—it creates artificial barriers, slows down teams, and produces worse products than either group could create if they actually worked together.

I learned this the hard way. Once I casually mentioned “testing the design with users” in a meeting, and a software architect immediately challenged me: “No one cares about the design.” My instinct was to snap back defensively—after all, design was literally why I was there. But instead, I kept talking and asked questions. It helped that everyone else in the meeting thought that the engineer was being rude :)

It turned out that the term “testing” carried completely different assumptions depending on your job title. For the engineer, “testing” meant writing and running automated tests. For me, “testing” meant user testing. We weren’t actually disagreeing about whether to validate our work—we were using the same word to mean entirely different things. Once I understood that, I could explain what user testing actually involved and why it mattered. That architect and I ended up bonding over our shared love of Paris and photos of Notre Dame after the fire. The difference in our disciplines wasn’t the problem—the assumption that we couldn’t understand each other was.

The truth? Designers and developers have far more in common than most people realize. Both are problem-solvers who break down complex challenges into manageable pieces. Both iterate on solutions until they work reliably. Both care deeply about craft and take pride in elegant solutions. Both get frustrated when politics override logic or when stakeholders make decisions without understanding technical constraints.

Most importantly, both designers and developers are fundamentally creative. Yes, developers are creative—not in the sense of arbitrary artistic expression, but in the deeper sense of generating novel solutions to difficult problems. When a developer refactors messy code into something elegant and maintainable, that’s creativity. When they find an unexpected way to implement a feature that seemed impossible, that’s creativity. When they debug a complex system by seeing patterns others missed, that’s creativity.

The Real Common Ground

Think about what both disciplines actually do:

Systems thinking: Engineers consider how all the pieces of software connect and affect each other. If they change one part of the code, they must consider what might break elsewhere. Designers think about how different parts of a user’s experience connect. If they redesign the checkout process, they consider how that affects everything from initial product browsing to post-purchase emails. Both are thinking about the whole system, not just individual pieces.

Constraint optimization: Developers constantly work within limitations—limited server memory, strict performance requirements, tight deadlines. They must find the best solution possible within those boundaries. Designers face similar challenges with different constraints—limited attention spans, screen sizes, or how much complexity people can handle at once. Both professions are essentially about finding the best possible solution when you can’t have everything you want.

Iterative refinement: A developer writes code, tests it, finds bugs, fixes them, and tests again. A designer creates a prototype, shows it to users, discovers problems, revises the design, and tests again. The specific methods differ, but the overall approach is identical—both are improving their work through repeated cycles of trying something, seeing what happens, and adjusting based on what they learned.

User empathy: Here’s where the myth gets especially misleading. Engineers often design systems for other technical people—when they create programming tools or write documentation, they’re thinking about fellow engineers who understand technical concepts. Designers typically focus on end users who just want to complete tasks without thinking about underlying technology. Both care about making someone’s experience better; they’re just optimizing for different types of people with different levels of technical knowledge.

What Breaks Down Communication

Most conflicts between designers and developers stem not from fundamental incompatibility, but from misunderstandings that could be easily resolved:

Terminology confusion: I once watched two teams spend an entire month in meetings arguing about design system components. One team kept asking for a style for “alerts” while my team insisted we already had one—but we called them “notifications.” Same functionality, same appearance, different words. A month of frustration and wasted time that could have been resolved with thirty minutes of shared vocabulary mapping at the project’s beginning. When everyone uses the same terms for the same concepts, most “disagreements” disappear because they were never actually disagreements about substance—they were just translation problems masquerading as technical conflicts.

Late involvement: When designers create complete mockups in isolation and then hand them to developers, the inevitable “we can’t build that” response kills collaboration before it starts. But when engineers join the design process early enough that technical constraints inform creative solutions, the conversation becomes “what can we do instead?” rather than “why can’t you just build what I designed?”

Assumption gaps: Designers sometimes propose solutions without understanding technical implications. Developers sometimes dismiss ideas without understanding the user problems they’re trying to solve. Both issues disappear when people ask questions instead of making assumptions: “What’s the technical challenge here?” and “What user problem does this solve?”

Building the Alliance

The most effective product teams don’t treat designer-developer collaboration as an unnatural act requiring heroic effort. They recognize that these disciplines are natural allies working toward the same goal—building things that actually help people.

This means pairing sessions where both people solve the same problem simultaneously. It means constraint exploration where limitations become starting points for innovation rather than roadblocks that kill creativity. It means progressive fidelity where both disciplines move from rough to refined together instead of working in sequence.

Most importantly, it means shared ownership where both the designer and engineer take responsibility for whether the final product actually works for users, not just whether their individual piece is technically correct.

The designer-developer divide isn’t inevitable—it’s a choice we keep making because the myth is so deeply embedded in how we organize teams and think about roles. But every team that rejects this myth and builds genuine collaboration discovers the same thing: when designers and developers work as natural allies rather than forced partners, they produce better solutions faster while enjoying their work more.

The question isn’t whether designers and developers can work together effectively. It’s why we ever thought they couldn’t.


My book BAD FIT: A Career Survival Guide will be available in early 2026. Want early access to chapters and additional resources? Reply to this email—I'd love to hear about your own experiences navigating workplace dysfunction.

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