Design Engineers/Design Researchers

Design in modern product organisations should change. Most design roles could be split into two: Design Researchers & Design Engineers. These could be the same people in a team, but could easily be split up.

Design Researchers

Designers who lean deeply into qualitative research practice. Cover all the basis that user research roles do but can take those insights and combine with strong synthesis skills. They also have a good understanding of what a good product looks like, as well as thing about things in terms of "services" not just an interface.

Roles already like this are Service Designers and User Researchers. However I think have a design background could help bring more creativity to this role.

Their main job is to help the business side (PM, CEO, Sales etc) deeply understand the problem they want solve, why, and shape a high-level solution. They should be as close to the problem space and business strategy as possible.

Design Engineers

Designers who lean deeply into front-end engineering. They focus on the UI layer including visual and interactive parts of the product. Depending on the product/team they may have a wider scope to think about the whole scope of frontend but really depends how the product is structured.

Roles like this already exist and also could include some FE engineers.

Their main job is to take the shaped problem and high-level solution, prototype ideas, and then implement them with the wider engineering team (usually full stack or product engineers). They should write production code but depending on the stack. They should be as close to the existing product and solution as possible.

This role split isn't about division of labour but more about how designs impact lives on either side of the problem/solution hill. Also both sides of that hill have other teams that are generally leading those parts of the project. Instead of creating a design middle section, we should fall in with either side and bring value.