The best design work I’ve done has never happened in isolation.
It happened in the room between design and engineering, where a well-framed problem is more valuable than a polished mockup. It happened when a developer pushed back on a component I’d spec’d out and we found a better pattern together. It happened when a researcher’s findings changed the direction of something I thought I already understood.
I came to this view slowly. Early in my career I thought good design was mostly about craft — getting the hierarchy right, sweating the details, having a strong visual point of view. Those things still matter. But I’ve come to believe that understanding is the real leverage. Understanding the constraints engineering is working inside. Understanding what’s actually hard for users under time pressure. Understanding why an existing pattern exists before deciding to replace it.
Cross-functional collaboration isn’t a soft skill. It’s a design skill. The ability to translate between disciplines — to speak both the language of intent and the language of implementation — is what separates systems that get adopted from systems that get worked around.
This is especially true in design systems work, where the “user” is often a fellow designer or engineer and success depends entirely on trust. You can’t govern your way to adoption. You earn it by being useful, being responsive, and being honest about tradeoffs.
I don’t always get this right. But it’s what I’m aiming at.