Lately it seems we hear a great deal about “craft” in UX, at least via the LinkedIn algo. But it does seem baked into nearly every job description, even for senior leaders! Why must a Head or VP of Design still prove their worth with “exquisite craft”? Isn’t their value supposed to lie in vision, influence, and leadership? 🤔 Perhaps that’s a post for another day, on the conflation of taste, craft, and quality… sigh. But it seems that a key driver of this “craft” obsession—let’s just say it— involves Figma’s massive presence. I mean, it reigns supreme—and maybe rightfully so, given its very useful features enabling rapid Eng+Design+PM collabs, along with precise screens for implementation. Figma has seized the attention of executives, founders, and product leaders, almost becoming synonymous with design itself — regrettably. 😬
Here’s the risk I see: the tech industry’s over-dialed focus on producing Figma mockups (“give me a Figma” has now replaced “I need a design”) can lead teams to mistake execution for strategy.
Strategically impactful design isn’t about polishing pixels in Figma—it’s about the underlying problem-solving, systematic critical thinking, and conceptual modeling that create products customers truly value, and willing to pay for! 🤑 Doing that—creating real value—requires a kind of design mastery that goes far beyond pixels.
Design tools are part of the path to master, but not the whole story.
Of course, learning the mechanics of a tool or a process—the tactical execution—can certainly make someone highly proficient, to the point that what’s created seems almost magical. ✨ With constant practice those rote sequences become second nature, just like the finely tuned muscle memory of a musician. And frankly, easily replaceable by scrappy new AI tools like Loveable or V0 where just a few elaborate prompts can yield sufficient outputs to unblock a team. 🙃 Pure execution skills are increasingly a vulnerability, if not a full liability.
But bonafide design mastery—especially for long-term strategic impact—goes far beyond efficiently cranking polished designs. It’s a fusion of mechanics, mindset, and something harder to define: a kind of alchemy. The ability to navigate complexity & ambiguity with clarity, confidence, and an intuitive strategic fluency. That’s what unlocks real value—and drives results with revenue. 💰
Three levels of design mastery
The way I see it, most folks move through three stages on their journey of becoming a designer.
1. Mechanics: The foundation. At the entry level, design is about mastering tools, steps, and raw execution. The goal is straightforward—create something functional, aesthetically pleasing, and capable of solving a specific problem. Many who transition into design from other disciplines start here, often drawn in by the visually appealing outputs the field produces. And that’s totally cool! But mechanics alone do not make a designer. 😇
2. Mindset: The motives and values. The next level requires a deeper understanding of context and purpose. Why are these design choices being made? What trade-offs exist? How do constraints, contingencies, and possibilities shape the final outcome?
This is where critical thinking, curiosity, and skepticism become essential.
Impactful designers don’t simply follow a formula or template or pattern—they challenge assumptions, ask “What if?” and provoke potentially awkward or uncomfortable conversations that could lead to better outcomes. It takes careful courage and confidence, no doubt! 🤨
3. Alchemy: The true art of strategic design. Mastery is when design moves beyond execution—it becomes intuitive, strategic, and influential. A practiced fluency that lets you adapt, negotiate, and lead through complexity. This is not just about style or usability—it’s a deeply internalized understanding, the ability to adapt dynamically to unforeseen challenges, and a fluidity in navigating complexity, including relationships among stakeholders, competing priorities or confused agendas, to find a good, effective negotiated compromise, per principles/values. 🤔
From my view, a negotiated compromise builds on the messy, real-world process where the team hashes things out—surfacing different needs and views from Eng, Design, and Business—and lands on an aligned solution that works well enough to keep moving forward. It’s shaped by strong opinions, real-world limits like time & budget, plus a shared sense of what matters overall for the product.
It’s kinda like playing jazz: everyone brings their own style, riffs off each other, and adjusts in real-time—sometimes clashing, sometimes harmonizing—until the team finds a groove that works and keeps the overall composition in mind.1
Experienced designers who bring deep mastery akin to alchemy don’t just solve delivery execution; they invent new possibilities, anticipate future obstacles, and create systemic change in a holistic manner, that is not only effective but meaningful — while leading cross-functional teams forward together. 🙌🏽
In a sense you’re like a “complexity whisperer” who knows how to foster bridge-building, transforming a mediocre mess into powerful momentum.
Gladwell popularized the idea that 10,000 hours of practice can make someone an expert. However, for designing digital apps, services, and flows, mastery isn’t just about logging hours of cranking out mockups & assets via Figma or GenAI tools. It’s about reflection, adaptation, and the evolution of your professional approach.
The truly effective designers cultivate their ethos over time, developing a sense of direction that permeates their thinking, decision-making, and leadership style.
Such deep expertise requires a journey of continuous learning, exposure to diverse situations, and the ability to transform experienced moments into personalized, intuitive practice that makes you a confident, capable strategic designer of unique value. There will be many humbling falls along the way — believe me, I know! 😅 But that journey of design mastery can improve the way you design products & services, engage customers, and drive innovation with real strategic value.
It takes time, reflection, and a willingness to get a little lost — but it’s worth it. Because there’s no ‘auto layout’ trick for becoming the kind of designer who shapes strategy and drives real impact. 🙃
✦ If you’d like guidance moving towards a strategically impactful designer, reach out for a free initial discovery call. Learn about my coaching services here →
By the way, Jim Kalbach has a fantastic talk about improvisational jazz as a model for dynamic team collab — highly recommend it! 🎷
This is so true, there is a bit of alchemy going on when we create something new that, with collaboration, starts breathing a life of its own. And it is true that over time you bring your own unique “special sauce” perspective to your design leadership and your design influence. Mine happens to be radical simplicity and clear directness. My designs come out to be simple and direct and my design team starts to follow that tune. And I probably can’t count on two hands the number of “Figmas“ I have had to learn in 20+ years that were all the rage until they fell by the way for the next shiny new object. (Except for Flash. Flash was a godsend to an animator like me, gave me a UX career and taught me how to rapid prototype back in the early 90s - way before that was a thing for designers - and enabled me to create amazingly interactive prototypes, even passing data around.) Designers like the challenge of making shit work in Figma, but in doing so can easily forget about the problem that they’re trying to solve, which is the user’s.