Don’t Miss the Product for the Artifacts

Ever hear that idiom, “Don’t miss the forest for the trees”? The idea being, you miss the bigger picture because you’re focused on the minutia?

Feels like the tech equivalent is: Don’t miss the product for the artifacts.

Here’s Robin Rendle in a recent piece on design artifacts:

There’s a factory-like production of the modern design process which believes that the assets are more important than the product itself.

Nailed it 🎯

Too often we confuse 1) the artifact created in support of the deliverable, with 2) the deliverable itself.

For example, some designers are awesome at Figma. True wizards at the things they can make. But we’re not Figma designers. We’re app designers, web designers, product designers. Figma is just the tool that facilitates creating the thing we actually want to make. Yet we can spend so much time thinking “being good at Figma” is our purpose, when in fact it’s to use Figma to build something great for people!

Even “website” or “app” can be misleading. A web developer makes what they were hired for: a web site. An app developer makes an app.

But we’re not making websites or apps. We’re making tools and experiences that help people solve their problems.

In that sense, delivering a website is still just delivering an artifact.

And we’re not making artifacts.

We’re trying to help people make progress: solve their problems, find information, complete tasks.

Artifacts are always in service of progress, not progress itself.