How Design Killed Silicon Valley

The evolution of design's influence on the way we think and how we launch products has created a major shift in how organizations work today. Digital tools have changed how teams work together and being in a single location is no longer required to build great digital products. Some businesses that adopt these new ways of working have seen historic growth, while others that don't may not see tomorrow. ☠️

“It’s funny to think the tech startups who aimed to make online life as easy as possible needed a single location where they all physically went every day.” - Amardeep Parmar

Design used to only happen in Silicon Valley

In the past, the norm for creativity was collaborating together in a room — we even called them "war" rooms. Sitting in a studio jamming on products, you could feel the creativity in the air. This is why people and companies flocked to Silicon Valley: Individuals wanted to be at the center of creativity. They wanted the feeling they could create and be creative with others. As the center of digital world, Silicon Valley produced some amazing products and tools that folks from all over the world would use, from hardware like iPhones to software and apps.

However, centralizing design started to become a problem. Businesses began enticing designers to move to Silicon Valley to be a part of the creative culture. As a result, we started to see products take a very "Silicon Valley minded approach" to solving problems, and the lack of diverse thinking showed in the products it was creating. The pendulum began to swing, thinking that only talented creative people lived in Silicon Valley.

Things were on a slow path to balance this pendulum swing, then Covid happened and everything accelerated — along with the design tools and the new ways of working to enable it.

Design should happen anywhere

If the true ethos of Silicon Valley is embracing a culture of openness and a free exchange of ideas, then this should happen everywhere. Bringing people together from different places, different cultures and different backgrounds only makes products better. Period. The next Silicon Valley is not a single place. It's not even a zip code. The Silicon Valley thinking and doing is now enabled from anywhere in any timezone, and it's creating better products faster.

The next Silicon Valley is not a single place. It's not even a zip code.

The onset of Covid has made it very apparent that offices are not mandatory for great products and productivity. To that point, an office might even slow down the creative process and productivity. Many business have mentioned that if employees were expected to have the same productivity level now working from home as when they move back into an office it would be impossible. From a recent article in the NY Times, Nathan Schultz, a senior executive at Chegg, mentioned that his team completed a project for Verizon in 15 days that he said would have taken a month during normal times.

“They would have filled their time with going down to our well-accoutremented cafeteria in Silicon Valley,” Mr. Schultz said.

Speed is a business differentiator

Getting a good product to market faster has become a key business differentiator no matter the industry. The faster you can get a product in the hands of customers, the faster you can get feedback and see how customers are using it. In today's world, customer expectations are changing daily — if you take 6 months to put a product in market, it might not meet the new customer expectations.

Design teams have always put a focus on bringing diverse groups together to help create new ideas and align on features customers want. Design collaboration across all groups be it design, marketing or engineering creates alignment and a mutual understanding of the product vision, which increases speed to market. Leveraging design-centric tools in a remote-first world has accelerated the ability to bring all these diverse team together into one environment.

Design collaboration across all groups be it design, marketing or engineering creates alignment and a mutual understanding of the product vision, which increases speed to market.

Prototypes over presentations

As product teams become more and more aligned using these remote tools, another benefit is seeing a product come to life in the form of prototypes. Instead of wasting time designing a deck presentation, you can focus the team's efforts on designing the actual product in one centralized location, which further increases the speed for putting a product in market.

Instead of wasting time designing a deck presentation, you can focus the team's efforts on designing the actual product.

This aligned understanding of the product vision directly drives speed to build and enables a team to develop and deliver the product to the market faster. Once the product is in market, the speed to identify issues or opportunities increases, too, and launching and iterating products can happen in days versus months.

Thinking beyond just a design tool

Tools like Figma and those from InVision help data and information come to life, and if looked at as more than just tools used by designers, it can fundamentally change how we work together. These aren't just design tools — they're collaborative team alignment tools communicating a collected understanding of a product vision. Allowing for reduced overhead from context switching between 5-6 different tools to capture and understand the outcomes of a product, these tools can visually enable entire teams at once. There have been recent studies on the effects of back to back zoom meetings on the brain as related to stress and brain noise.

Gathering global product input from PMs, Devs, Marketing, Clients and Users all in one tool allows everyone to see and understand exactly how the product should be created. These tools have become increasingly more accessible to non-designers as well, making it comfortable for anyone to contribute to a product.

These aren't just design tools — they're collaborative team alignment tools communicating a collected understanding of a product vision.

One major improvement is the visibility from entire product teams. Take engineering, for example: All too often these teams worked in silos from the design teams and are forced to make things happen after a design was approved, sometimes leading to longer dev cycles and lackluster execution of products. Now, these teams are seamlessly integrated in real time to see how a design is coming to life with the ability to comment on how it may impact the development. This has also improved the opportunity to unlock hidden data that engineering teams may have visibility into that others do not, creating more powerful, data-informed product experiences.

The creative ethos of Silicon Valley is now woven throughout these collaboration tools with the added benefit of diverse global product input. The next big challenge will be integrating new ways of working to make it “feel” more human connected.

The creative ethos of Silicon Valley is now woven throughout these collaboration tools with the added benefit of diverse global product input.

Less meetings, more productivity

Having a single place where everyone can interact with a product means spending less time in meetings. We all know meetings having increased significantly this last year, which can make it difficult for product teams to find time for working on the product instead of just talking about it. Having deeper visibility into the product and how it works means less meetings and more time collaborating as a team.

Instead of meetings, we're starting to see a "follow me" culture — simply watching and following people in these tools to see and understand whats happening. The tools themselves become a live look in real time at whats happening, which means no need for screen sharing and less meetings. This also helps replace the in-office "Hey, can you take a look at this?" conversations. A lot of times these hallway chats are some of the best feedback and hard to replace remotely.

As we continue to refine remote work and see more hybrid ways of working, design will play a crucial role in how these product teams perform. Speed and collaboration will only grow more important, and making sure its seamless with the team's day-to-day will become a core differentiator for successful businesses.

In the end, all these tools make products and teams better, and give companies a mechanism for delivering products designed by people from different places with different ideas to market faster.