A friend’s software startup is all devs, no designers. Devs complain that requirements (“stories”) aren’t defined enough.

There’s confusion about who to hire to fix it. “Designer” is too broad, too visual. “Product owner/manager” only makes sense at larger-scale firms.

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We can call the missing role, upstream from programmers, the “system designer.” This is somebody who uses time and resources as constraints to make trade-offs about what to build.

Their inputs are demand-side (what people value). Their output is supply-side (shaped work).

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A system designer differs from a “designer” by setting the boundary of what’s in/out. Within that, there are a million hard things to get right that require a designer’s expertise.

They differ from a PM because design is about making trade-offs. Mgmt is about doing it all. 3/3