We live in a massively diverse world and good design should broaden perspectives and expand our understanding of the world. Seek and amplify perspectives that challenge assumptions—it’s how teams and products grow stronger.
Good design is often described as invisible. To me, it doesn’t just mean clean interfaces and elegant use of white space. It means problems don’t arise because someone planned for them. The seams never show because someone already pulled on every thread.
In my experience, the people most likely to pull on those threads aren’t the ones with the most traditional backgrounds. They’re the ones who come out of left field with an unlikely scenario nobody else thought to raise, and ask “will it work for this?” Because when you can design something that holds up in the most unusual, high-stakes, or improbable situation, it’ll work effortlessly for your everyday ones too.
I’ve seen what happens when that perspective is missing from the room. I worked on a team designing a messaging feature that would let customers communicate directly with service providers through an app. Sounds straightforward until someone on our team, who had the lived experience of being stalked and harassed online, flagged that the initial release had no privacy or safety controls whatsoever. That observation didn’t come from a research report. It came from someone who knew firsthand what that risk felt like.
I’ve observed a team designing a cost-splitting feature framed around splitting the bill for an expensive international vacation…for a platform where the average customer was someone who held multiple part-time jobs. The disconnect was staggering. I once had to explain to a senior leader why a user calling support from a bus was a completely reasonable scenario. Their instinct was to ask why that person couldn’t just call from their car, which assumed car ownership was a given, and that someone working back-to-back shifts and commuting on public transit had twenty private minutes to spare.
Working in tech, especially at a certain level, can insulate you from the everyday constraints and realities that a lot of people navigate. Nobody in that room was being careless on purpose. They were just designing from their own experience, which is exactly what we all do when we don’t have other perspectives in the room to push back.
There’s a version of this that gets dismissed as a research problem, and yes, strong qualitative and quantitative research can surface a lot of it. But research requires time, attention, and a genuine commitment to understanding your full user base, not just the one that looks like your core—or ideal—user. And when your team shares the same academic background, the same career trajectory, the same general relationship to stability and privilege, the research questions you think to ask may reflect that. You can’t investigate the gaps you don’t know exist.
Design for the Edge Cases, Hire for the Unexpected
This is why I care deeply about who’s in the room. Not just about diversity as an abstract organizational value, but because people who have had non-linear careers, unconventional paths, and varied life experiences bring a fundamentally different quality of thinking to design problems. They ask harder questions. They’re more likely to see around corners. They’re less likely to assume that the way they experience the world is the way everyone does.
When I hire, I’m not just scanning for expensive colleges, impressive company names or tidy career ladders. I’m looking for range. Curiosity. Evidence that someone has worked across different product areas, thought about downstream effects, and demonstrated some genuine understanding of the people who use what we build. A portfolio full of polished case studies from well-resourced companies is one signal. But the designer who can tell me about a time they caught something nobody else saw, that’s the person I want on my team. I want to work with people who humble me when I miss something, because they brought their unique perspective into the room—it’s what makes us all stronger.