Nielsen Norman Group surveyed 150 designers and researchers enrolled in their 'Product and UX: Building Partnerships for Better Outcomes' course and found that roughly half reported the same core problem: alignment. Not craft. Not tooling. Alignment.
The most frequent complaint was facilitating agreement across engineering, product, marketing, and leadership simultaneously. Designers described themselves as organizational glue with no adhesive: no frameworks, no formal authority, no training for the cross-functional coordination they are already doing every day. Misaligned workflows, time zone fragmentation, and fuzzy success metrics are the actual job, and nobody prepared them for it.
The full article breaks down all the major theme categories from those 150 responses, not just the top one. If you work in or alongside a design function, the taxonomy of failures is worth reading in detail. The gap between what design school teaches and what product orgs actually demand is wider than most leaders recognize.
[READ ORIGINAL →]