Nielsen Norman Group surveyed 150 designers and researchers enrolled in their 'Product and UX: Building Partnerships for Better Outcomes' course and found one result dominating all others: alignment. Not craft. Not research methodology. Alignment, specifically the work of getting engineering, product, marketing, and leadership onto the same page before anything gets built.
The single most common theme was facilitating alignment between disciplines. Designers described themselves as the connective tissue of their teams, bridging functions across time zones and org charts with no formal training or tooling for that role. Fuzzy success definitions, misaligned workflows, and cross-functional communication breakdowns are the actual daily job. Nobody taught them how to do it.
The full article maps all the major themes from those 150 responses, not just alignment. Read it for the breakdown of where designers lose influence, why the gap between design work and shipped product exists, and what organizational skills the field has systematically failed to develop.
[READ ORIGINAL →]