I had such a great time speaking and hanging out with the community at Y OSLO last week! It was fun to hear the reactions to my talk “Bridging the Gap: Creating True Partnership Between Product and Design”. I continue to be fascinated by the shared challenges and the common ground we find when we come together in community, no matter what seems to separate us.
In fact, “what seems to separate us” was really what I was there to examine in my talk—in this case understanding the differences in culture and viewpoint that keep product and design teams at odds, in a permanent adversarial stance.
In the talk, I conclude that what matters more than whatever differences we perceive is reclaiming a lost sense of commonality. When we remind ourselves and each other what we share, we create the space to imagine something new together.
Because in the end it’s not the processes or the structures or the frameworks that are responsible for our success. It’s people coming together and deciding that their success is necessarily shared, and refusing to buy into narratives that place one side’s success at the other’s expense.
And maybe, if we can figure out how to do that, in our absurdly little corner of the universe that is digital product development, we can find a way to do it everywhere else too.
Jesse James Garrett 