INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS: who gets to define the product?
More and more teams are splitting product decisions across four separate roles. PMs define what it does. UX owns the interaction. Researchers control the insight. And industrial design gets looped in after the fact to “make it look pretty”, most often too late to actually influence anything that matters.
This isn’t about ego, it’s about outcomes.
Design used to lead product. Not just the shell, but the whole thing. How it worked, what it solved, and how it fit into people’s lives. Now we’re being brought in to add polish after the structure is already built.
No one pulled that power away from us. We gave it up by sitting back. And in a lot of cases, we’re not even in the passenger seat anymore. We’re in the back, trying to be helpful, if we’re lucky.
If industrial designers need a say in product again, we have to stop waiting for an invite. That means showing up earlier, making a case for integrated thinking, and reminding teams that the customer experience doesn’t start at the surface, it runs through the whole thing.
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Product managers are claiming user needs definition. UX designers are claiming interface decisions. Design researchers are claiming user understanding. And industrial design is getting pushed further downstream into "make it pretty" territory.
Here's what actually happened. Software ate the world, and suddenly companies needed people who understood pixels and flows. They hired UX designers. Those designers brought research methods and user advocacy. Product managers emerged to coordinate cross-functional teams. Each role carved out territory and defended it with frameworks, certifications, and job titles.
Industrial design predates all of them. We were doing user research before it had a name. We were defining product requirements before PMs existed. We were designing interactions before there were screens to put them on. The difference is we were also thinking about manufacturing constraints, material properties, ergonomic reality, and physical form simultaneously. We never got to specialize because the physics wouldn't let us.
Now we're in this weird situation where a PM defines what the product does, a UX designer defines how users interact with it, a researcher validates the assumptions, and industrial design gets the leftover decisions about housing and CMF. As if those aren't interconnected from day one.
No other discipline is fighting this battle. Mechanical engineers own structure. Electrical engineers own circuits. Software engineers own code. But product definition, user understanding, and interaction design have become contested territory with no clear owner, just whoever has the most organizational power in that particular company.
The question isn't who deserves to own it. The question is whether fragmenting these decisions across four roles with different incentives and timelines actually produces better products than one discipline that never stopped thinking holistically.
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