Five common mistakes designers (and others) make
From chasing perfection to skipping strategy — hard lessons I keep seeing again and again
One of LinkedIn post of mine suddenly went viral — people jumped into the comments to argue about the importance of setting up infrastructure early. Then, during a recent lecture, we discussed design debt and usability bugs — and how no one wants to fix them.
All of this inspired me to collect the following mistakes.
1. Chasing perfection
Many designers (broadly speaking) believe their job is to make things perfect. And they get really upset when that doesn’t happen.
But in reality, the main goal is to create a solution that brings value to the business and the user. “Perfect” is a utopia. It’s also subjective — even designers can’t agree on what “perfect” actually means.
In the real world, you need to test, adapt, and find compromises that solve problems and make money. And each year, you need to do that faster.
2. The illusion of long-term solutions
Some designers believe they can create things “for years to come” — an interface, infrastructure, or design system that will never break and will save their future selves tons of time and money.
But in reality:
Product strategy changes faster than expected.
The team today and the team a year from now will likely have different skills and people. As companies scale, they hire people with experience at larger scale.
If the product succeeds, the company will have resources to solve scaling problems later.
I’ve seen designers spend weeks preparing full localization systems — only for the product to never even launch. Same with design systems: they will change anyway. No one knows what problems will appear in a few years. Trying to predict them all is a waste of time — time better spent on customer research, testing more product-market fit hypotheses, etc.
3. Handing over responsibility to managers
Many people blindly accept priorities from management without digging into the context.
But managers make decisions not just based on information and business logic — but also on personal biases, the biases of their managers, their mood, obsession with data or frameworks, and more. If the team doesn’t ask the right questions and help clarify the reasoning, things often go sideways — and everyone’s time and energy gets wasted.
Your career and outcomes are directly affected by how well others do their job. Do you really want to gamble with your life and career on that?
4. Believing design speaks for itself
Every idea needs to be sold. You need to explain its value — otherwise, your team won’t understand it, let alone “buy in.” And then you’ll end up saying: “I suggested a great idea, but no one supported it — there’s no point in proposing anything anymore.”
The world is changing: soon, people will care less about your ability to use tools — and more about your vision, your ability to sell it, build it with developers, and push it through to results.
5. Lack of prioritization (or understanding of it)
Many people still think success means “doing everything” from the backlog. It’s binary: either “0” or “1”.
Recently, someone asked about design debt — saying their list of bugs and issues is huge, but managers don’t care and developers won’t act either — “If managers aren’t worried, why should we be?”
I believe the issue is this: designers often want to fix everything, instead of identifying the critical problems that truly affect the business — and focusing only on those. Prioritize. Find the right arguments. Choose the right moment.
Do you have any others to add?