Forward Deployed Design Is Bigger Than Engineering

14 July 2026

I’m back on the forward-deployed design beat because I want to make sure that as this practice starts to scale, we’re writing job descriptions and hiring for the right shapes of folks.

One thing that’s bugged me watching this conversation over the last year is how engineering-coded it’s become. I know it’s hard for engineers to believe, but not every important problem is a math problem. Some problems require sitting with people, understanding why they work the way they do, figuring out where the real bottleneck is, and designing around that instead of immediately reaching for software. Forward-deployed design isn’t inventing a new way of working so much as rediscovering an old one.

One question I got after my latest post was asking for examples of “service designers can do product management” work. Running discovery, facilitating workshops, managing stakeholders, scoping work, helping teams make decisions and leading delivery have always been part of service design. Artifacts like service blueprints and journey maps are valuable. So are workshop facilitation and stakeholder management. I’d argue that most orgs aren’t making enough time for those kinds of things anyway, so relegating a service designer to the role of “speciality UXer who we can’t afford because our problems are too fast for that,” is how I think (at least in the US) service design has been treated downstream.

AI doesn’t make those skills less valuable. The cheaper generating solutions gets, the scarcer understanding the problem becomes.

My latest post is on Making Public Work.