The first time I heard about the role of the Chief Designer Officer was when reading for the first time one of my favourite books: "Sketching User Experiences", from Bill Buxton. 

Is design leadership an executive level position?
Do you have a Chief Design Officer reporting to the president?

These are very good questions to ask to a CEO, and I agree with Mr Buxton's conclusions:

If the answer to the last two questions is no, (...) the likely message you are telegraphing to your employees is that you are not serious about design and innovation.

Design and Innovation

I know I've got quite a crowd coming from Hacker News, and I can bet that right now most of them are already getting suspicious: why on earth is this guy (and his so-called design-guru) putting design at the same level of innovation?

In the minds of most, innovation happens at the engineering level. Coming myself from the engineering part of things, I can understand this position: crafting software can definitely be innovative. If you take Facebook, for example, there is undoubtedly a lot of innovation going: from Cassandra to HipHop, their way of operating helps reducing costs, increase scalability, and do other great things that actively help Facebook success.

Product innovation though comes mostly from design, and is normally the result of a successful design process. Let's just make another simple example: Basecamp owes most of its success to how it was designed. Everything in Basecamp, especially right after launch, was rather basic: a simple todo application, a basic wiki, some messaging and a way to share files, tools that most project management tools had, most of the times with more features (some would say "more complete"). Basecamp put together those features to be very easy to use, understand and learn, introducing practices that are now the rule of thumb (build less, blank states, start with no), and serving their segment wonderfully. Was that product innovative? Hell yes, in 2006 a product with more features was objecively better than a product with less features, and Basecamp started changing that idiotic rule.

The point is that design and engineering are equally important in bringing innovation, and sometimes can also be complementary. I can go as far as to say that engineering is useless without design as much as design is useless without engineering.

Why we have a CTO, an executive responsible of the engineering, and not a CDO, an executive responsible of design? Who is accountable for the design process? Who can enforce good design practices and bring professional ethic in the craft of design? In a few words, if the CEO wants Comic Sans, who can say no and by no means win over such a terrible decision?

Nobody.

What's the job?

Let's take the classical lean startup loop. Even though coming from Agile development practices the lean startup loop always made a lot of sense, since the first time I looked at it I noticed a huge competency gap, that arrow that goes from "ideas" to "code", with that enigmatic "build" label.

What does it mean "build"? Of course, that's where design comes in.

A CDO should take care of whatever happens between idea generation and code writing, he should be the link between the problem team and the solution team, putting the CTO in the position of not guessing a solution, but having already a solution to discuss and implement.

From my experience, design is most likely to be first of all a process of filtering, eliminating what's not important "right now" and setting priorities and scopes. It honestly never happened to me to have a well defined solution right after problem definition, but most likely a problem with a range of possible solutions, sometimes very different one to the other, indicating that the problem wasn't defined that well after all. A good designer must be very good when it comes to reducing a problem at its minimum terms, that's why I'm suggesting he is perfect to stand between problem and solution team.

To summarize: a Chief Design Officer should be accountable of the design process and of the design itself, he should iterate over the solutions he implements caring about a whole different problem area: the interaction between users and the application.

Am I the only one to think that design should have a clear leadership and deserves a better position in an executive? Who is accountable of design in your startup/company? Who answers for that? Let me know in the comments.