This is the third dispatch in our series of Grand Design Challenges for 2025. Click here to read Part 1 and here for part 2. Check back next week for the final two installments.
Enterprise Software
The Grand Challenge of enterprise software is not directly a design problem but one of poor decision-making (a product problem), which adversely affects a product’s potential and quality. The challenge is steering stakeholders and decision-makers toward better decisions on strategy, goals, feature sets, priorities, and timelines; otherwise, the result is lots of vaporware, failed pilots, and technical debt. Product and project success depends on quality decision-making, and an apparent reason for failure is when there is no formal product management. Too often, design or technical leads filling the gap are underqualified, overloaded with too many other obligations to do the job properly, or both. Poorly executed product management is better than the worst case, which is none at all. We can do better.
Enterprise companies have many design service needs. Their software needs are evergreen. Most enterprise software is bespoke to fit the unique conditions of the company or its customers. It is productized software you cannot buy from a third party. This self-built software suffers from poor visual and interactive design even at a time when most 2D digital design problems are solved and commoditized.
Enterprises are complex environments where personality and political dynamics drive decision-making more than objective data on user needs, efficiency improvements, or market opportunities. Stakeholders suffer from cognitive biases, faulty rationale, blind logic (not based on data), and false confidence when making feature scope, prioritization, and timeline decisions. Ironically, stakeholders who are risk-averse and unwilling to commit time or budget to improve insight-informing decisions elevate risk, handicap their designers and developers, and impose a ceiling on the success of their projects. For example, product discovery (research, feature validation, design validation) is always the first stage of product development to be cut or limited to the point of ineffectiveness.
Focal Points:
- In the absence of formal product management, how do designers influence and shepherd stakeholders to make higher quality decisions grounded in strategy and data and less from self-conviction and politics (in other words, employ product management best practices)?
- How do we convince stakeholders that product delivery through product discovery, strategy, and design is more efficient than the shortcuts or unproven promises of the new “it” technology?
- When should design or technology leads take on the product manager role, and when is the scale large enough for a dedicated product manager? This assumes leads are knowledgeable of and skilled at product management and the product model philosophy.
