This was written a few years ago but it captures a mind shift that was important for me and that I think is still missing in a lot of places.
This realization, that nearly every role at a company is making decisions that will have some impact on the user experience of a designed thing, has huge implications.
Whether you think semantically that makes everyone a designer or not is besides the point. The really meaty things to dig into are the implications of this mental shift.
If you accept this view, it follows that effective designers need to be really good at collaborating with a variety of roles and functions (and vice versa).
If you believe that collaboration is aided by having shared language, understanding, and respect, that means effective designers need to be really good at getting fluent in other roles and functions, and other roles and functions (hello data and software people!) need to have some level of fluency in design.
A design mindset needs to be present in many, many decisions and that happens more effectively if it permeates the organization and isn't just the purview of a single department or role.
