2026 is here. Welcome to the first article of the year. 🎉
The start of a new year is more than just about beginning anew. It is a chance to reconsider what you want to do. You can choose where to focus your time, your energy, and your skills. You don’t need to completely reinvent yourself (unless you want to). For designers, that question feels especially important right now.
Making things has never been easier or faster. We can prototype, iterate, and ship at a pace that would have felt impossible not long ago. But as execution gets cheaper, the real challenge has shifted. The work that matters most now happens before we open a design file.
This article is about that change. Choosing what to build is now more crucial than how fast or well you build it. This ability is becoming one of the most valuable skills for designers.
The design industry is at a real inflection point. For a long time, our value was closely tied to execution. How fast can we design or wireframe? How polished is the UI we designed? How fluent are we in our tools?
That still matters, but it is no longer the constraint.
Today, we can spin up prototypes, flows, and even working software in a fraction of the time it used to take. Making things is easier than ever. The harder and more valuable skill now is knowing what’s actually worth making in the first place.
As building gets cheaper and faster, the conversation inside product teams has shifted. We’re no longer stuck on “can we build this?” The real questions are tougher.
- Should we build this?
- Why this instead of everything else we could be working on?
Teams are sharpening their focus on purpose, impact, and smart trade-offs over feasibility. Many teams have limited time and energy. So, they need to make thoughtful decisions.
Designers are synthesizers
Designers sit in a unique position in this new reality. We’re close to user behavior, business goals, and technical constraints all at once. A product manager might notice a metric slipping. An engineer might notice a system limitation. Designers tend to notice the human friction that connects those signals.
Good ideas hardly ever come from a single breakthrough insight.
They arrive through synthesis. We see patterns form across behavior, research, conversations, and constraints. Three users encounter the same problem at the same step. They describe it in different ways. The business’s needs conflict with user expectations. Pattern recognition is a key way designers help teams figure out what matters most.
The power of the thinking artifact
Noticing the problem is only half the work. The other half is helping the team see it too. This is where making becomes a form of thinking.
Prototypes aren’t only for making an idea as real as possible. They’re a way to explore what a decision feels like. A simple three-screen flow can spot issues faster than a long strategy document. It can reveal confusion, tension, or unnecessary complexity in a brief moment.
When we build to think, not to ship, we bring better questions into the room earlier.
- Does this actually solve the friction we noticed last sprint?
- Are we creating real value, or adding more surface area?
- Is this trade-off worth the impact on users?
Be a designer in action
Picture a team creating a detailed, data-rich dashboard. Users want better visibility. A designer could spend weeks refining tables and layouts. Or they could spin up a paper-thin prototype in an afternoon and show it to a handful of users.
They might discover that users care only about one specific number. By getting the team to think, the designer saves weeks of work. This shifts their focus to the factors that have a significant impact.
Leading with judgement
This is why this skill matters so much right now. Designers who connect the dots and spot opportunities have more influence. They use making as a way to think. This approach helps shape what gets built. Knowing what is worth building and what isn’t is where the biggest impact lies.
If you want to start exercising this muscle tomorrow, try a few small shifts
Build to interrogate. When you’re handed a feature request, don’t start with a high-fidelity mockup. Make a rough prototype that focuses on the messiest part of your idea. Use it to determine whether it resolves the problem well.
Voice the patterns. When you notice the same friction recurring across many user sessions, don’t log it and move on. Link it to the roadmap.
Solving friction can better advance business goals than launching a new feature.
Here’s how
- Focus on efficiency: fixing friction points improves current processes. This leads to faster results.
- Customer satisfaction: smoother experiences keep customers happy. Happy customers are more likely to return.
- Cost-effective: Solving issues often costs less than developing new features. This saves time and resources.
- Immediate impact: Addressing friction can show quick wins. New features take longer to see benefits.
Removing obstacles can speed up progress more than adding new features.
Default to “should.” In your next planning chat, focus less on how long design will take. Instead, think about what you won’t build if you choose this.
As the cost of building continues to fall, your value isn’t in how well you use a tool. It’s in how well you use your judgment.
