Are you the problem? Or is it your company?

The vast majority of us spend our days just doing stuff by rote.

A task comes across our desk, we follow the specs, then hand it on. Because, if you’ve had at least a year or two’s experience in product design, your good enough to create a decent webpage without too much effort.

You know the best practices. You’ve already got a design library to work from. You just move a few elements around & there you have it.

So we get lazy. We just do stuff. Without thinking. Without questioning.

The why we should be asking ourselves is replaced by what.

Yet such thinking will eventually lead to failure — whether through poor decision-making or, simply, mediocre product design.

We know this deep down, but we still do nothing about it.

Whose fault is it then?

When you are the sole product person, maybe when the company just has a few founders involved, that’s your bad. That’s your responsibility to change, to question, to drastically improve your decision-making.

But in a larger team? Who’s really responsible for that?

Company culture.

One that shies away from risk. One that just asks you to go through the motions. One that promotes intellectual laziness, asking you to just do what the competition does or just get on with what is handed down from you from your superiors. One that doesn’t push for success, but, rather, for a regular pay check.

Is it the founders’ fault? Yours? Your teams?

Who is responsible for poor decision-making doesn’t really matters. What matters, instead, is whether you believe you are able to change it:

Can you be the agent of change in your company? What impact can you have? If you push for change & don’t see results, is it time to move somewhere else, where you can make an impact?