I work on UX/UI for startups. Have both worked for big tech companies and have many designer friends in big Tech co’s. The pattern I unfortunately see is that many of the larger firms somehow think they need dozens (a few cases: hundreds) of product designers who are all fiddling in the exact same interface. It’s absolutely nuts.
It becomes an internal battle of who finds a more clever way to present a design in a meeting to a product manager. I’m sure all of OP’s complaints sounded like very clever solutions in meetings. But that’s not where your users are.
Please. Keep your design team to a minimum. Design is not like engineering. More designers working on a single piece of software is counter productive.
Another way to think of this is: no one gets promoted for keeping things the same or making small optimizations. PM’s/designers get rewarded for sweeping changes, which is why UI for a given product often gets worse instead of better. The first version was the usable bare-bones MVP, then things bloat as ppl stuff in features, then it all gets swept away in a “refresh” which often buries the most useful stuff that was simple and boring for the PMs — but they forget about new users seeing it all for the first time.
It would be awesome if tesla let us truly customize the UI with some CSS, or at least accept a few themes that they bless. I want to have my energy usage always visible somewhere on screen, for example, without completely blocking the map…
Customization is nice, but it's a nightmare for testing and support. You can't test every combination, and you can never know if you're seeing the same thing the customer sees. Plus it's murder if you have to share a device with someone else. I have enough trouble just with the radio presets between myself and my wife!
I drive often rental cars. A lot of modern cars have a difficult UI. Often are things somewhere hidden, while even on the oldest car, there was just a button.
I've seen initial versions of UIs having been created in a certain way because of multiple valid reasons (people that worked on it really put some thoughts into it), those reasons (priorities of fields, differentiation of informations, speed of entering data, overview of the data, ...) were never written anywhere => the next people that worked on it changed that because of any reason and the result was often worse - maybe by having guidelines/explanations associated to the UI (similar to what is done for the app's code) would avoid that.
I think you’re hitting on a real problem, but one that’s slightly adjacent to what you describe. The size of the design team is correlated with, but not the cause of dysfunctional product and design management. A large team where responsibilities and ownership have clear delineation, and ideas are validated through research, shouldn’t result in cleverness competitions.
There's that, and there's the fact that once you show up to the meeting it's basically open season for anyone with eyeballs to give their hot takes about design as well.
At least in a restaurant, there's not a line of people who've just finished your food who are about to tell you how you should actually cook it.
It becomes an internal battle of who finds a more clever way to present a design in a meeting to a product manager. I’m sure all of OP’s complaints sounded like very clever solutions in meetings. But that’s not where your users are.
Please. Keep your design team to a minimum. Design is not like engineering. More designers working on a single piece of software is counter productive.