The worst designer I've ever worked with was also the most productive

Credit: AutoSysConveyors

This ambitious young designer pumped out more screens in a day than more-experienced designers would in a week. Leadership adored them. They saw the speed, the volume, the 'beast mode' energy — and mistook it for value creation. Under pressure to sign a lifesaving contract with a major customer, management praised the increased output without understanding the value or assessing the risks.

By rewarding speed and volume over quality and necessity, leadership created a dangerous feedback loop: the more this designer produced, the more praise they received, the more resistant they became to a rational user-centred design process.

What those leaders failed to see was a growing pile of unaudited, untested, and misaligned design work: a ticking time-bomb of incoherence, technical debt and costly rework that would eventually cost the team far more than it saved.

Flooding the zone

This eager young designer produced so much work that we ultimately lost the ability to evaluate it.

What began as impressive momentum became an unmanageable flood. Screens appeared in the backlog faster than anyone could review them. No critique, no usability testing, no standards. Most of it bypassed the design team entirely: no alignment, no time to check whether any of it could solve a real problem, no space to assess if it worked in our design system.

This work poured into the backlog and created confusion across teams. Impossible to manage, impossible to question, it drowned the design process in sheer volume. Work went straight from Figma to Jira, bloating the pipeline with decisions no one had the time or space to challenge, creating an illusion of progress.

The pile grew taller and the thinking grew thinner.

This is what political agitators call 'flooding the zone': Overwhelm a space with noise until discernment and critical thought collapses. It’s a powerful tactic to kill scrutiny and accountability. In design, pure productivity is just as corrosive. Inundate a team with outputs and artefacts and eventually, no one can tell what’s good anymore.

Build the right thing. Build the thing right.

John Maeda defines power as doing less to get more. But this ambitious young designer made themselves so busy, they lost their power, along with any grip on what good design looks like.

They didn’t question the product documents. Didn’t read user research findings. Didn’t run design reviews or usability tests. Ironically they complained they were was 'too busy' to follow our processes, as if a design process was a luxury, and not their actual job. Their first ideas became final outputs. Over and over again.

Design is not just production. It’s about discernment. Design is a discipline of questioning, testing, refining and making hard choices.

As Marty Cagan put it, great teams build the right thing, and build it right. That means not just making something, but making the right thing, at the right time, for the right reasons.

Something that works for real customer's needs at a fair price.

Flooding the zone is easy. It looks impressive. It gets promotions. But that's not progress: It’s just output. Without critical thinking, output becomes theatre — things that look nice but solve nothing.

Good designers slow down when it matters. To clarify the problem. To align with their team. To create outcomes that matter.

When someone brags about how much they shipped, don’t applaud. Ask what impact they had. Ask who they helped. Ask what behaviour they changed for the better. Ask what would’ve happened if they’d simply done nothing.

That’s the measure of good design. Everything else is waste.