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 him. 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, they praised his outputs without understanding the value or assessing the risks.

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

What they 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 backlog

He produced so much work we lost the ability to evaluate it.

What started 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 team entirely: no gatekeeping, no alignment, no time to check whether any of could solve a real problem. No space to assess if worked in our design system.

This work poured into backlog and confused the teams — impossible to manage, impossible to question, drowning 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.

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 output and 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 did so much and made himself so busy, he lost his power, along with any grip on what good design looks like.

He didn’t question the product documents. Didn’t read user research findings. Didn’t run design reviews or usability tests. Ironically he often complained that he was 'too busy' for process — as if process was a luxury, not the job.

His first ideas became his final outputs. Over and over again.

Design is not just production. It’s discernment — the discipline of questioning, testing, refining and making 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 where it moved the needle. Ask who it helped. Ask what would’ve happened if they’d done nothing. That’s the measure. Everything else is waste.