Answer by Glyn Williams, Grizzled game industry veteran, on Quora,
There is within the tech industry, a common notion.
"It's all about the engineering."
Engineering needs study, it needs rigor. And it makes all this stuff possible.
Engineers are like builders. Without builders, we would not have buildings.
But builders need architects.
To create great buildings, we need a grand vision of the final structure. And that vision needs to be shaped around the experience of the users of the building.
Engineers, in my experience, love process. They love methodology. When comparing skills, an engineer might boast of a spectacularly impressive problem that he solved. But engineers don't spend a lot of time thinking about outcomes.
To an engineer, two products, both containing similar components, and involving similar development strategies, are equivalent.
To a designer, the difference is all about how people use and experience the product. To a designer, those two products are not equivalent if one provides a superior experience.
From a designer's perspective, the engineering should be servicing design and not the other way round.
Where Steve Jobs made a difference was creating a technology company where the relationship between design and engineering struck the right balance. The highest priority of the company was not achieving the highest numerical performance, or the lowest numerical production cost, but rather the best user experience. And that is a much harder thing to quantify.
Job's role was not as a chief engineer. And not even as a designer. But rather as sort of proxy for the consumer. In most tech companies, the QA guys are the lowest paid, and the least respected. In
Jobs used his taste and sensibilities to shape products in a completely different way. He cared about the look of the thing. The weight. They shape. The packaging. How it sounded - and then made the company iterate, and fix and refine products until they met his expectation.
He was an architect.
It's becoming interesting to see how other tech companies, who have steadfastly placed engineering first, continue to make mis-steps by placing engineering priorities before user experience.
At some point, someone will figure out that you shouldn't assume that every builder can become an architect.
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