Nowadays, everyone is talking about design leaning into strategy, ostensibly because AI is going to eat our lunch in the arena of producing visuals. That’s not actually true, but a lot of executives think it’s true, and that confusion is guiding their investments, which amounts to the same thing in the end.

And sure, design should do strategy. But that binary framing of strategy & production as the only two jobs that need doing is part of the problem. There’s a secret third thing that design excels at, which gets downplayed in a world dominated by feature factory thinking and output-driven productivity metrics.

That third thing sits at the intersection of architecture and maintenance. I’m going to be calling it experience governance: the process by which we prevent experience rot, or at least organize its abatement.

Because I’m one of those “the interface is not the product” people, I’m going to give you an example that has nothing to do with software: pandemic social distancing signs. They addressed a very important problem; in software terms they were a priority one feature (aside: if your planning process has a priority zero, you need an intervention). Effort was put into implementing them. But long after we learned that 6 feet of distance wasn’t much help against COVID-19 and implemented a better mitigating feature in the form of vaccines, they’re still there.

This is an example of a good feature that has outlived its usefulness, but many features start out being bad (either by being poorly designed, or by being a “build, measure, learn” effort that mysteriously forgets to do the latter two steps). And in a tech industry that mistakes velocity for productivity, no one is incentivized to slow down and think about the emergent properties of all those features. No matter how delightful they are individually, the aggregate of all that delight is misery.

Productivity without governance just turns your website into sludge.

Which brings me to perhaps the coolest innovation in product development that I’ve seen in a while: the OECD sludge audit. This is the maintenance part of experience governance: providing value through removing things that no longer serve (and perhaps never actually served) user needs, rather than simply covering up the sludge with a new layer of paint.

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it comes from the public sector and from content design — two areas that are far less captured by the output bug than front-end design and the private sector. The public/private split should be obvious (business models rarely follow the pattern of “make thing people want” because there are more profitable approaches) but I want to dwell a little on the other half of that contrast.

One of the most pervasive mythologies in this field is that it was ruined in the 2010s by graphic designers who started calling themselves UXers (paired with the laughable claim that graphic designers actually invented UX back in the 60s or something). There is a parallel story told by product managers about people they don’t like: that they are merely project managers who changed to a trendier title.

Those distinctions are pointless. It doesn’t make a difference what you call yourself if feature releases are the heartbeat of your entire practice. As long as your work is fully contained within the boxes laid out by Figma, Jira, and the logic of the “use case,” you’re adding to the sludge.

The real story of how the field was “ruined” is that — counter to the common narrative of generalization — UX design continued to specialize. As the challenges facing information architecture changed, designers abandoned the right side of this diagram and focused entirely on the left:

The problem with the left side of the diagram is that to our stakeholders, it might as well be called “look and feel.” The left side presents the content provided on the right side; if you look closely, navigation (which in a hypertext system is not just the top-nav, but going from page to page) is on the right. The system determines how you can get to an interface and what that interface can do; the interface design itself attends only to the how. My colleague Molly Misek provides an excellent example: no interaction pattern can make up for notifications that are governed by frustrating anti-user logic.

Fortunately, while many designers left the right side up to chance (or worse, to back-end developers), two entire disciplines emerged to attend to that work: service design and content design.

The reason these fields excite me so much is that their practice doesn’t treat architecture as someone else’s job. Governance and information architecture are at the core of content design. Service design isn’t distracted by screens, and is thus well set up to attend to the systems that connect those screens with the people who use them.

One of the most emblematic beliefs of “new UX” is that designers can shop out “useful” or “valuable” to product managers. This often takes the form of “they own the what and we own the how” (or sometimes, they own the why and we own the what and engineering owns the how). Not only is this a very silly and counter-productive framing, but it has now locked us out of the very thing designers want to reclaim: strategy.

In a world of cost-cutting layoffs, no product manager is going to give up “doing strategy.” These roles are perceived as a zero-sum game, and every function is busy building moats around what they think the company considers indispensable.

But chances are that no one “owns” experience governance at your company, because it’s not on anybody’s radar. And leaning into these neglected skills of maintenance and architecture could be your road out of production design.

— Pavel at the Product Picnic