Lauren Schwartz and Monica Granfield have both done an awful lot of interface design, for some companies you might have heard of. Mostly Microsoft. And they like designers...they really do. Enough so that they were willing to come and chat with a roomfull of them just before lunch today, about some strengths and some "opportunities" (read - things that annoy them) they see with designers in technical industries.

Now, they did give a list of PowerPoint bullets, identifying some skills they wish more designers had, but I'm not going to list that here. They're words like "Leadership" and "Diversity" and other terms that could be construed a hundred ways.

The upshot of the whole thing is that the more a designer knows about the process they're designing for, and the more they understand what the other team members are doing, the more effective they'll be. Pretty level-headed stuff, backed up by plenty of examples.

The phrase that sticks out for me is "This is my vision" -- something I've heard from plenty of designers' mouths, and something that, for some reason, irritates non-designers. In fact, this is the crux of the cross-functional team's biggest problem. While product development is increasingly done with such multi-skilled groups, very little is taught in design schools about communicating and negotiating with non-designers, and yet it's something that happens every day in the real world.