The ability to identify and frame problems is your most valuableasset.Engineering wont be the most valuable tech skill for muchlonger.As no-code app building becomes commonplace, and vibe coding gets better, the important question changes from how do we build this to what should webuild?Guess whos great at figuring out what to build? Why, your friendly neighborhood designer, ofcourse!Designs true superpower is identifying problems people will pay to solve. Developers and PMs can also do that, but design is uniquely positioned to translate those ethereal ideas into communication artifacts everyone can alignto.The problem is that, in most organizations, designers are relegated to a narrow space of creating solutions, rather than identifying problems.Narrow focus on solutionsThe process of building software usually goes likethis:Stakeholder has anopinionThey tell the designer to designitThe designer designsitThe developer buildsitSome metric goes up or down but nobody knowswhyThis is how most software is made. Its the result of a poor understanding of what design is. It rarely works unless you have loads of cash, and oftentimes thats not evenenough.Restricting design to only finding solutions is problematic in two ways. It limits how much value it creates for the business and its customersand well talk about that in a secondbut it also allows teams to fill up the product with failed features they ship hoping something willstick.As more features are added, it becomes harder to make the overall design coherent and sensical. Soon features are crammed into corners that dont make sense.Jared M.SpoolIts not always easy to deprecate failed features. The more useless things you put in the product, the greater the chance theyll become dependencies for other important things.Take two-factor authentication viaSMS:Turns out your users move a lot for work and switch numbers. So they often get locked out of their accounts, which means frustration and a lot of supporttickets.Had you done your research in advance, youd have realized they would have preferred 2FA via an authenticator app or email. Now you cant fully remove 2FA via SMS until you implement another authentication method. And then you have to get your entire user base over to the new method. Until then, people will continue getting locked out of their accounts.What began as lets ship this thing we need and here, design this became an expensive problem that will take weeks of engineering time tofix.Oops!Design doesnt just prevent you from building the wrong thingit helps you figure out the right thing to build. By discovering and framing valuable problems, design boosts the teams ability to innovate based on what the marketwants.Discovering valuableproblemsThe highest-impact part of the design process is identifying and framing valuable problems to solve. Valuable is the key term here. It has to be valuable for customers and profitable for the business.Product taste, user understanding, and the ability to define problems clearly are becoming more valuable than pure coding skills as Al handles more implementation.Lennys newsletterLeveraging strategic UXresearchIve been designing and building products for over a decade. I have yet to find a better way to discover valuable problems than talking with people. Sure, you can look at secondary data and narrow down your scope. But only by talking to people will you understand why certain issues are problems worthsolving.Page visits reflect what you have, not necessarily what customers want. There may be tasks that you dont have content forso its unlikely they will show up in search and site data. And analyses of page views often reflect an amalgam of tasks; its hard to separate the top tasks on these pages from the tiny tasks.GerryMcGovernTheres a widespread notion that research costs time and money thats hard to justify. I believe this attitude stems from leaders conflating strategic UX research with tactical UX research. And theres some important differences between thetwo.Tactical vs strategic UXresearchTactical UX research is what most people refer to as evaluative research. This is when you capture users thoughts on existing solutions. Strategic UX research, on the other hand, focuses on problems for which a solution does not yetexist.The problem is, when you only work tactically, you never feel like youre making progress. The teams always doing tactical UX research are caught in a feature factory.Jared M.SpoolIt doesnt have to be complicated. 23 conversations with users a week, which wont take longer than 2 hours, can be instrumental on improving the adoption and retention of your product. Other than sales, its hard to think of an activity with a higherROI.Strategic UX research is one of the most important inputs in deciding what to build. If you dont know what your customers or audience are willing to pay for, youre best case missing out on business opportunities, worse case burning cash building stuff people dont find important.Framing problemsThis is another way in which design steers the product development process in the right direction. Framing a problem helps align the team around the problem they are solving and, just as importantly, the problems they are notsolving.Problem Framing combines product discovery with a strategic decision-making process. It ensures teams align on the right problems before diving into solutions.DanaVetanOne of the simplest ways to frame a problem is asking who, what, why, where. Which is a variation of People, Activities, Contexts and Technologies (PACT).The specific framework you use isnt as important as the actual exercise of properly framing the problem and using that common understanding to resolve the inevitable tradeoffs of product development.Wait, isnt that what PMs are supposed todo?Lets talk about the elephant in the room: The turf war between product managers and designers.In startups, where roles are more relaxed, designers have a lot of wiggle room to define their role and own larger parts of the strategic work. Its important to achieve mutual understanding on who does what, earlyon.You have to work in how you work. You have to invest time in defining the roles in your team and the agreements on the charter of your project and your team. How do we work together?Christian CrumlishAs the company matures, though, the roles settle and changing them becomesharder.In most larger organizations, strategy is the official responsibility of product managers and other stakeholders. Designers are there for mere tactical support. It thats your case, rather than wasting your energy trying to change corporate culture from the bottom up, youll be better off transitioning into a PM position.If your company doesnt offer an IC track for designers, switching to product is a sensible step towards increasing your influence.An estimation of the degree of business savvy between designers and product managers at different levels of seniority.A bright future for strategic thinkersBeing good at identifying and framing problems, whether do bear the design title or not, is going to become a key differentiator. Everyone can ship, but not everyone can figure out what toship.While strategy is not exclusive to designers, their ability to produce artifacts to align stakeholders around a research-driven vision, is what will help the organization solve real problems rather chasing vanitymetrics.SourcesI skipped Figma and built my MVP in Replit Artiom DashinskyNik Storonsky, Revolut Founder: What Revolut Needs to Do to Hit $100BN Valuation |E1233Experience rotCenterCentreThe problem of identifying design with problem solvingAlbertoZamarrnWhat is problem framingDanaVetanThe problem discDask DesignCenterBuilding Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (CEO and co-founder)Lennys newsletterWhat Really Matters: Focusing on Top Tasks GerryMcGovernStrategic UX Research is the next big thing Jared M.SpoolThe key to stakeholder alignment? Incentives ConnorJoyceProduct Management for UX People with Christian Crumlish, Ep19Experience designedpodcastHow I transitioned from UX to Product ManagementKatrinZotchevA bright future for strategic thinkers was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.