What a design education teaches that a business degree does not

Before he helped start Twitter, Biz Stone worked in book publishing designing jacket covers. It is an unusual training for a technology founder, and his remark explains why he valued it. A cover designer faces a blank space, a deadline, a budget and a dozen people with opinions. There is no single correct answer. The job is to produce one good answer, quickly, and to explain why it works.

That is the skill the line is about. Most design decisions are choices among options that are all acceptable. Which typeface, which image, how much space. Designers learn to make many of these a day, to commit without complete information, and to accept criticism in a group review without losing the thread of what they were trying to do. They also learn to work within constraints and to treat those constraints as material rather than obstacles.

Twitter’s own shape is an example of that habit of mind. Messages were limited to 140 characters so that each would fit inside a single text message, which at the time carried a maximum of 160. A limit imposed by the technology became the defining feature of the product. A team trained to see constraints as design material was well placed to make that choice and to keep it when users asked for more room.

The same skill carries over to running a company. Founders face a constant flow of decisions with no clear right answer: which feature to build first, which customer to pursue, which candidate to hire. Most can be made reasonably well in several ways. What matters is making them at a steady pace, explaining them well enough that the team can act, and revisiting them when evidence changes. Designers practice that loop daily.

The analogy has limits. Design decisions are usually cheap to test and easy to reverse; a cover can be redrawn and a screen can be changed next week. Many business decisions are not. A hire, a lease, a funding round or a legal structure has consequences that last for years, and treating them with a designer’s speed can be expensive. Design training also says little about finance or about managing people through difficult conversations.

So design is good preparation for one kind of decision: frequent, reversible choices under constraint. For the other kind, the rare and binding ones, the designer’s habits need slowing down. The best founders from design backgrounds seem to know which kind of decision they are facing and change pace accordingly.