Here’s the thing nobody talks about: Product Managers and CTOs are really designers in disguise.
This article nails something profound about the impact that extends far beyond the design discipline. The author’s insight about how design impact “spreads across many teams, departments, customer segments, and user personas” is exactly what separates great PMs and CTOs from the order-takers.
Think about it. When a designer saves 13,000 hours annually through automation, when they reduce support calls, when they improve developer experience, they’re not just moving pixels. They’re architecting human systems. They’re designing how people work, think, and collaborate.
Product Managers do the exact same thing. They’re designing the customer journey, the feature roadmap, the stakeholder dance. They’re constantly asking, “What if we connected this dot to that dot?” A PM who launches a feature that reduces customer churn by 3% isn’t just hitting a metric. They’re designing retention into the product experience across sales, support, engineering, and customer success.
CTOs? They’re designing the entire technology ecosystem. When they choose a tech stack, they’re designing how hundreds of developers will think about problems for the next five years. When they architect a system that reduces deployment time from hours to minutes, they’re designing organizational velocity. When they implement observability that prevents outages, they’re designing customer trust.
The beautiful parallel here is impact measurement. Just like the designer in this article struggled to show ROI, the best PMs and CTOs often create their most valuable impact in ways that resist easy quantification. How do you measure the impact of technical debt prevented? The customer relationships saved by better product decisions? The competitive advantage created by making the right architectural choice?
All three roles share this fundamental challenge: they’re system thinkers operating in a world obsessed with linear metrics. They see the connections between decisions and outcomes that others miss. They understand that real impact ripples through organizations in ways that spreadsheets can’t capture.
The article’s technique of mapping impact across stakeholders? That’s exactly how great PMs present quarterly reviews and how smart CTOs justify infrastructure investments. They’re all designing experiences—whether for users, internal teams, or entire business ecosystems.
At the end of the day, designers, PMs, and CTOs are all in the same business: making complex things simple, invisible things visible, and impossible things inevitable.