“Design is a powerful and often overlooked way to solve problems. But without the right fuel, design is worthless. When designers don’t know which problems to solve, we spin our wheels. We make products prettier when we could be solving customer’s needs and generating real value. So any company that’s serious about design should get equally serious about listening to customers,” writes Braden Kowitz, a product designer at Google Ventures.

+ What you know about information architecture might not be true (Headscape);When it comes to user experience, ask your own users about their experience on your news site instead of reading industry-wide reports (DDM Publishing Solutions); How HubSpot transformed into a product driven company (Medium)