To properly take flight and thrive in the upper levels of product/user experience excellence atmosphere, a design needs a significant amount of runway (to use a very extended airplane metaphor :-)…What do I mean by this? Simply put, there’s need to be thorough time, discussion, collaboration, and exploration of possible solutions before settling on “the design solution” to be implemented. Too often PMs and Devs simply want a quick easy fix to solve some bug and then push it out per some pre-determined timeline, thus ignoring the need for proper design engagement and iteration.
That “runway” is the social and chronological space for the design to coalesce into a form worth lifting off. Time is key element, setting up a wide boundary for opportunities of exploration. But also there needs to be social/collab space of discussion, interpretation, identification, iteration, review/feedback, etc.
And within corp environs featuring multiple products, this runway may require discussions with other designers, evaluation of patterns/standards, ensuring consistency of visual and behavioral approaches, with outlets for inventing new standards if necessary.
To get a design properly airborne, there needs to be a sufficiently long runway to get it up to speed properly so it can thrive in production and implementation. Otherwise, the risk is a design that hits some bumpy turbulence with broken visuals, unaccounted or clumsy interactions, missing features/paths/flows, and lots of bugs unnecessarily filed and triaged (which translate into future patches/updates that jam up schedules, etc.).