If you've ever been in the position of a "design dictator", you know that it's no picnic. You live and die on every piece of qualitative user feedback, every us

If you've ever been in the position of a "design dictator", you know that it's no picnic. You live and die on every piece of qualitative user feedback, every usability test and every A-B test result. Sure, you get to make decisions, but if you fail, you fail publicly. Great designers are accountable, but design-by-committee is a much more popular model because it diffuses responsibility. You can always find the bad designers hiding behind the committee. A lot of people think they have good ideas and want to moonlight as designers. But when the data comes in evaluating their ideas, too often those people have moved on to other things. That's because they're idea guys - when their idea fails, they lose interest in the problem. Real designers stick with it, learn, iterate and find better solutions.