I'm a CDO and occasionally feel the sting from it being such a new term. When the press covered Referly's big new features last week (an API, shopping experience and design overhaul) the ones that mentioned me put my title in dick quotes - "Chief Design Officer" instead of Chief Design Officer. And it sounds too similar to CTO to just say CDO when you first meet people, so I just say I'm a cofounder.
It's ok though and stuff like that's rare. Overall I feel a growing responsibility to represent design founders and it's what most accurately represents my role anyway. CDO is more fad-proof and less limiting than other titles like Chief UX Officer (too much focus on function, plus UX is industry jargon) or Chief Creative Officer (too much focus on visuals and marketing, plus it makes you sound like a Don Draper wannabe).
We live in an era when most companies are competing neck to neck on technology.
This is a key insight. Design isn't any more or less "important" today - it has simply become a more critical place of battle. If two products are even in terms of features, design can be the tiebreaker.
If two products are even in terms of features, design can be the tiebreaker.
Design can be even more critical than that and more valuable than feature parity. Facebook had way less features than Myspace - you could do all kinds of stuff on Myspace like listen to music, customize your page, have photo slideshows - but Facebook's design was a welcome relief from the haphazard Geocities-like mess that Myspace devolved into.
And similarly, Facebook's current crowded interface leaves room open for even better designed networks like Path, Instagram, etc.
Crappy writing, opinion or are you calling the whole design movement crappy?
Coz its easy to call something crappy. A little harder to be a constructive critic.
It's ok though and stuff like that's rare. Overall I feel a growing responsibility to represent design founders and it's what most accurately represents my role anyway. CDO is more fad-proof and less limiting than other titles like Chief UX Officer (too much focus on function, plus UX is industry jargon) or Chief Creative Officer (too much focus on visuals and marketing, plus it makes you sound like a Don Draper wannabe).