Just have to say thanks for writing this, Daniel! As you said, it should be obvious to anyone considering themselves Product/UX/UI/Whatever Designers, but most just get defensive of their craft. I honestly cannot tweet and share this enough!

Retrospectively, in my first job I missed a lot of opportunities to better the overall product by shying away from the challenge of working with some from the “decision level” and instead going for the easy but much less effective route of trying to make sense of these decisions through the interface.

I now am in a lucky position of being able to spend half of my time with our dev team and working on our products together. We just started out in this setting so it’s too early to tell, but I’m super confident that we will learn a ton from each other. Hopefully I can make them better designers as they make me a better engineer.