What is the role of a User Experience (UX) team? Is it to tactically deliver wireframes, or dramatically increase a company's competitive advantage through great design? Both.

UX teams need to rapidly deliver designs that are intuitive, useful, and delightful on very short schedules. This is also foundational. A tactical feature set keeps the lights on, but does not generally help a company beat its competition.

A leader who can structure a team and an environment so it can also deliver breakthrough ideas is rare. Many leaders talk about it, and I think few really deliver.

The iPhone, Telepresence, Facebook, and Twitter are breakthrough ideas: They introduced new markets and increased profitable revenue. They required designers, product managers, and engineers, working closely together to identify and implement breakthroughs. These ideas changed market dynamics and entire ecosystems of use and contribution.

Today, we need both great desigers, and great collaborators, who can work together to identify, design, and align around big ideas.