Embracing Design Strategically: Redefining Value and Business Impact

I never imagined that understanding design would be such a challenge, especially among those who claim to champion it. Part of the problem arises when you ask 100 designers to define design, you’ll likely receive 100 different answers. When I refer to design, I mean the user-centered design approach for solving problems.

First, let’s acknowledge the prevailing misconception (aka elephant in the room): the conventional perception of design often labels it as a non-essential expense, relegating it to the status of a “nice-to-have” to make things look good. This outdated perspective treats design as a mere tool for generating artifacts that mirror stakeholders’ viewpoints, or as a means to free front-end engineers from the tedium of layout tasks.

This article challenges and evolves the conventional and antiquated belief surrounding design, offering a more strategic and valuable perspective. It defines design as a way to realize significant value, achieve strategic product and business outcomes, mitigate product risk, and reduce significant project costs.

Steve Jobs shared many insights into Apple’s operating principles and beliefs. One is, ”Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.” For decades, this definition has been discounted, yet it is a key tenet within Apple that places design central to their approach to product and helped them become the world’s most valuable company. (Source: New York Times)

Why strategic design

To achieve product success, it’s crucial to define design in a more strategic way to increase product value and reduce costs in doing so. According to Marty Cagan, design addresses two of the four big risks for product success: Value and usability.

First, design, along with product management, helps de-risk and expedite achieving a valuable product that customers find compelling and will choose to buy. Design helps achieve product-market fit by discovering customers’ unmet needs early, before you build, which informs strategies for creating solutions that customers deem valuable. This also saves the project a lot of expensive rework.

Second, design de-risks product usability issues early before they undermine sales and increase support overhead. Additionally, better usability augments adoption and feature utilization. By engaging users early and often, design can address usability issues before you build and launch. Addressing usability issues early ensures that customers find the product a compelling improvement over competing products or previous versions, making it easier for them to use.

How to Define Design Strategically

Since design is an approach for problem solving, it’s most effective to work backward from current experience shortcoming. In other words, align design’s definition with how you measure product and project success.

At its simplest, design improves something for someone. Design depends on detailing the improvements and the business value those improvements represent. Linking design to business objectives is often overlooked. Like most things in life, design will disappoint when based solely on assumptions and hope. Instead, strategic design relies on insights to constrain and inform what users and the market need and value; not to mention debunk assumptions, opinions, guessing, and HiPPO decision-making.

Proper design requires us to define the problem:

What are we improving?
What type of improvements will generate the most business value – whether top-line sales and retention or internal efficiencies. Potential themes could be to increase sales and/or market fit, address usability issues, improve how we build, get to market faster, decrease cost for support, etc.
Who are we improving it for?
Who are the specific users that define what is an improvement, what is valuable, compelling, and better.

Potential audiences:

Product customers/users – how does design define individual user groups by behaviors (aka personas)
Additional market and users – how do we discover net new users via research
Developers/engineers support – how can design help bring product to market faster with less rework
Customer support – how can design reduce customer support overhead and increase user self-reliance
Sales support – how can design help augment sales efficiency

Then, determine how to measure improvements and manage design:

Benchmark the current state: Determine ways to benchmark the current state. For new products: what is the state of current user experiences, solutions, workarounds, “post-it notes and spreadsheets,” etc.
Synthesize findings: Create strategies for improvement opportunities, such as value, usability, build-ability, and support.
Create concepts to refine: Conceptualize solutions, test concepts with users, iterate to align with users, and repeat about three times.
Produce solution to build: Develop the final solution based on the iterative refinements.

When Does Design Add Value

Another antiquated belief is that you should wait to engage design. While design can provide aesthetic value at any stage, it is unrealistic to expect design to instantly fix usability issues or achieve product-market fit later in the process. Think of design as an architect vs. a decorator. It’s much quicker, easier, and cheaper to iterate during the design phase before the build phase vs. after the build or launch phases. See how much so in “The Business Benefits of Good Design.”

Marty Cagan also strongly recommends addressing these “four big risks” as early as possible in the product cycle:

Value risk: whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use it. A solution driven by product and design.
Usability risk: whether users can figure out how to use it. A solution driven by design and supported by engineering.
Feasibility risk: whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills, and technology we have. A solution driven by engineering and supported by product.
Business viability risk: whether our business can support the product in the market. A solution driven by business and supported by product.

Defining design as a problem-solving method that generates significant value has been well-documented and proven to be effective for the most successful products. Tying design to business objectives generates unique insights that inform strategies that yield valuable solutions.

After 25 years, I still don’t understand why some hold on to antiquated beliefs about design and its strategic value. In the end it’s up to designers to define their profession and their value, but they can’t do it alone or without the opportunity. Excluding design from leadership positions and strategic discussions is, at best, risky. At worst, it undermines the product’s potential value and exposes it to financial risk.

Regardless of whether you have design leaders, the first step is to define design in a manner that aligns with and supports product and business objectives. Attach design to desired business outcomes. Determine during the conceptual and discovery phases (before you build) how to measure these outcomes. This means allowing design to discover users’ current experiences, challenges and unmet needs. It also means engaging users to elicit inputs to inform and debunk assumptions and missteps before you build, to save you costly rework later.

Design May Be Artistic, But It Isn’t Art

For those who still perceive design as merely making things look good, it’s essential to understand that art is self-expression, while design serves others.

In the end, it’s not an individual stakeholder who determines what is valuable, it’s the users of your product. They’re the ones who choose to buy and use your product, define what’s easy to use, and who call support when needed. The sooner we can assimilate to users’ needs, pain points, preferences, etc., the sooner and more effectively and efficiently product success can be achieved.