Design Informs Product Strategy

How design will play an important role in business transformation

It’s no surprise, the user experience design profession is quickly evolving, shifting from a deliverables based entity to a business-oriented function that can provide a strategic differentiation for companies. Beyond the visual layer that design is well known for, how does this shift translate into providing value to the business as a whole? Essentially, it all falls down to our ability to clearly articulate how the design process and methods affect the overall business and it’s bottom line.

As any designer in the field can attest to, there is no doubt a high demand for our skillset and organizations are willing to pay top dollar, regardless of whether or not they know what they are actually looking for. So we could sit back and keep pushing out deliverable after deliverable and have no say into whether or not what we’re designing is actually providing any value to the end user. Or we can be strategic in how we get into those business discussions, alongside the product manager to help better inform the product strategy. I feel we as designers could (and should) offer more.

A Shift is Happening

Over the next few years I anticipate designers playing a bigger role at a more strategic level. Albeit it may take longer for larger, more established organizations to make this shift, but they’ll eventually be forced to explore other ways of operating as more players pour into their industry. You’re already starting to see roles pop up such as the Chief Experience Officer (CXO) and VP of Design at organizations of all sizes. In order to broaden this effort we need to expand our approach and move away from just the aesthetic, interface level, to integrating design thinking methodologies and processes within an organization to provide real, measurable value to the business and it’s customers.

How can the UXD process expand to help companies connect and establish a dialogue with their consumers and within their own internal functions, thus enabling them to innovate more quickly and efficiently?

UX Design’s Role in Value Creation

How do we speak to business leadership, or so any “non designer” can understand design’s true value to their business? It’s our job to educate and lead by example, because who else will? How can we break away from the stereotypical designer that just makes things look pretty? Bloomberg wrote a great article explaining four areas where design plays an important role in value creation:

1. Understanding the consumer: Designers focus heavily on understanding a consumer’s thought process and emotions in order to motivate and measure behavioral changes.
2. Risk mitigation: Designer’s are able to synthesize insights and turn them into tangible offerings in a way that addresses business and consumer goals.
3. Boosting marketing and branding: Design is a fundamental part of creating an image and experience of luxury, exclusivity, and belonging. And yet the consumers who purchase these items often select them because they see a little bit of themselves (or who they would like to be) on the shelf.
4. Sustainability: How can the need to consume be balanced with the need to be good stewards of the planet? How can companies retain their brand and image while still delivering a superior experience and reducing their waste and carbon footprint at the same time? These are business challenges where design plays a large role.

In addition, designers have the ability to use consumer insights he or she has gathered from research, psychology, and best practices and take a consumer-centric approach to business strategy that essentially acts as a change agent within an organization. Consider it the “Yang” for businesses that primarily focus their energy on pleasing internal stakeholders whose only concern are short term gains. How much innovation can really happen if this short term mindset is the only focus in an organization?

Breaking Silo’s

By breaking out of our silo’s and collaborating cross-departmentally through involvement, transparency and education, we can create a better foundation to start from. Well rounded designers have the ability to build empathy, connect the dots to complex problems, bring teams together into the design process and help teams apply design thinking methodologies to various issues. In addition, designers can introduce leaner methods and processes that can help validate the many assumptions that go into building a product — typically done through rapid experimentation, learning and iteration before any line of code is written.

By broadening our skillset and understanding of business, it opens up a whole new world of opportunity. This can potentially give designers “a seat at the leadership table”, sharing strategy and prioritization responsibilities with product, business and engineering executives.

Moving forward

The discussion and education around the business value of user experience design is needed to move the field forward. There are far more commonalities in regards to how UX design and business is aligned than what is actually perceived. Much like visionary leaders, great designers create value by exploring (without limitation) through the psyche, thought processes and actual goals of consumers. They view the world from a different perspective and constantly ask questions like “Why” and “What if?”. They’re resourceful and can do more with less. Designers could (and should) offer more to businesses. This requires the business to invest more into finding, hiring and growing the field within.

Hopefully, by shining a light on topics such as this, we can work toward figuring out the best next steps to forge a future and an industry that we’d all like to be a part of; one that will truly allow designers to drive and execute meaningful change within the world’s biggest businesses.

“Good design is good business.” — T. J. Watson Jr., IBM