How are we adding value?

I recently asked the design community in a post.

“How do you think we are adding value to the business as designers?”

Here is the Link to the Post

I got few responses but the one that really stands out is from Karthikeyan Kandavelu

“Save business money by guiding them to not develop features that doesn’t add value to customers” — Karthikeyan Kandavelu

While saving business money is one side of the coin, the other side is determining whether the money invested by the company in developing a product or a feature is actually meeting an unmet customer need.

I also recently read an article titled “Why Twitter had 7500 Employees, and Startups Crush Big Companies,” in which the author defines value as follows.

Every week you write new code, and build new features. New value is added into your product. If you’re an excellent engineer, your productivity is high. If you’re a poor engineer, your productivity will be low. Regardless, you’re adding value every week.

Really? Don’t we get paid to write code? In this case, adding value to me would be writing code that can be reused, extended, and minified to improve performance, or adding detailed…