So you think you’re design driven
Is your company design-driven?
This is a question that as a designer you’ve likely asked a potential employer. I know in my previous experiences — as both an individual contributor, as well as a design leader — I have asked this question sitting across the table from future teammates, bosses, and CEOs. In most of these situations I can recall that many of them exuberantly touted how their company was design-driven based on numerous existing process and artifacts.
These artifacts included things like a dedicated design room or common practice of using sprints for product discovery. All of these artifacts seem to check the boxes for organizations pushing for better design practices and inclusion. However, in my experience, these are merely artifacts of a culture that likes the idea of being design-driven. And who doesn’t want to be design-driven? Look at the successes of the design culture in companies like Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter, and Stripe. Design representation in leadership is not always an indication of a design-driven organization.
The facts are that its hard to assess whether a culture is design-driven while sitting at a table with individuals who are in need of your talents. You need to experience the resistance, the process, the partnerships, the disagreements, and the culture to truly understand whether a company is dedicated to empowering design to truly lead in an organization.
The Design Leadership fallacy
One selling point in the design-driven organization is when companies tell you they either have a Head of Design or are hiring for one to help lead the team. In my experience most companies have no idea what this individual will actually do aside from coral this existing group of individuals that seem like the moon to other cross-functional teams. Beautiful and glowing but thousands of miles away in the darkness of the product development space.
Does an organization need someone to lead this team as a like-minded individual focused on growth and development while contributing to key initiatives across the company? Or do they need a babysitter to quietly keep the team motivated while a company changes and evolves around them without any consideration for how design fits into the vision for the future.
“What do you even do with designers?” — Someone who should know
This is a question I was asked during an interview for a design leadership role. This was a joke, right? Or was it? Most organizations especially B2B have a narrow understanding of the true potential of design.
Design leadership is only effective if you see design-led initiatives as the true markers for success. Design can be the curators of growth within an organization that brings a method and vision for scaling the customer experience with a true focus on business metrics. Design can empower an organization to be customer-obsessed through a polished and thoughtful approach to customer engagement within the product development lifecycle. Design can transform a product experience from a workflow tool to an industry powerhouse by understanding, synthesizing, and making big bets against usability metrics within the app experience.
Above all design can nurture and grow the future leaders or tech that are focused on ethics, social responsibility, and custom er data privacy behind design thinking methods and a sharp customer focus.
To do this design must break out of the supporting role within organizations, but it starts with first understanding the perception of design within your organization and taking the steps to be agents of change to influence the culture and start design-led initiatives.
The Canary
One clear indication is how many of your your company big picture initiatives or quarterly OKRs are actually born within your design teams? Depending on the company size your resources may be scarce. The investment in even the smallest feature could be met with resistance if you’re competing with a revenue driving feature and you come to the table armed only with a usability metric. Resourcing and internal investment in design-led projects should be apparent and encouraged.
Take a look at some of our OKRs in the past year:
Another indication is whether or not design is allowed to work within their own process guidelines as oppose to fitting into existing ones. An example that happens often is clear when you take a look at the timeline of a project. A PM or Marketing team will have a project that requires cross-functional stakeholders, input, and content. The entire timeline is 2 weeks, however, the final content was not given to design until 10 days in and our engineering teams still need 2 days to build, test, and implement the solution. This leaves design with little more than 2 days to discover, synthesize, and execute on a proper solution that meets the bare minimum bar for customer success.
Design is often in this spot whether its product or brand design initiatives. The key here is to insure you’re a true partner in project inception from beginning to end. Not only should you be a part of these discussions but you should lead them. Design is often a proxy for customers in many conversations and can only demonstrate design drive if we (design) are behind the wheel.
Design-led
The fact is that you can’t expect design to lead out of the gate — its a marathon where you need to acquire skills, influence, and resources to execute. In my experience it’s always good to look for design in the DNA of an organization. At what stage did a company think to bring in a designer and what impact did that have on the business? The capabilities you need to insure exist or bring to an organization, big or small, are:
Fluency — Do you have the trust of the organization and communicate the value a design-led project could bring to the organization.
Customer insights — Design spans across every customer touchpoint and building a deep understanding and motion around deriving customer insights at every stage of the customer experience is key to the success of the business.
Establish usability metrics — There are high level company metrics which likely have been established and vetted by your management team around revenue and opportunity. Design should be responsible for the success of a customer’s interaction with your product and experience.
Build capabilities in others — Design can bring operational focus to many aspects of the business. Research and Design thinking best practices are often the first to have strong impact on your business. Try to unpack these with cross-functional teams. In the end, we’re all on the same team and want each other to be successful.
There are several ways that you can unpack each of these capabilities within your organization. Design-led teams can do so much more than just say they are design driven. These teams are a pillar of change within an organization and empower other teams to do their best work.
