Design can earn seats at the Table

Businesses across the world are shifting their views of their design practices from service-based, nice-to-have and potential value-add to a core competency in driving the business bottom line forward. Management is starting to see customer-led initiatives retain existing business and a tool for converting visitors to loyal customers. They recognize that employee experience is as important to the supply chain productivity as the processes which hold it together.

However, the greatest bottleneck that organizations encounter with embracing design thinking as a peer is letting go of the past behaviors of purveyors within the practice.

Part of the issue is that we as designers, have not done a great job talking about the value of design in business outcomes in the way that traditional executives understand. Rather, we have focused on emotional outcomes that may or may not convert to revenue but will absolutely result in operational and capital spending.

The first step to overcome in building these new expectations is to establish a framework of communication. A design organization's ability to speak the financial and operational language of the business is our opportunity to earn leaders’ respect. After all, gaps in communication do not reinforce trust in our ability to handle business decisions responsibly.

We must also embrace new expectations placed on us by the business. We must let go of fantasies of a world where we live by our own rules and have little accountability to the world around us. For years we have sought the “keys” to the product kingdom. A seat at the big boy table. We imagine that when we got there it would be an IDEO utopia. Everyone would approach us to give them the ideas that would save the company and bring customers back in droves.

As designers, our new responsibility means we need to demonstrate business impact. We no longer can expect someone else to translate our work into sales. It is our job to do that. If sales are not coming as a result of projects we worked on, we MUST dive in, understand, and help. We must be willing to pivot from our ideals if it doesn't translate to revenue.

For a design practice to evolve within a modern organization, it must shift behaviors which made it successful in early years to the mature responsibilities which other members of the organization are accountable.

We can no longer expect someone else to make hard decisions. We are expected to act as owners. We must manage our own budgets and translate them into financial impact. We must demonstrate an understanding of the ongoing costs to maintain and sustain the experiences we evangelize. We need to talk less about user emotions and more about how those emotions translate to sales. We need to talk less about specific tools and techniques and more about the immediate ROI of our process.

These are the expectations and needs of today's business owner. Yes, its a lot of new responsibilities. None of which we signed up for when we considered this field a viable career option. We as designers have the opportunity to act as business owners, with the needs of users in our constant peripheral. Being a designer in the modern digital revolution means that we fully understand and appreciate that a company needs to make money to exist, and we need to own our contributions.