Design is (Still) Good Business

It's time for another edition of?Inside Ideas, the newsletter that brings insights from our InsideOut design leadership community right to your inbox.

MORE EXCITING NEWS! Our last in-person roundtable in Seattle was officially our 300th session! That's a lot of learning, connecting and fun–and we're not done with 2023 yet. Read on to discover what we've been up to lately.

As you'll see, many of our recent topics (all selected by our members) have centered around how design adds value to the business–no surprise as companies double down on doing more with less. The trick? Identifying high impact problems to solve and demonstrating that value to the business.

One might say, "That's always the problem." Sure. But add to the equation the ongoing changes to business strategies (and org structures), and the mind-bending pace of technology evolution, and it's a new game for everyone.

An effective approach: meet business partners where they are to uncover their challenges, use their language, and help them achieve their goals. As one of our brilliant senior leaders says, "Make it all about them." Great advice.

Before this year ends, we've got more community-wide sessions (a member request) to bring even more leaders together for exploration and connections:

• AI Show & Tell: Our leaders can't get enough of learning practical, real-world uses of AI. We are thrilled for the Big Medium team to share their AI explorations with our members in an Everyday AI for Design Teams session.
• Book Club: Back in October, Changing Work founder and former Head of Mindfulness at LinkedIn, Scott Shute , hosted a fabulous workshop for us (notes below). Our next book will be his: The Full Body Yes .

And now, let's take another peek behind the curtain and see what our InsideOut leaders were discussing in our recent conversations.

We've had a busy Fall this year, including 10 in-person sessions across our 5 primary cities in a 5-week period (on top of continued virtual ones). As our leaders will attest, all our sessions lead to AHA moments and actionable ideas. We need a longer newsletter!

FALL SESSION TOPICS

• Budgets, Rates & Buy-in, Oh My!
• The Systems Around Design Systems
• Content for Design Teams
• Reporting, Analytics and Value
• Benchmarking Creative Projects
• Elevating Your Team's Business Acumen
• Happiness from the Inside Out Workshop with Scott Shute

With budgeting and planning for next year well underway, our operations leaders chose topics that get to the heart of measuring value: Budgets, Reporting & Data.

In fact, we had a lively discussion in NY about the importance of engaging your ops leaders in the strategy (not just the numbers) part of planning. From that we generated a list of what ops leaders need to improve the budget process and add even more value:

• A complete picture of costs (both salary and non-staff) AND of business and partner priorities up front
• Locked in big initiatives to ensure dedicated resources to cover those, along with the ability to carve out money for contingencies (which are inevitable)
• Stakeholder understanding that in the Good, Fast, Cheap triad, design must be GOOD vs "cheap" (and can only be "fast" when there's a partnership)
• Allocated budget for evolution, including funds and time for staff to explore ways to leverage emerging techniques, trends and tools
• Opportunity to show how staff ratios impact delivery of competing priorities, especially when there are not enough design/creative resources to handle the work of an imbalanced number of stakeholders
• The tools and systems needed to get the work done along with executive buy-in for partners to use them (the tools themselves are useless without it)

Meanwhile, we hosted 5 in-person roundtables with senior design leaders on the topic of Elevating Your Team's Business Acumen. We're working on an article filled with the many insights from these sessions, so stay tuned for that.

Our West Coast design leaders had a fascinating discussion about Design Systems–not the systems themselves but the need to consider all the systems around them. Though building the Design System itself may have been a heavy lift, integrating it into all the systems already in place is the biggest challenge of all.

Together they brainstormed ways design leaders can improve their chances of a successful launch and long-term adoption. Here are some of those ideas:

• Show actual use cases that demonstrate specific problems of users and partners to bring the system's purpose to life
• Instead of accommodating for 100% of possible use cases, take a 70/30 approach, leaving room to adapt to shifting priorities
• Capture best practices in rules vs. locking them in (which removes flexibility)
• Pair design system designers with leads on partner teams to tie the system directly to the needs of their teams
• Use storytelling to prove that lack of consistency breeds mistrust among users and customers, which leads to undesirable behavior (thus, a design system is important)
• Show the development costs of using vs. not using the system to gain support and funding; use older projects (pre-system) as benchmarks
• Talk about what the system is going to do for its users (test faster, build faster, save time & money) instead of just how it works
• Present the system alongside engineering peers for additional support and to present a unified front
• Refer to the system as a product (which serves a purpose, solves a need and evolves) to set expectations that "this will change"–just like everything else

And finally, below are a few highlights from our Happiness (JOY!) Workshop with Scott Shute , former VP of Ops at LinkedIn and author of The Full Body Yes . We're sharing just enough to pique your interest, since it's impossible to replicate the power of Scott's stories.

Here are just a few inspiring ideas to help you find your own joy:

• Recognize that we are guided our amygdala, and choose not to be led by those animal responses.
• BREATHE. This is a pattern interrupt to that animal response. It can also be a calming resource to help others move past fight or flight.
• Move beyond fixating on the pothole and see the whole road. Ask yourself, "What Else is True?" Where we fixate will determine our level of Joy.
• Be happy with your own accomplishments and experiences, instead of always looking outside for what others think about them. Joy is for you.

Obviously, we had a fabulous Fall together, learning, connecting and even spending time in-person. There's simply nothing like being in the room together, though our virtual sessions allow for more voices, regardless of geography. Put them all together, and we've got a learning extravaganza!

Below are links to content and resources shared during our live discussions in response to current leader challenges:

• An Overlapping (BIG) Ops Graphic : Thanks to Scott Brinker for these illustrations of the proliferation of operations and how those roles intertwine. Hot Tip: If you're not connecting ops leaders across your org, consider it!
• Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing : This article breaks down "a model that describes the development of groups and explains how they gradually become more efficient." Who doesn't need that?
• DVF Framework : Design leaders are familiar with this framework for design, but getting designers to move from "desirability" to "feasibility" can be a challenge–yet it's important as they tackle the needs of the business.
• Tools for Design Systems: The most common tools shared were Storybook and Figma , but others like Supernova and Knapsack may work for your team, depending on design maturity. If you know of a "one ring to rule them all" tool for mature systems, please share in the comments!
• The Job Search: Like the thousands of others impacted by layoffs this year, several of our InsideOut leaders are on the job hunt. These tools surfaced as ones that match resumes to job descriptions: Skillsyncher & TealHQ .

Hot off the Press! Our most recent article shares insights from senior design leaders in our West Coast group on how to improve employee morale:

• A Leader's Guide to Boosting Team Morale

Too busy to read? Don't forget we've added AUDIO to our blog articles, read by yours truly, Susie Hall . Here are more articles for you to read or listen to:

• Design leadership is vital: here's how to explain why
• The Automation Revolution: finding efficiency in the creative process
• Start hosting better virtual events

And you can check out our updated InsideOut program overview for dates and topics for our upcoming sessions , refreshed articles with high level insights from our sessions, as well as our member profile and a handy form to express interest or refer a friend.

And there you have it. We couldn't be happier to hold space for senior leaders to explore new ideas and will keep sharing them through this?Inside Ideas?newsletter.

Our mission is to connect leaders to find solutions. If you’re a senior design, experience, or creative operations leader of an in-house team and want to connect with others who share your unique challenges, let’s talk. Our InsideOut community hosts virtual and in-person roundtables to support the learning and growth of our members, and we're honored to facilitate those discussions.

If you stumbled upon this newsletter and liked it, please share. We aim to help as many leaders as possible. And if you haven't subscribed yet, what are you waiting for? Let’s keep learning together!