What is a Design Team Worth?

What is a design team worth?

Having just read “Design assimilated into business, but did business ever understand design?”, written by Natasha Jen for The Drum, she eloquently put into words what I’ve been feeling and saying for the past few years.

She writes “Design has assimilated – but the assimilation was not mutual. Designers now speak business fluently. But business has not learned to see design. It still treats form as polish, emotion as indulgence and ambiguity as inefficiency. This is not a neutral stance – it’s a form of cultural illiteracy. And it’s everywhere.”.

As I design lead in a large corporation I’ve struggled with how to show the ROI of designers. We inevitably fall back on language that business understands; How quickly we can react, how can we eliminate errors, and how we can quantify why a new design will be an instant success?

These KPIs will eventually stagnate your design team, as they don’t reflect the crucial work behind a design idea:

Reflection - without proper to time to digest, reflect and critique your own work, you can not interrogate your design reasoning, the cultural signals, atheistic shifts and utilitarian needs of your design. Understanding why you feel this will work is essential.

Innovation - the process of design isn’t too imagine something perfectly in our minds and then land margin correct bestsellers instantly. It is a process of trial and error that can surprise with it’s results and push your brand forward. Creating something ‘bad’ points the signals to something ‘good’. Failure is essential to innovation in design.

Future thinking - Having to ‘prove’ something will be a success with understandable metrics devalues the creative knowledge of your design team. ‘Taste’, built the hard way, by studying cultural shifts, consumer behaviours and aesthetics give designers creative knowledge that creates maps to the future.

In order to break this cycle it requires business leaders to think differently about the ROI of a design team. What qualitative value do designers provide that the quantitative value of your business analysts do not?

What is a design team worth?