The Business Leader’s
Guide to Design
Organizations have begun to recognize that
design is more than a service. It could actually
be their secret weapon. That’s why many are
embedding it as a core competency, even at
the executive level.
In Org Design for Design Orgs, authors Kristin Skinner Perhaps part of the reason is that design as a formal discipline
and Peter Merholz write, “There’s a sense that is newer to many organizations than many other core business
functions like sales and marketing, and even technology. In many
design makes things ‘better,’ by making [companies]
ways, designers have had to design their own way forward, testing
more attractive, more desirable, and easier to use.”
and iterating to carve their space in an organization. In other
Prominent design recruiter Judy Wert says “More and words, they’ve had to learn by doing. But through this process of
more leaders care about design and feel that there’s experimentation, norms and best practices have emerged that can
something about design that’s going to be important guide leaders who are looking for direction on how to build their
to the success of their business.” own high-performing design organizations.
In this ebook, we’ll help business leaders understand how design
Critically, research conducted by McKinsey & Company works at scale, from team structures and roles to practices and
found that companies with high-performing design practices processes and in cross-functional collaboration with business
have as much as doubled their performance compared to their stakeholders. In short, we’ll pull back and look at how design is
The Business Leader’s Guide to Design
competitors. actually designed in an organization.
But how well do business leaders really
understand it? What do they know
about how design works, how teams are
structured, and what drives the designers
who have aspirations to become part of
67% 90% <50%
of CEOs don’t have of CEOs don’t of design leaders
their company’s leadership? Not very well, metrics they hold regularly involve feel their CEOs fully
according to McKinsey & Company. their design leaders design leaders in understand their role
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accountable to strategy development
INTRODUCTION
The management consultancy
reported in 2020 that;
2
The true power
of design
In many organizations, there remains a misconception X-ray vision: the ability to see through what people say to what
about what design is, and what designers actually people actually feel and need - is one of four “superpowers”
Bethune attributes to designers. The others are;
do. Perhaps there’s a tendency to think of design as
primarily focused on aesthetics, or even if it’s more
Shape-Shifting: the ability to not only observe but to become the
than that then maybe it’s a discipline that’s only user to understand their journey
The Business Leader’s Guide to Design
engaged at the end of the process when the time
comes to refine the end product. Empower others’ potential: the ability to understand what gets in
the way and would be needed for others to be at their best
However, as Kevin Bethune, author of Reimagining Design: Extrasensory perception: the ability to look at the user experience
Unlocking Strategic Innovation, says in a Ted presentation, the in a holistic way and consider all the senses - in other words ensure
reality is that designers can and do solve problems beyond the the product keeps us human
physical product. They are capable of shaping how we do business
and how we see the world.
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“If you want to succeed in business, you must - I mean you must
CHAPTER 1
“If I were to ask early cell phone users what they wanted in a phone - connect your product, your service, your digital platform, to your
before the release of the iPhone, they would have asked for bigger audience,” says Bethune. “It’s really about mapping to their needs,
thumb keypads,” he said. “This is where designers’ X-ray vision and it’s a personal relationship they’ve come to expect. Design plays
comes in handy.” a huge role in shaping those emotional connections.”
4
Core capabilities of
designers
Designers are renowned for their ability to notice 01 Product Design
things others overlook, to elevate others through
Product design can describe the set of capabilities that support
facilitation, to imagine what could be and to visualize
the end-to-end creation of digital products. It encompasses the
potential solutions. The Stanford d.school and IDEO
hybridized skills—UX (User Experience), (UI) User Interface, and
have tried to capture some of these intangibles into a prototyping—that most of today’s well-rounded digital designers
The Business Leader’s Guide to Design
design thinking process you’re likely familiar with, but possess.
when you hire designers, you aren’t hiring them for
design thinking, you hire them for their craft. Six big Of course, product design can also apply to the creation of physical
products. This ambiguity can actually be useful when there may be
areas of craft:
some overlap between digital and physical experiences, such as in
the creation of interactive displays, smart devices, and wearables.
Service design, which considers the multifaceted relationships in an
end-to-end user experience, is a sort of twin to the product design
capability.
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CHAPTER 2
6
02 Communication and Brand Design 03 Design Research
Communication design may be more generally referred to as visual Design research capabilities range from conducting interviews to
design or creative direction. Designers develop brand and identity facilitating workshops to observing behaviors in the field. Design
systems and the accompanying style guidelines and specifications researchers must also be able to recognize patterns, interpret
around layout, color, and typography. But it’s about more than data, and synthesize insights in order to strategically frame a
aesthetics - communication design is deeply grounded in semiotics: design problem or solution.
the understanding of symbols, their meaning, and how that
meaning is interpreted through different contextual lenses. Design research also extends past the “fuzzy front end” of
the design process to focus on functional user testing. This
Communication design also includes the specialized skills of specifically considers the usability and accessibility of a design
information and data design. These designers are responsible for and how people are able to interact with it.
rendering accessible, understandable, and elegant (not to mention
interactive) visualizations that communicate complex, data-derived Karel Vredenburg, global vice president of client insights and
The Business Leader’s Guide to Design
insights. Think, for example, of the graphics we interact with in research at IBM, says doing design without design research
news media, whose designers’ work helps us to make sense of is ineffective, wasting time and money, and gives design a bad
complex stories. name. He believes the discipline is so critical, organizations must
consider a ratio of design researcher to designer to be in the range
of 1 to 5-8.
“If we don’t have sufficient design researchers on a project,
designers will be flying blind and will need to just make things up,”
says Vredenburg. “They will also be giving designs to developers
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without the basic hygiene of user input and evaluation.”
CHAPTER 2
7
04 Content Design suite of design tools, establishing a design system, managing
the flow of traffic in terms of requests for resources and project
Content design is a critical layer to any interface, from labeling allocations, standardizing processes and creating resource-
navigation and sign-posting calls to action to creating an sharing systems and designing an interviewing protocol, team
identifiable tone of voice across a brand’s platforms. Thought onboarding flow, and training curriculum. In some organizations,
leadership, blogging, and occasionally social media, also fall under design ops also supports career progression and growth for
this category. designers.
Content design capabilities can range from traditional brand
copywriting to the more interface-driven form of UX writing and 06 Strategic design
multimedia storytelling, like video production. It can also extend to
technical writing, e.g., for producing robust instruction manuals Strategic design is the art of applying design principles to solve
and user guides, as well as FAQs and customer service scripts. The broader, systems-level challenges. That system may be simply
importance of clear and compelling writing skills is critical in any at the organizational or business level, or it may be even more
The Business Leader’s Guide to Design
aspect of the design process. abstracted to looking at a whole territory, like healthcare or
education.
05 Design management and ops In essence, strategic design emphasizes framing problems and
identifying opportunities over creating discrete solutions. It looks at
The emergence of design ops as a core capability reflects the the whole picture: what’s desirable for customers, what’s viable for
significant level of investment in cultivating design excellence the business, and what’s technologically feasible. That’s not to say
at scale. Design ops functions like a movie producer, managing that strategic designers don’t actually make things; of course they
increasingly complex workflows as design becomes more deeply do. Co-creation, experimentation, and prototyping are integral to
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embedded in an organization. strategic design practices, but the scope of what’s being prototyped
CHAPTER 2
is more than an interface or feature set. It might be a program, a
Design ops is purpose-built for creating a kind of support squad method, or a framework. Strategic designers are fundamentally
around the design org so that designers can actually focus on facilitators who are able to guide decision-making through design-
design. Some common responsibilities include managing the led processes.
8
How design teams
are structured
As design becomes more deeply embedded in 01 Centralized design teams
organizations, there are a few key models for how
A centralized design team does exactly what it says on the tin.
teams fit into the org structure. Different structures
There’s a core team that reports to a single design manager, usually
emphasize different roles and skills, but all share the
someone with the title Head of Design or Head of UX. Depending
same foundational capabilities ranging from strategy on the size of the team, there may be an additional level or two of
The Business Leader’s Guide to Design
to execution. At their core, leaders today are most hierarchy, with senior design leads each managing and mentoring a
concerned with designing teams that are flexible, small number of junior team members.
versatile, and scalable in order to be more resilient in
In the centralized model, the design team acts as a group of
the face of change.
consultants to the organization, like an internal agency. Designers
are resourced to different projects in different business units. One
There isn’t really one perfect structure to rule them of the key responsibilities (and main challenges) of the design
all, but many design organizations fit into one of three manager is coordinating their team’s allocation, looking across
multiple project timelines, and projecting gaps and overages of
models: centralized, decentralized, and hybrid teams.
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availability.
Let’s look at the pros and cons of each of them.
CHAPTER 3
10
Because centralised design teams offer a service to the 02 Decentralized design teams
organization, they operate as a cost center, which means that the
various business-sponsored projects must determine a budget A decentralized design team distributes and embeds designers in
for design. In this respect, project managers are keen to run a different workstreams, which might align around a specific product,
tight ship, making sure every budgeted design hour is tracked feature set, business unit, or even phase of the customer journey.
for efficiency. This might mean that exploratory strategic design Essentially, the emphasis of a decentralized design team is on
processes are curtailed to focus on executing the project plan’s cross-functional collaboration, and it can be an effective way to
pre-defined outcomes. In turn, this can inhibit a team’s ability to infuse design skillsets and mindsets across an organization.
develop multiple design iterations, driving them to narrow down to a
solution before they have time to properly validate their ideas. Designers form a trifecta with product managers and tech leads
to guide strategy and decision-making at every step of the product
However, centralized design teams do have their advantages, development cycle. In this model, designers report directly to their
which is why they’ve tended to be the standard for most large team lead (usually a product owner or business lead) rather than to
organizations with in-house design capabilities. First, they benefit a design manager.
from clear leadership. Design team managers are responsible for
The Business Leader’s Guide to Design
shaping and implementing their vision for how the team works: While the clear advantage of a decentralized design team is the
curating the toolkit, formalizing the design process, and defining consistency of design direction and guidance, the equally clear
key roles. They can tailor their teams to encompass a wide range disadvantage is the lack of a shared practice. Distributed designers
of skills and capabilities in order to serve the organization’s diverse sometimes feel isolated, disconnected from a sense of community.
design needs. Finally, centralized design teams have more well- To create a unified ethos across different teams, decentralized
defined career paths and opportunities for mentorship to help team designers often self-organize. This helps minimize redundancies
members level up their skills and grow with the company. and maximize the sharing of resources. Similarly, they also have to
be self-starters in terms of carving out opportunities for their career
growth and mentorship.
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CHAPTER 3
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03 Hybrid design teams
Hybrid design teams cross-report to both individual product or
business teams as well as to a central design organization. Team
leads tend to provide day-to-day oversight of project work and
rituals like reviews and check-ins, while design managers provide
leadership and organization around a design community of practice.
Design managers—who generally occupy high-level or executive
roles—are responsible for developing the practice, recruiting talent,
and overall design governance. The design team members will come
together regularly to share work and spin up collaborative and co-
The Business Leader’s Guide to Design
creative initiatives, like developing a design system or establishing a
set of design principles.
The only real pitfall can be the push-pull designers may feel
between the priorities and visions of their two managers. But this
can be mitigated with some coordination and greater organizational
alignment around skill development and career paths. For example,
a designer might set measurable OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
that track their project responsibilities but establish higher-order
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goals for professional growth with their practice manager.
CHAPTER 3
12
The many paths
designers take
Just 20 or 30 years ago, designers might have Today, there are more educational opportunities than ever before,
come from art schools, with their training primarily with a whole host of formal programs, training, and certifications
to help launch design careers. The days of a designer’s role
grounded in print media. Some may have also studied
being limited to form and function are also long gone. With new
architecture or industrial design and ergonomics, and
fields evolving and emerging, there are innumerable on-ramps
some might have even cropped up in computer science to becoming a designer and nearly as many paths and detours to
The Business Leader’s Guide to Design
programs. The first generation of digital designers, explore along one’s career path.
coming up during the dotcom era of the late ‘90s,
was largely self-taught, each finding their way into In developing their design organization, business leaders will
want to have a grasp on the levels of expertise needed to build a
interactive design through jobs in software firms,
balanced team, and the markers of growth that offer opportunities
marketing departments or advertising agencies. for individual advancement. So, where to start in understanding a
designer’s trajectory and how an organization can help to guide it
forward? Let’s take a look at the most basic question faced by a
beginning designer: to become a specialist or a generalist?
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CHAPTER 4
14
Specialization versus Career paths from
generalization maker to mentor
With so many possible starting points in terms of background and In building out design teams, leaders can think about how
education, it’s not totally unreasonable to think that anyone could they might strike a balance between makers, managers, and
find their way to a career in design. In fact, diversity and flexibility leaders, with consideration for the designers’ own aspirations for
can be as much of a competitive advantage as deep subject-matter structuring their career path.
expertise in the design jobs market.
For example, a designer might imagine defining their career by The maker path
bringing an iconic product to market. Their path to becoming a
The Business Leader’s Guide to Design
designer-founder would be spent honing skills in UX, UI, and even Most designers start out as makers - sometimes called individual
front-end coding, with the goal of becoming a jack-of-all-trades contributors - learning the craft from the ground up under the
who can lead a bootstrapped startup. guidance and direction of more experienced team members. The
focus at this stage, or in this role, is on developing one’s technical
Another designer might dream of architecting a system of acumen or craft.
design patterns that becomes a standard-bearer for the design
community. They might get their start through rigorous study of The maker path is about forging one’s identity as an individual
interface guidelines, focus deeply on producing detailed design contributor and is ideal for someone who is very craft oriented.
specifications, and perhaps work on positioning themselves as an The maker loves to roll up their sleeves and be actively designing
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industry thought leader. every day. A maker can grow by continuing to level up their seniority
CHAPTER 4
in a specialized category and may be a mentor or practice lead
without committing to people-management duties. Makers have
a tremendous propensity to shape and elevate design discourse as
thought leaders.
15
The manager path The leader path
With more experience, designers will be asked to step into leading More and more, designers are gaining seats at the executive table.
projects and training junior team members. Though not everyone Not only are they in a position to steer a company’s strategic
wants to be a people manager, senior designers will invariably direction from a human-centered point of view, but they must
take on more ownership of their work and accountability for their also benchmark the ROI of design against the business’ key
decision-making. The management path is perhaps the most performance indicators. Design leadership is, in short, also business
traditional way of leveling up one’s design career. leadership.
Management responsibilities (such as participation in the hiring Becoming a design leader could be seen as a natural extension
process, performance evaluation, and direct mentorship of of the management path, and indeed it may be the pinnacle of a
individuals) require the cultivation of soft skills that the maker path designer’s career aspirations. But not all managers are meant to,
may not. Managers must learn how to listen actively, communicate or even desire to, become design leaders. For a lot of individuals,
The Business Leader’s Guide to Design
clearly, and gracefully defuse conflict. In effect, managers must the leadership path may stray too far from the practice of design.
learn to become coaches who understand their team members’ Though a design leader occupies a visionary, often evangelical
unique strengths and weaknesses in order to help them train, grow, realm, they’re equally pulled down to earth with budgets and
and thrive. timelines and resourcing challenges.
In the design process, managers are also accountable, if not directly As Rachel Kobe, design leader at Expedia, points out, this path
responsible, for how a project is run. They will likely play a role means being a company leader, not just a functional leader. It
in defining the project’s scope, timeline, approach, and resource means driving transformation across the company, connecting the
allocation. Design managers will often be the primary point of dots between departments and influencing upwards as well as
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contact for a project’s clients and stakeholders. downwards.
CHAPTER 4
16
Conclusion
Designers are in a position to influence how ideas
are formed, circulated, cultivated, and ultimately
executed at every level. Fundamentally, they are
culture creators and agents of change, and business
leaders would be wise to tap into their potential as
organizational catalysts.
As McKinsey and Company puts it, “Farsighted CEOs…
empower their design leaders to be catalysts for broad strategic
transformation, not only for end-to-end experience improvement
for users but also for the organization as a whole.”
For companies looking to enjoy the growth and performance of
their design-led peers, the journey begins at the top.
