We recently ran a Design Leadership Round Table event in Melbourne, bringing together a group of passionate and experienced design leaders to discuss the challenges and opportunities shaping our practice today. It was a unique opportunity to share experiences, exchange insights, and collectively reflect on what it means to lead in the dynamic and evolving world of design.
Key Insights and Takeaways
1. Measuring the ROI of Design
The group opened up the discussion by addressing how teams quantify and track the impact of design. As it is with many complex challenges, the answer really depends on the context of the organisation and what you’re trying to measure. There was no doubt across the group that design metrics should be tracked and they should tie back to business goals while centering the customer. So how do we do this? Here are some key insights from the discussion:
- Measuring engagement & growth metrics; For a customer facing product measuring engagement and growth is one easy way to keep track of active users, frequency of use, onboarding conversions or goal completion can reflect how effective the product is at meeting business goals.
- Measuring increased customer satisfaction; Likewise, measuring retention rates, churn rates, and NPS scores is often the easiest way to quantify impact.
- Design Systems; A well-maintained design system can save time and money by speeding up development and ensuring consistency across teams
- Strategic Contributions: The challenge is greater when it comes to measuring the value of strategic or innovation work. Shifting left to discovery instead of delivery can make measuring ROI difficult. How do we quantify the value design brings when shaping product roadmaps or exploring new market opportunities?
- Evolving Accountability: implementing ways of measuring the use of outputs from design is one way to keep everyone accountable. Encouraging designers and researchers to produce actionable insights and measuring how many of those are implemented into products can increase the responsibility of design to socialise their work but also move accountability to product to implement the insights. Design can’t do it all.
The challenge is that showing the ROI on design isn’t always about numbers. Design teams can influence customer experience, drive innovation, save costs and time to deliver and impact business goals. Trying to quantify and measure every aspect can be a tricky task, the overall takeaway is to get clear on business goals and a strategy, tie your design teams work back to these goals and ensure it’s a collaboration across disciplines.
2. Communicating the Intangible Value of Design
It was notable that for the majority of people in the room, the internal discussion within their organisations has shifted from communicating the intangible value of design to ensuring the value of design is tangible. For organisations that have been educated and understand that design can reduce risk, shape customer centricity or contribute to innovation, the focus for them shifts from waving the flag of design and getting into producing outcomes.
For those in environments where educating stakeholders on the value of design was still a need, it was evident that they too had shifted from overemphasising the design process to ensuring they were reframing design work in terms that businesses could understand. “No one wants to hear about the double diamond anymore,” joked one participant. The point here being, design in many instances can have intangible benefits, but an environment that understands design doesn’t need the point to be hammered home, they need designers doing their work and solving problems.
3. Building Trust and Authority for Design Teams
How do you increase your team’s authority with stakeholders and build trust between teams? The group shared strategies for building credibility and influence.
- Language matters: Positioning designers as subject matter experts (SMEs) in areas like accessibility, UX, or service design builds authority and sets the tone for stakeholder engagement.
- Rebuilding Broken Trust: For teams with a rocky history, restoring credibility takes patience, consistency, and a few small wins. Building strong partnerships across the organisation is key. Sometimes drastic changes are needed to create change, instead of doubling down on what’s not working.
- Design: The best designers are true problem solvers, whether the problem is big or small. The best way to build trust and influence is to deliver. Help stakeholders solve their problems, even if it isn’t glamorous work.
4. Design Team Structures: Centralised vs. Decentralised
When it comes to team structure, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Leaders shared the upsides and downsides of different approaches.
Decentralised
- Pro: Embedded designers can move quicker and work more closely with stakeholders
- Con: customer experiences are rarely vertical and instead run horizontal, connected teams help solve at a birds eye view. Decentralised teams can create siloes making it difficult to connect and can mean you’re solving the same problems and creating duplication
Centralised
- Pros: Promote consistency and enable shared resources, like enterprise-level design systems.
- Cons: Risk of too many meetings and a disconnect from individual business units.
The ideal structure depends on your organisation’s needs, but strong collaboration and alignment are essential, no matter how your team is organised.
5. Design Operations for Smaller Teams
Design operations is an important function, particularly for teams trying to scale. It was agreed that the majority of the time when teams are small, the leaders naturally take on the responsibility of ops but as a team grows the need for a dedicated design ops function becomes greater.
The role of a design ops function is to create order and processes to support designers and allow them to design. Removing the barriers and challenges to their day to day role, to allow the ability to make the greatest impact.
Tips for design ops:
- Set Boundaries: Clearly define what design ops does (and doesn’t) handle. Without this, ops teams can become overwhelmed with admin tasks and lose focus on strategic support.
- Proactivity: Implementing the right tooling and processes early can go a long way. Promote collaboration and reduce time wasted for your design team.
- Advocating for Ops: Even a small investment in design ops can make a big difference, but proving its value to leadership is an ongoing effort. Consistently demonstrating the wins through efficiency, streamlining design, or reducing duplication of work is key.
