Article
Leading with Design
Driving business value with design governance
Design governance combines the visionary impact of design leadership with the operational focus of design management. By leveraging design maturity models, this unified approach enables companies to become design-driven, influencing all levels of the organization and driving business value.
Introduction
Leading with design, as discussed in this article, refers to design governance – a unified approach combining the practices of design leadership and management. While I'll cover the differences between leadership and management roles, let's first explore the levels of design, as they play a critical role in influencing how design is led.
Levels of Design
To truly understand how to lead with design, it's essential to first understand the levels of design and how they align with traditional business levels.
Visionary Design
Visionary design is about defining a vision and setting the direction. It leverages strategic frameworks, such as design maturity models, to integrate customer orientation and design thinking into the organization. Visionary design also focuses on identifying strategic opportunities through positioning and differentiation, understanding key audiences and market dynamics, and shaping a long-term vision that aligns design efforts with their needs and aspirations.
Strategic Design
Strategic design is about understanding market demand, managing portfolios, and planning how to move towards the set direction and achieve the desired vision. It defines the purpose and value of design in addressing business objectives and solving customer pain points through actionable strategies.
Tactical Design
Tactical design focuses on executing the strategic plan to progress towards the vision. It emphasizes setting clear goals and measurable targets, translating strategy into specific deliverables, processes, and projects to create tangible value.
Operational Design
Operational design involves the hands-on, practical execution of daily design work. It ensures effective production and delivery by leveraging the right systems, tools, methods, and workflows to maintain quality and consistency.
Design Governance integrates visionary Design Leadership with the operational focus of Design Management, influencing all levels of the business. The illustrated model is adapted from Emma Boulton's Research Funnel.
In practice, these levels often overlap and blend together. A manager might juggle both visionary and strategic topics, while a consultant's work may span tactical and operational aspects.
Fundamentally, the lower the level, the closer the company is to the customer. It's no surprise that the most detailed customer insights are found at the lowest level of the organization, where teams such as sales, delivery, and customer care interact with customers on a daily basis.
Design Maturity
Design maturity is a critical aspect of leading with design. Multiple frameworks exist, such as the Design Ladder by the Danish Design Centre, the UX Maturity Model by Macadamian Technologies, and the Design Maturity Model by InVision. These models serve as tools for assessing a company's use of design and design competencies. They help integrate design practices across all business levels while ensuring a coherent brand experience by adhering to brand identity and guidelines, and visual language in every design output. This fosters consistency across channels, including marketing materials, product interfaces, and internal communications.
While these frameworks share similar stages for measuring design maturity, this article will focus on the Design Ladder by the Danish Design Centre, as it is widely recognized and easy to understand.
Let's explore the definition of the Design Ladder:
Step 1: Non-Design
Design is not systematically applied. It remains an invisible part of product development, often handled by non-designers. The process relies on participants' ideas of functionality and aesthetics, with little or no focus on the users' perspective.
Step 2: Design as Form-Giving
Design is used primarily for finishing, styling, or form-giving in products and services. This stage often involves non-design professionals and views design as a final step rather than an integral process.
Step 3: Design as Process
Design becomes an integrated element in development processes, introduced at early stages. Solutions are user-driven and involve multidisciplinary collaboration among designers, developers, marketers, and other professionals.
Step 4: Design as Strategy
Design is a strategic asset embedded in the company's business model. Designers collaborate with decision-makers to rethink business concepts, aligning design processes with business visions, areas, and roles in the value chain.
The Design Ladder by the Danish Design Centre illustrates the steps of design maturity, from non-design to design as strategy, showcasing how companies can evolve their use of design to drive business success.
We can consider the ground level as Step 0: No Design, where design is entirely absent from the company. However, this is very rare because, in reality, everything is designed – even weapons. No two weapons are identical; someone, most likely an engineer, has carefully considered how the weapon works, looks, and feels.
Since its introduction in 2001, the Design Ladder has been adopted and modified by many companies to suit their organizational needs. Some companies have even added additional steps such as Design as Vision and Design as Culture to reflect advanced integration of design. While these additions are not part of the original model, they highlight how the framework can evolve to align with a company's culture and goals.
Measuring Design Maturity
Tracking and evaluating progress in design maturity involves management boards or steering groups, focusing primarily on qualitative KPIs. Unlike business development frameworks, design maturity lacks hard quantitative metrics, making its application and validation more challenging. Success requires an organizational commitment to becoming design-driven. Without this commitment, adopting a design maturity framework may lack purpose and impact.
How to Lead with Design?
Understanding the levels of design and design maturity models is essential to grasp how design creates value across an organization. As promised, let's explore the differences between the roles and activities of a design leader and a design manager.
Design Leader's Role
A design leader focuses on long-term visionary and strategic objectives, which are often ambitious and undefined. These leaders are typically innovative generalists who do not have direct team responsibilities but instead focus on high-level initiatives. They observe market dynamics, maintain a big-picture perspective, and incorporate creativity into strategic decisions that align with the company's goals.
Their daily work includes:
- Acting as a design evangelist to define the vision and positioning for the company, business line, or product.
- Setting direction for strategic initiatives and contributing to brand strategy.
- Facilitating workshops, casual one-to-ones, and sparring sessions across departments to inspire creativity, foster ideation, and encourage alignment.
Ultimately, a design leader's role is to define how design supports company growth, ensuring alignment with business objectives and uncovering new opportunities for innovation.
The Design Leader's Process
While there are no official processes for design leadership, visionary initiatives often follow a similar pattern, as described in my article Business by Design:
- Discover: Define the vision and set the direction by uncovering strategic opportunities, understanding key audiences, and analyzing market dynamics.
- Analyze: Synthesize insights from the discovery phase to refine opportunities and align with organizational goals.
- Plan: Create actionable strategies and scenario forecasts that define goals and potential outcomes, ensuring alignment with the strategic vision.
- Evaluate: Conduct an internal (management) review to assess the desirability, feasibility, and viability of the initiative.
- Proceed: Transition an approved initiative into a more concrete and actionable strategy, ready for development and execution.
Re-Assess: Address uncertainties or risks by revisiting earlier phases. If risks remain significant or the initiative lacks value, it may be dropped.
A visualization of a common design leadership process, based on the design thinking approach, starting with an exploratory initiative and progressing into strategic planning or tactical activities.
My own experience as a design leader has heavily focused on the discovery phase, which involves gaining a deep understanding of consumers, market dynamics, and competitors. This work has often centered on identifying business opportunities, achieving competitive advantages, and defining the brand identity.
Design Manager's Role
A design manager focuses on operational excellence, ensuring smooth day-to-day execution of design work. Unlike the long-term, high-level focus of the design leader, the design manager works more closely with their team to translate strategic goals into deliverable outcomes. They balance short-term clarity with team management responsibilities to ensure efficiency and quality.
Their daily work often includes:
- Acting as a design advocate within the organization to align design efforts with business needs.
- Conducting formal one-to-ones to provide mentorship, coaching, and problem-solving support.
- Organizing workflows, managing resources and resolving issues to ensure projects progress smoothly.
The role also involves fostering a collaborative culture, defining efficient processes, and overseeing the execution of product and brand initiatives to maintain consistency and quality across channels.
Reflections on Design Manager Practices
In my experience, the role of a design manager revolves around:
- Mentoring and sparring to foster individual growth and work satisfaction.
- Encouraging ownership and responsibility to empower team members.
- Enhancing team competence and personal development to align with business objectives.
- Establishing processes and methods to accelerate delivery and maintain quality.
Design managers balance internal forces – such as company direction, business requirements, and objectives that influence the demand for design competencies – and external forces, including collaboration with partners, vendors, and contractors to ensure their contributions align with internal goals. They also navigate dominant management and technological trends that shape preferences for practices and tools. In short, the design manager's focus is on executing and advancing projects while ensuring the consistent implementation of brand identity across all touchpoints.
My design management framework focuses on fostering team and individual growth by developing competencies to elevate design quality and support business objectives. It also enhances team spirit to improve work satisfaction and strengthens commitment to the team and the company.
Design Leadership vs. Design Management
To summarize, design leaders focus on integrating design maturity into the organization, while design managers implement processes to support daily work and grow competencies. Together, they apply design at all levels of the business, maximizing design's value for the company.
In smaller companies, these roles often overlap, with a single person responsible for both. If that's you – good luck, you're in for a rewarding challenge!
Summary
In essence, leading with design happens at all levels within a company, leveraging design maturity models and benefiting from design evangelists and advocates throughout the organization. It incorporates customer orientation and emphasizes that design is not just a practice – it's a mindset that shapes one's entire perspective of the world. At its core, design embodies a continuous desire to improve, solving problems one at a time to make the world a better place. This commitment to ongoing improvement is the greatest value a company gains by becoming design-driven.
The traditional business model of creating value solely for owners is no longer sustainable. A modern, more effective approach to market success is creating value for others – customers, employees, partners, and stakeholders. This shift from self-interest to serving others ensures that by generating value for others, the company itself thrives. Design's empathetic approach is key to understanding the needs of diverse stakeholders, enabling the creation of innovative services tailored to the target audience, whether digital products, physical spaces, or a combination of both. This is the essence of design governance.
Through the leadership of design leaders and managers, design governance ensures that business models are not overly product or technology oriented, nor focused solely on the company's internal needs. Such a short-sighted approach is risky and unsustainable. It is the responsibility of every designer to incorporate customer orientation and insights at all levels of the business, driving exceptional customer experiences and sustainable growth.
Tim Cook, Apple's current CEO, summarized it well:
“Most business models have focused on self-interest instead of user experience.”
Design governance is a broad and multifaceted topic, and this article serves only as a starting point. There's much more to explore – so stay tuned for future insights! ▪