A good designer is a good businessperson
By: Rasam Rostami
Tags: Strategy, Design, Business, Design Thinking, Entrepreneurship

IBM’s president Thomas J. Jr. Watson’s “Good Design is Good Business” 1973 saying, is making much more sense in our tech business space now. Building and shipping digital -or even non-digital- products is getting easier every day, making design play an even more recognizable role than ever.

One of the by-products of this fact according to John Maeda’s design in tech report is the rising rate of involving designers at the very early stages of a startup as core builders. In fact, the number of successful startups founded by designers might be surprising to most people. This surge of design’s extending functionality in businesses rises the demand for business training and education for designers. The area that has been neglected in most design school programs. Many employers prefer hiring designers with solid business understanding and their career path mostly leads to getting more involved in management areas, serving more direct business objectives.

The business value of design has been discussed and measured in various papers and reports (famously McKinsey report). With that being said, many teams still struggle to find a meaningful relationship between their design team performance and achieving business objectives. The issue here lies in how design teams are managed and directed, not the whole design function in general.

In short, If you need to address the business value of your design team, it’s unlikely to be a good one.

Products and services are getting closer to users with individually crafted experiences. Given this opportunity, a user-centric design approach is also expected to deliver readily visible business value.

It’s ultimately the job of the designer (or design manager) to demonstrate that. To transform design process achievements and insights into business terminology in a way that’s understandable and conclusive.

To do so, a designer with business value in mind must practice to think, learn, and act like a business person. Studying similar materials, learning about business foundations, and developing a bird’s-eye view on how everything is running. This is a proactive effort and not exactly included in a typical daily designer tasks or job description.

When you think about it, it’s hard to unsee the fact that in a typical design process, the closer you get to the so-called “business” part of the model (which usually includes delivering, shipping etc.) the closer you are to see your decisions immediate impact.

Based on combined diagram of double diamond and elements of UX model by @Andrew Aquino

However, it’s important to remember that the notion of developing this business and strategic mindset for designers, shouldn’t turn into a deviation from user-centeric approach. It’s quite the opposite in fact, it turns out this mindset helps the outcomes of user research and earlier steps of product design process actually get shipped to customers faster, by getting signed-off easier by all business stakeholders

As a recap, the recommendation is developing a business mindset for product designers, rather than maybe getting closer to coding or getting too focused on the latest visual trends. This is the way not only to actually get the job done, but also delivered and shipped effectively.