Value of Design P2:

Creating demand for Design

The second in a 3 part series where we will look at the steps you can take to help your team and company understand the value of design. In this episode, we will look at creating the demand for design by creating an effective plan and using three critical methodologies and approaches to help move your team to a more valued contributor to your company.

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Listen now:

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Welcome back to this three-episode series, where we are talking about the value of design. I am doing this series because over the past few years the question I have been asked the most is – how we show the value of design to our company. In the last episode, we talked about how some people see design as a statement of ownership, design vs. creativity, and design as an output and an outcome. A lot of that was high level but that foundation is critical to understand for everything we are going to talk about in this episode. In this episode, we will talk about how to understand the real value of design, how to create demand for design, and how to everyone the value you have created.

A different approach

So why do we need to create demand? Why can’t we just get to work and have everyone see the value of what we do? Design is not a department so you will need to approach this problem differently.

Creating demand

Your plans have to be grounded in 4 things.
• Informed: Grounded in reality, data, insights, and real examples.
• Clear: People understand what needs to change and their role in it.
• Inclusive: Everyone is empowered to be a part of the change.
• Human: Everyone feels valued and personnel changes are based on their decisions.

The plan doesn’t need to have the answers. ( Work out the approach and let the team help work out all the details and implementation )

To create value you will need 3 things:
• Design methodology
• Single source of truth
• Shared mindset

Design methodology

Design methodology: You need a data-informed, human-centered design methodology to get consistent results.

It creates teamwork, empathy, and perspective
You can’t create value on your own so you need a methodology that creates teamwork, empathy for the customer, and perspective to find new ideas.

It stops opinion battles
Your design work has to stop being debatable and has to be based on data and research with your customers as the source of truth.

It’s empowering
Design methodologies empower the entire design team to help lead and guide the creative process with all your partners.

Don’t skip steps or just use the easy parts of the methodology.

It can not exist alone so work with product and operations teams.

Single source of truth

Single source of truth: An image, document or concept that aligns everyone on the problems to be solved.

You can’t build demand if everyone isn’t clear on what problems you need to solve.

Customer journey map – A journey map lets you have a real, data-informed conversation about the state of your experience.

Northstar concepts – A north star lets you see the future while working back to your current work.

Shared mindset

Shared mindset: Create trust, transparency and honesty in your team so they can do their best work.

Most teams address their problems retroactively and reactively.

We need to define the mentality for the work we are about to do to empower the team.

Define behaviors

Final thought

People do not care about problems that do not affect them.

This work is so hard because success only exists in hindsight.

You are going to expose long-standing problems and they will try and blame design.