Design vs. business
A perspective from Courtney Drake, MBA and Design Leader
Many designers find their way into the profession because they love the work — the craft and creativity, but also the user centricity and empathy at the core of what we do.
Business leaders value other things more highly: financial performance, product market fit, strategic alignment.
It’s easy to look at the two and think that design and business are diametrically opposed.
But design isn’t art. As much as creatives might be artists at heart, we create design to support a business or organization’s success. We do that through our craft and focus on users.
The intersection
It’s essential to find an intersection between the product or service you aspire to design and the realities of the business your design supports.
Many designers don’t think about — or even look for — that intersection, choosing to focus more on user behavior or the question of what qualifies as Good Design.
But when we acknowledge the design/business intersection, real impact is possible.
True impact
Think about it: If you create a solution you believe will benefit your users, but you can’t get the business to support it, your design will languish unused on a (virtual) shelf. That’s not impact.
Our work has to get shipped to have impact, which means it has to both:
- Solve a real user need, and
- Address issues the business cares about
If we succeed at both of those objectives, there’s an argument to be made that the shipped work is better than the aspirational but unrealistic designs sitting on the shelf. Because the shipped work is real. It’s out there in the world, being used by real, live people.
Isn’t that the whole reason we signed up for this work?
A counterpoint
What about all the products out there that don’t meet our quality bar for good design, you might ask. Are those designs truly better than our aspirational-but-shelved design?
It’s true that many of the products and tools we use regularly don’t meet our Good Design quality bar, but they serve our needs well enough that we keep coming back.
Could they be improved? Sure. But pause to appreciate the fact that the design teams behind those products were making decisions within the constraints of the business they were in, and they created something that real people use and get value from.
Own it
Look honestly at what your business needs from design right now. Are you in a startup and you need to move quickly to find market fit? Are you in a mature company with a large design team that needs efficient processes and a robust design system?
Match your design fidelity to your business needs — and then take responsibility for it.
There’s as much craft in the scrappy design that’s just enough to learn as in the polished design that elegantly covers all the edge cases.
Craft isn’t just the pixels or content that we create — those are only as good as the thinking and strategy behind the decisions we made to get there and what we learned from users’ reactions to it.
Craft is our end-to-end creative process. It’s understanding and framing problems. Dreaming big and then editing down to a realistic scope. Bringing our teams along on our creative journey. Craft is execution, analysis, and iteration.
It’s time to face the reality that design is here to build the business. The sooner we find a satisfying frame for our craft within that context, the more impact we can have.
We created our Designing Businesses workshop to help creatives understand their intersection with business and build their acumen to become more impactful leaders.
Here are three ways Design Dept. can help you grow as a leader:
- Attend a workshop to focus on a learning area, or design a customized learning series for your team
- Work one-on-one with leadership coach to tap into your creativity as a leader and transform the way you work with your team
- Sign up for our newsletter to get design leadership wisdom in your inbox each week
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