Effectively Conveying Design's Value (ROI)

While I'm a strong advocate for designers "leading with their work" and aligning their value with business goals, it can feel like design needs to "evangelize" it’s worth more than, say, Bob in accounting. Based on my own experience this isn't an intentional slight—it's often a lack of understanding of design’s value and function. We all understand Bob's role, which is why he's not pitching his team's contributions at the water cooler.

For us designers to properly convey the value of design we must first be aligned on what design is and how it looks in a high functioning product team. 

Aligning on what we mean by 'design'

As it pertains to digital products, design is a problem solving methodology that teams use to achieve product development success. 

This methodology typically includes some version of early research and context gathering, understanding any relevant constraints (time, technical, organizational), defining the problem, testing potential solutions, and narrowing in on a solution that will go into production. Sometimes this methodology is referred to as ‘design or product thinking’.

This problem-solving methodology reduces risk while increasing the likelihood of success and typically includes a visual outcome. When design is properly "operationalized" within product teams, it encourages contributions from all team members in real time, not just designers. In a high-functioning product team, everyone should feel empowered to contribute to "designing" and "building" products collaboratively.

Design’s main contribution is often associated with the visual aspect of a project, but this accounts for only 20% of its contribution when considering the 5 layers of UX graph. Effective design systematically aligns with business goals while understanding customer needs, existing constraints, and the challenges at hand, all while working toward a solution that is validated by stakeholders and customers.

Image: Five layers of UX Design

How design looks in highly functioning product teams

When I think of fully functioning product teams, I envision teams that have taken the time to define cross departmental operating practices (product management, design, engineering, marketing) that supports continuous collaboration. Activities we oftentimes associate with “design” — like research, user feedback, prototyping, and iterative feedback— should be understood at a basic level by the entire team. I refer to this as the team's collective mindset and have written about it in detail here.

While design may be pushing pixels or conducting user interviews, the rest of the product team should be able to follow along in real time with these practices with as little difficulty as possible, allowing them to contribute effectively as projects move from problem to solution. Highly functioning product teams define and adopt processes that promote transparency, cross departmental collaboration, and knowledge sharing, ensuring all IC work can be traced back to top level organizational goals. This approach also builds trust among teams, enabling product managers, engineers, stakeholders, and marketers to understand the logic and research behind design decisions before they reach production.

Articulating design’s value (ROI)

Once our team is aligned on what design is and how it should function within the product development process we are much more likely to be able to effectively communicate and understand its value. 

Here are a 3 areas design’s value can be considered and measured:

1. Increasing revenue and closing deals 

When sales reps confidently demo a product, knowing the actual user experience will match or exceed the promises made, trust, reputation, and momentum are easier to build.

Here are a few ways design’s value can be linked to increasing revenue:

Customer Satisfaction: NPS scores and surveys can provide insights into customer sentiment. While not perfect, they are a simple starting point. Task completion rates, which measure actual tasks completed by customers, can be more telling (see Product & User Experience Quality below).

Onboarding: Design can significantly influence the onboarding experience. By identifying and improving on a baseline of current onboarding times and steps, design can make a strong impact.

“You only get one chance at making a first impression.”

Product & User Experience Quality: When design is effectively integrated, the quality of the product and user experience should increase. Metrics like task success rate, time on task, and customer satisfaction scores can help measure the quality of a product.

Churn rate: Churn rate is a challenge for any technology or product centric organization. While there are several factors that are in play related to churn rate, design should share in this responsibility. The idea here is that if design is positively impacting the other areas listed, churn rate should be minimized.

2. Decrease in development and support costs

A clear understanding of how IC work impacts top-level goals, along with streamlined knowledge sharing, reliable design systems, and a well-defined product direction, minimizes context switching and wasted effort. Designers mapping and creating user flows, in-depth UX documentation, wireframes, and prototypes reduce the need to solve problems through code, resulting in cost savings.

Here are a few ways design’s value can be linked to decreasing development costs:

Reduction in risk: When wireframes and prototypes are tested before pushing to production overall risk is significantly reduced. This is especially important for larger projects that will require significant engineering time and resources. 

Error Rates and Messaging: Consistent error messaging and clear user flows reduce customer frustration when errors occur. These scenarios should be documented in the design system.

Effective Design System Implementation & Maintenance: A well-maintained, easy-to-use design system ensures product quality and team efficiency. The best design system is the one that works for its product team and end users.

Customer Complaints and Bugs: A customer requests and bugs board accessible to design in real-time can help address “low-hanging” issues without heavy PM or engineering involvement. Tools like Canny.io can support this.

3. Increase in team morale, employee retention, and talent cultivation

When teams are systematically incorporating design and product thinking with clearly outlined top level goals, connecting those goals to IC work, streamlining knowledge sharing, and using an effective design system, product teams are able to work from problem to solution more effectively and at a higher velocity. These teams are mission led and more likely to create and sustain better performing products over an extended period of time.


Best-in-class design practices, when optimized within product teams, empower teams to better understand issues earlier, see clearly how their day-to-day work impacts top-level organizational goals, and move at a higher velocity, avoiding the pitfalls of non-design, reactive, feature-factory practices. This design-centric approach not only drives higher profits and superior customer experiences but also boosts team morale, employee retention, and talent cultivation.

If you or your team want to increase design’s impact or better align cross-departmentally, I’d love to connect. You can email me at brock@commonlanguage.io.