Design Operations and Business Value

Exploring the role of design operations in creating efficiencies for individuals and businesses, focusing on the holistic experience beyond pixels and copy. The guest shares insights on the evolution of design thinking and the importance of design in driving business outcomes.

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Episode notes

Here is something that makes many service design professionals cringe...

The question to quantify the impact design has on the company goals.

You'll see that finding the answer to this question is actually surprisingly easier (and more fun) than you might think.

Here's a business mantra you might have heard before: If it's not being measured, it's not important.

Numbers rule. That's that cold, hard reality of how companies operate.

Now, as a design community, we've always struggled to quantify the value we bring to tangible business outcomes.

Sure, there are valid reasons – we often work on systemic challenges where it's hard to make a water-tight correlation between our efforts and the specific impact they have on the goals.

There are just many factors at play that have an influence, and isolating our contribution is hard or, rather, impossible.

So, we often get hung up on this attribution question as we feel we can't "prove" how much we've contributed.

Even if we want to measure our contribution, we find that the right measuring processes aren't in place to do so. So, we'd rather focus our time and energy on solving the actual challenge at hand than implementing those processes from the ground up.

And let's be real, not many of us wake up excited about capturing things in a spreadsheet.

So yes, there are reasons why quantifying the impact of design is hard and often lacking.

But, as we've recently seen, we're paying a high price for this.

Just scroll through your LinkedIn feed to see many sad examples of that playing out. When budgets tighten, design often takes the hit as it can't show, in numbers, its contribution to the business.

Okay, I know this hasn't been a very uplifting message so far. But here's the good news.

There is a group of professionals out there who absolutely love design and thrive on these types of measurement challenges.

Of course, I'm referring to our friends from the DesignOps community.

When we collaborate closely together, we have the power to anchor design as an indispensable strategic discipline. At least that's the firm conviction of Patrizia Bertini, our guest in this episode.

Patrizia, shares her journey of implementing measurement frameworks that facilitate healthier conversations between design professionals and business stakeholders. In the conversation, we dive into the juicy stuff like value attribution, measuring systemic impact, and prototyping with numbers.

I can't guarantee this episode will turn you into a spreadsheet enthusiast, but it will definitely inspire you to be BFFs with someone who loves crunching numbers.

Let's face it; we might sometimes feel intimidated by numbers. We want to prove with scientific rigor that things are the way we say. But here's a secret: educated guesses are everything you need...

Enjoy the chat and keep making a positive impact!

~ Marc

--- [ 1. GUIDE ] ---

00:00 Welcome to Episode 196

03:30 Who is Patricia

04:15 Patricia's first Service Design encounter

05:00 Lightning Round

06:30 Thoughts about design identity

12:00 The decline of strategic design

16:30 Unpacking data triangulation

21:00 Identifying problem in onboarding

24:45 Design thinking for business problems