• Embrace user-centric strategies, improving not only products and services but also the full user experience and, in some cases, the organization itself.
• Embed your senior designer into the C-suite while cultivating a collaborative top-team environment in which your design leader will thrive.
• Make the most of user data through a balance of quantitative and qualitative design metrics and incentives that enhance user satisfaction and business performance.

Companies addressing these three factors will give their senior design leader (and their top team more broadly) a powerfully ambitious mandate. And, by helping launch new, user-centric strategies putting users at the center of everything the company does; by elevating the role of the senior designer; and by infusing analytics, qualitative insights, and design tools into the C-suite, executives can unlock a step change in business performance and capture the full business value of design.

Just how strategic is the role of design? Bracken Darrell, the CEO of Logitech, describes three broad phases of design, each of them progressively more strategic.  In the first phase, companies view design narrowly, focusing on aesthetics and form: the color, material, and finish of products. In the second phase, companies broaden their design emphasis to encompass end-to-end user experiences. In the final phase, companies realize that design infuses everything they do; it transforms the entire company. Logitech is itself a company that’s well along on the journey to becoming a phase-three company. Its design-driven transformation between 2013 and 2019 saw the company’s market value increase roughly sevenfold.

Research shows that bold, user-centric strategies correlate strongly with higher financial results. User-centric strategies go beyond pithy vision statements, although these can be a good place to start.  At their best, they touch every aspect of the organization. Senior designers have at least two unique perspectives to contribute.

Design leaders frame strategic questions

Senior design leaders can complement the hypothesis- and framework-based approaches to strategy on which top executives have long (and perhaps overly) relied. Overreliance on such approaches risks introducing cognitive biases into strategy development, while underindexing on dramatic market disruptions. To build upon the hypothesis- and framework-based approaches, strategists and design leaders must effectively work together to combine analytical insights regarding, for instance, resource allocation and M&A, with differentiated (relative to competitors) understanding of users’ needs. This marriage brings fresh, user-based understanding into the big strategic moves that companies can make to jump up the “power curve” of performance. This can lead to striking changes in the strategic questions that organizations ask themselves—and in the answers they find when they do.

The design-thinking approach also helps companies sharpen their lookout for coming disruption. For example, the chief design officer (CDO) of a food company saw the shift in Generation Z’s expectation for social and environmental responsibility. The CDO worked with marketing and R&D to help transform the company’s internal processes, with the goal being to implement circular-economy design principles in order to minimize packaging waste. The ability to anticipate—and then quickly act and adapt to changing consumer habits—resulted in outsize growth well before regulatory pressure drove competitors to catch up.

Not that we’re saying design leadership should usurp the chief strategist’s role—only that design has a unique role to play in strategy. Lyft’s most recent app redesign, for example, introduced more than a few new tabs: it contributed to the company’s new strategic direction. The app had previously highlighted car rides. However, the company learned that its riders were interested in multiple forms of transportation. The redesign brought new options such as choosing a bus route, grabbing a scooter, or even renting a car into an equal view under the same app. The user and market insights gleaned through this redesign process helped fuel Lyft’s strategic shift from a provider of rides to a portal enabling people to move through cities in multimodal fashion. Design was not the only party contributing to this strategic shift, but as Katie M. Dill, vice president of design at Lyft, makes clear, “It’s not design versus the business, it’s about what we can do together.”