To Grow as a UX Designer, Start Speaking the Language of Business
Designers may feel reluctant to acquire new business skills that aren’t traditionally seen as creative, but doing so is the key to future success.
This article is adapted from the conversation Maximize What Matters: A UX Designer’s Playbook for Business Impact. You can watch the full conversation here.
Design attracts creatives of all stripes for good reason—it’s often a path for more artistic types to make a more stable living. But many of those same creatives and designers find themselves hitting a plateau in their careers, unsure where to go next.
Ryan Scott believes that when designers take the initiative to understand and act on the business side of their work, it can unlock new opportunities and allow greater influence.
He sat down with People Nerds to discuss what it takes for designers to take themselves to the next level so that business leaders can genuinely understand their value—and everyone can work together better as a team.
Ryan Scott is the Founder of Accelerate Design and a former Airbnb Design Lead.
Stevie Vanderwiel is a Brand Marketing Manager at Dscout.
Jump to…
Stevie: What are the biggest reasons business leaders misunderstand design's impact?
Ryan: This is something I didn't have a good perspective on for most of my career as a designer. I got an art degree in graphic design and then went into Silicon Valley. Only after working as a designer in-house for the better part of a decade, did I end up going and getting my MBA from Berkeley.
In this program you had to learn marketing, statistics, management, accounting, microeconomics, macroeconomics, and design thinking. So many people didn't understand the value of the design thinking class that the next year it was transitioned to an elective instead of a requirement.
Part of the problem here is even if you go to business school—which most people don't—you're not being taught the value of design. There is a lack of awareness. With other disciplines like statistics and finance, you have a formula and there's a right way and a wrong way to deploy that formula. Design doesn't work that way. It's not an input/output type of thing.
I read an awesome book over the summer called Slow Productivity by Cal Newport. The book posited that since the industrial revolution, there's been one way of working: the factory setting.
Now that we've transitioned from industrial work to knowledge work, we don't understand how to culturally break away from that. Inspiration is non-linear—you might be in the shower thinking about something, and all of a sudden a great idea comes to you.
That approach is not something that's baked into our culture in a lot of ways. Culturally, this backdrop undermines the way that knowledge workers or creative-type workers do their best work. It sets up a disconnect.
How does a lack of business acumen limit designers’ ability to influence?
As a designer, I was expected to deliver on business outcomes, but didn’t understand how they worked. In business school, I learned so much that I hadn’t realized was expected of me.
From an identity perspective, designers also “other” ourselves. We have this idea of, ‘I'm a creative, I don't need to understand business.’ The worst permutation of that is, ‘I'll understand business when they understand design.’
If you want a seat at the table, you don’t go to a foreign country and say, ‘I don't want to eat their food or speak their language.’ If you want to acclimate, you need to think of design as a business function like marketing, HR, or sales.
When it comes to our careers, there's what I call a stall point. Around that senior product designer level, people start to plateau. They can't just get better at Figma anymore. What they need is more development in business skills.
Business is a big category and it's abstract. Let's break it down with some examples of how you can set goals in your career or areas you want to influence.
- Shipping designs: Understand statistics to help you analyze data and get deliverables out the door.
- Getting idea buy-in: Buff up your negotiation skills.
- Drumming up excitement: Learn more marketing skills.
- Managing a team: Learn more about operations and management.
“If you want a seat at the table, you don’t go to a foreign country and say, ‘I don't want to eat their food or speak their language.’ If you want to acclimate, you need to think of design as a business function like marketing, HR, or sales.”
Founder of Accelerate Design
How do we bridge the gap of designers shifting into speaking stakeholders’ language?
If you're changing the language you use or changing your framing, that can be enough to bridge the gap between business people and design people.
A lot of my work at Airbnb was reviewed by the CEO Brian Chesky. He's the only person I've seen who understands the intrinsic value of reducing cognitive load and can track that back to why it’s good for the business. Most other people need more explanation.
Any time you're making a change in the product, your ultimate goal is to change someone's behavior. Design work produces behavior or attitude shifts for people. That shows up in the metrics.
Take a look at design’s impact on metrics such as…
- Retention
- Referrals
- Reducing customer acquisition costs
- Time on task
- Completion rate
- NPS
Talking about the behavioral or attitude change that's happening for the user is the foundation. Track those results back to metrics to bridge the gap.
Also take the time to understand what metrics different teams care about. It's going to help you understand how your work plugs into the big picture.
Talk to those teams to learn what they care about and what their metrics are. Then you can say, “Okay, here's how my work is going to help you.” Keep the conversation going. Start with hypotheses and that kick off the conversation, which develops relationships, which can lead to more influence.
What are the top things that designers should start doing to better showcase their value now?
1. Shift your mindset and consider the business aspect
If you want a seat at the table, you can't other yourself. You can't say, ‘We're creatives. We're not business people.’
Realize that design is a business function in a lot of ways. It's your responsibility to balance the user needs and the business needs. That's also what separates design from art in a lot of ways—you have an objective, and it's often a business goal. If you don't focus on those goals, your business goes away and you're not really helping anyone.
2. Describe the value of your work to other people and sell them on it
Stakeholders aren’t going to come to us—we need to come to them. That's why I'm passionate about helping designers learn the skills to display and communicate value. Design teams will always be small and mighty. We need to demonstrate the value of the design and figure out what the value props are.
3. Brush up your business skills with new tools
The business tools I shared earlier are necessary if you want to move up in your career. If your career is stalling out and you don't know why, you're probably missing some of the following skills:
- Marketing
- Negotiation
- Statistics
- Product management
- Operations
You need more of those skills to be an effective designer and move up. Deploying these skills will allow you to get pulled into more strategic projects, get promoted, and get better, higher-paying jobs—even in this market.
4. Start asking questions
I've been guilty of this my whole career—wanting to be a dutiful designer and not asking questions about a project.
Starting on the wireframes, go talk to people. Some questions you can ask include:
- Why are we doing this project?
- Why does this matter to the business?
- What are our success metrics?
- How can I help you hit your goals?
Cultivate your influence by starting to ask questions. Developing relationships and showing an interest in what you’re doing can help move the needle.
You want to avoid people feeling like, ‘Why does design matter?’ When you develop relationships with PMs and other stakeholders by talking to them, it shows your team’s value.
Wrapping it up
Creating more impact in your work won’t happen overnight, but it starts with taking stock of your current business acumen. Are you creating a good business case for your designs and seeing how those outcomes align with greater business goals?
Nurture relationships with PMs and stakeholders to understand the why of a project, and work to become both curious and an advocate for what you do. When designers start speaking the language of business, it opens new vistas for what’s possible in their work.
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