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December 10, 2024
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December 10, 2024
UX professionals specializing in design or research have encountered a recurring theme in discussions among industry leaders: the need for good business acumen.
It’s not enough to only do your craft well, but we must now—more than ever—do more to understand how our work ties to the businesses we sit in. We must learn to be business professionals first, UXers second. This is especially important for leaders in the field, or teams-of-one.
While leading a team of over 12 Researchers, Research Operators, and Designers at one of the biggest banks in the US, I learned from our Divisional President to “be your own CEO”, which I took seriously by adapting a common framework used in business today: the Business Model Canvas.
In this article, I’ll provide an overview to UX-as-a-Business Model. Whether you’re a leader seeking inspiration for your strategy over the next 12 months—or whether you’re looking to optimize your practice as a team of one—you’ll have a tried and true starting point for speaking to the specific operations of your team and advocating for its investments.
The goal of reflecting business operations on a single page is to get an understanding of what it takes to create value for customers, and to be clear about what kind of value you’re generating. This allows comparisons to other business models, or a jumping off point to conceive new ideas for improving operations and enhancing customer value.
The teams and practices that we forge cost the company overhead for needed resources, time, and salaries in order for us to do our work well. And when times are tough, senior leaders often evaluate departments based on strong returns on investments (ROI)—a question any UX leader should be prepared to answer confidently.
The original Business Model Canvas incorporates nine key reflection points for identifying any business model on a high level, which I’ve tweaked to better fit internal UX teams:
Before I break down each in more detail and how it pertains to running a UX practice, there are a few tweaks I recommend making to this canvas that will better fit internal teams versus standalone businesses.
While the end result of our work benefits end-customer segments, our team’s output isn’t directly provided to them. More often, we provide deliverables to internal teams who work with us to support end-customers. In addition, we focus most on influence within these internal relationships. In this case, we’ll combine these two and call it “Internal customers and influence.”
To truly treat your UX practice as a business and ensure you’re not stuck delivering the same type of value over time and expecting different results, we’ll keep this the same.
Traditionally this means delivery methods by which value is provided to customers, such as direct mail, a mobile application, a call center, etc. For most UX teams, this is not as relevant. Instead, deliverables may be provided in varying ways such as quarterly reports, bi-weekly sprints, or ad-hoc meetings, which we can call “Touchpoints”.
While every business and team has a laundry list of activities carried out, these are hardly random or ad hoc. It may be more helpful to think of these actions as repeatable, demonstrable, and easily explained. In addition, UX teams often rely on many partnerships to get work done, which are best contextualized within the processes we follow, as actors in a swimlane. Let’s combine these and just call it “Processes.”
For business operations, these two differentiate what it costs to operate a value chain apart from the resources that it requires. For an internal UX discipline, these may be one in the same. E.g., a digital research tool is a key resource that also comes with a set cost. Let’s combine these and call it simply “Investments.”
While businesses generate direct revenue, most internal UX teams do not. In this case, “money coming in” is the value we’re generating for the business by the results from our work. This may come in the form of dollars and cents, reduced time-to-market, or other metrics. Let’s call this “Returns” to complete our ROI framework.
Now, our UX-as-a-Business Model takes shape:
In order to treat your team like its own business, you must declare who your internal customers are. Your internal customers are the stakeholders who directly rely on your team’s work, such as product managers or engineers. They use your deliverables—whether research insights or design systems—to influence leadership, drive strategy, and create end-user experiences.
While it is easy to declare all Engineers, PMs, Designers, Leaders, Marketers, and others collectively as your customer, it’s best to focus on just one or two. This focus, rather than trying to serve everyone equally, allows your team to channel efforts effectively and deliver greater impact.
Assess your relationships with internal customers:
Consider conducting short interviews with stakeholders to gather feedback on their experiences and your team’s perceived influence. This will help identify gaps and opportunities for growth, which will be important later when defining an ideal state!
Once you’ve identified your core customers, and levels of influence, you are best equipped to identify the current value props you’re delivering for them. Later, this could inform what value props you may yet need to develop in order to increase influence and drive higher returns.
An example of an effective “Internal customers and influence” may look something like this for a research team:
✦ Product managers: Passive collaborators who drive most roadmap prioritization for products. Currently show up to readouts, but don’t involve us in key priority decisions because they don’t understand all that our team provides.
This is perhaps the most important element of the canvas, and one of the most transformational ways to get you to think about your team (and practice) as a business itself that generates value for internal customers. Your value props define how your team delivers value to internal customers. These go beyond outputs like mockups or reports to include broader capabilities, such as democratized research tools or self-service design systems.
By identifying all current value props, you’re driving a level of self reflection that will allow you to enhance them, sunset them, or create new ones altogether.
Here are a few examples of value propositions provided by a research team:
✦ High-priority insights: UX Researchers provide insights, recommendations, and partnerships on highest-priority initiatives within the business. This mitigates risk and increases confidence in next steps.
✦ Insight repository: ResOps partners collate, update, and publish documented insights and meta-analyses of completed research to mitigate duplicate research, provide self-service “findings” for Product teams, and drive quarterly roadmaps.
✦ Office hours: UX Researchers provide weekly office hours to consult on research being done by Product teams, mitigate bias, improve insight outcomes, and limit duplicate work.
Similar to any successfully run business, one must identify how each core value proposition is being delivered to customers. These include scheduled meetings, planning sessions, or asynchronous updates like reports and newsletters.
By identifying these, you determine dependencies which your team would be unable to deliver value without.
This section does not have to be extremely long or comprehensive, but should instead cover the core methods by which your team provides value. It may look something like this for a UX Research team:
✦ Readout meetings: UXR-scheduled meetings to provide key findings and recommendations for further product decision making.
✦ Monthly newsletter: A compilation of recently completed work, and core customer learnings provided every month via email.
Whether you’re in a scrappy startup jumping from one project to the next, or in a larger enterprise team with program managers who steer scope and prioritization, every UX team has some form of process they follow (no matter how loose it may be!). Processes are the repeatable steps your team follows to deliver value, and should include the key partners involved in those steps. Documenting these identifies inefficiencies, clarifies roles, and improves collaboration.
When finished, you’ll be left with one or several process maps which serve as a foundation for identifying improvements, or clearly communicating value chains. While it’s perfectly fine to house your maps separately from your UX-as-a-Business Model, they should be linked in this section of the canvas.
One process example for a research team may look like this:
✦ Primary research process:
Leaders who demonstrate strong ROI for their teams make it harder for decision-makers to justify budget cuts, as reducing these investments often undermines proven returns.
Devin Harold
Design Leader
This is where things get most concrete in terms of reflecting on your team as a business itself in order to justify its existence, maintenance, or growth. This is where you need to be a business leader first, and a UX leader second. Every UX team requires investments to operate—whether in tools, software, or salaries. Understanding these costs is critical for demonstrating ROI and justifying further funding.
This section tends to be more sensitive as we discuss budget, so it’s best to fill in this part of the canvas alone or with the help from leadership versus the entire team.
Pro tip: If you lack access to salary data, use averages from platforms like Glassdoor or PayScale to estimate these types of costs.
A simple example of accumulated investments to operate your UX function may look something like this for a research team:
3 UX Researchers - $400,000 / year
Research Vendors - $100,000 / year
Subscriptions - $50,000 / year
Total Investments - $550,000 / year
It all comes down to this. Identifying your team’s returns is essential for justifying its operating costs (as calculated above). Without clearly articulating ROI—whether through revenue generation or cost savings—your team risks de-funding or stagnant growth, particularly in challenging business environments. Leaders who demonstrate strong ROI for their teams make it harder for decision-makers to justify budget cuts, as reducing these investments often undermines proven returns.
Returns can come in many forms, from identified revenue from happy customers, to costs avoided through improved efficiency in operations.
While this will look different depending on the makeup of your business, team, and projects, here are a few starting examples:
External returns are tied to measurable business outcomes like revenue. To track them, stay involved from a product’s inception to launch and collaborate with partners to assess your team’s impact. For instance, if your team helps increase the average basket size for 10% of shoppers, and this affects 5,000 customers per month who each add $10 more to their baskets, that’s $50,000 in monthly returns, or $600,000 annually. While your team may not deliver this value alone, as long as you can clearly connect your contributions to the result, this estimate is sufficient to document.
Internal returns reflect efficiencies gained within the business, like time or costs saved through better business processes. Document before-and-after changes to calculate these, just like with external returns above. For example, if a redesigned workflow saves 10 hours a week per employee and impacts a total of 800 employees, that’s 8,000 hours saved weekly. If employees in this group earn $33/hour, this equals $264,000 per week—or $13.7 million annually—available for reinvestment in other tasks or areas of the business.
Operational returns come from enhancing team practices, like reducing duplication or improving project delivery speed. These can be harder to quantify but can be estimated with stakeholder input. For example, if a research repository saves three employees an average of three hours per sprint searching for previous insights, and you run 24 sprints per year, that’s 216 total hours saved annually. With an averaged estimated hourly rate of $58, this equates to $12,528 in annual savings. While approximations, these figures showcase the value of your team’s operational contributions.
Categorize your returns (external, internal, operational) and document them regularly. I recommend jotting down changes early and often using my CHANGE canvas across every project and initiative. It makes filling out your UX-as-a-Business Model canvas much easier!
Tying returns to each value proposition strengthens your case for continued investment, while being transparent about approximations and gathering feedback ensures credibility. Over time, this habit will make measuring and communicating your impact seamless, while informing your team’s roadmap and strategy.
Now that you’re familiar with this canvas and how it can be applied to any UX team within any industry, it’s time to put it to use. To apply this framework, begin by assessing your current state. Understanding where your team stands today is crucial before setting a path toward your ideal state. This will guide steps to enhance customer relationships, improve processes, and elevate UX maturity.
You and your team likely already know a lot about what things are working well, and what things aren’t. Conduct a team session to discuss what’s working, what’s lacking, and what’s needed. Use this to fill in gaps in the UX-as-a-Business Model and spark internal research.
Every successful business works backwards from true customer needs, not hunches. Gather input from internal customers to understand their perceptions of your team’s value props, processes, and preferred touch points in order to solidify your current state and identify areas for improvement.
While most of the canvas is relatively straightforward, identifying investments and returns may be a challenge. Analyze previously completed projects to uncover returns, and collaborate with stakeholders to fill data gaps where you don’t have all the information. Do this for all completed projects in a calendar year—or in the past quarter—in order to get a summary of what impact your function is driving.
If you struggle to identify your current state or gather data to define your returns, remember this is part of the process. The entire point of this exercise is to reflect on your operations and build a habit of seeking this information regularly. Approximate where you need to in order to fill in the gaps, and don’t get discouraged!
Based on findings from research and the retrospective, define what areas of your UX-as-a-Business model you want to improve or tweak either by…
Taking any of these steps may enhance your current model and increase margins on your returns as they stand today.
Host an ideation session as a team and with partners to generate ideas for net new capabilities, processes, or touchpoints that turn pains into gains for internal customers. Prioritize ideas using frameworks like RICE to align solutions with customer needs based on varying factors. E.g., if research synthesis takes too long, investing in an AI-analysis tool may be a great value prop that drives high impact!
Just as with building a successful product, new or refined capabilities should be evaluated with customers. Get proposed solutions in front of internal stakeholders to ensure they address key needs effectively. E.g., to address a lack of a “proactive touch point”, you may think of creating a newsletter before learning from customers that they prefer Slack.
With a list of prioritized, validated future-state solutions, use the framework to visualize your new processes, touchpoints, value propositions, and even expected returns. This provides a clear roadmap for advancing your team’s maturity and justifying strategic investments. This new artifact will help communicate where your team is going, and why.
By reframing your team and UX practice as a business model in itself using this framework, you’ll be able to effectively articulate both current and future ROI. Whether leading a large team or working solo, being able to speak confidently about the value your team delivers is critical for securing support and resources.
The future of UX lies in balancing business leadership with craft, and in leaders “becoming their own CEO” of their practice. By focusing on business needs and aligning your team’s evolution with those needs, you position UX for lasting success and influence. Taking ownership of your team’s maturity and its contributions will not only enhance your leadership skills, but also strengthen your team’s role in driving organizational impact.
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