🤿 Dive Club | You’re not getting enough credit for your design work

This year, I’ve trained hundreds of designers, design leaders, and teams around the world. A common theme that comes up across my courses and coaching is: “how do I have more impact as a designer?”

The interest from designers to drive more impact may be more amplified after years of tech instability and layoffs. However, the desire to do more and deliver more is an evergreen question in our industry, for two key reasons:

Reason 1: Many designers naturally reach a point in their careers when they want to do more than push pixels

For years, I diligently tackled any project handed down to me. When I saw “urgent” projects suddenly shelved or sub-MVP products fail, I started questioning how we ship products.

If I was going to spend my time designing something with care, I wanted to participate in conversations about What we were building and When we were launching it, not just How it took shape on the screen.

Many designers realize that to continue growing in their careers, they need to go beyond technical design skills. The desire to approach my design work more holistically is one reason I earned my MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Reason 2: Designers aren’t getting the credit they deserve for the impact they’re already making

Most companies aren’t “designed for designers,” because most non-designers aren’t trained to understand the how Design contributes to the business.

At Haas, a Design Thinking course was required alongside topics like Economics, Statistics, and Finance. Unfortunately, so many students complained that the course was fluffy and unnecessary that it was relegated to an elective. Future business leaders wouldn’t have any exposure to Design unless they went looking for it.

When business leaders aren’t taught how Design contributes to the bottom-line, they underinvest in it. When we receive less investment, our ability to deliver value becomes limited. This further justifies less investment. And so on.

What can we do about it

Having worked on the growth teams at DoorDash and Airbnb, I abhor leaky conversion funnels. There’s no point in pouring ad dollars into a flow that won’t convert and capture value.

Similarly, Designers shouldn’t focus on doing net-new impactful work if they’re not getting credit for the work they’re already doing. If your company doesn’t fully understand design, we must first solve the credit problem.

The method I’ve found that works best is to explain how design work positively impacts the measures and goals business teams already care about.

The key to telling this story is the understanding that the variable that drives many metrics is changes to human behavior, attitudes, and emotions.

Behavior: If an action is intuitive or information architecture is clear, metrics like time on task, conversion
Attitudes: If a user feels more confident using a product, metrics like Activation, Retention, and Conversion increase.
Emotions: If a user likes a product better, metrics like NPS, Retention, and Referrals increase.

What’s great is that Designers—through our work simplifying flows, making language clear, leveraging recognizable conventions, and a million other things—are often the ones responsible for shifting a user’s behavior, attitudes, and emotions.

At DoorDash, I was responsible for launching the company’s entire photography program. When our first A/B test showed that photography didn’t increase conversion, there was pressure to cancel the project. But I anticipated that some users must have been impacted in some way, so I asked, “what did change?”

It turned out that photography helped people make the next decision in the flow—pick a cuisine, a restaurant, an item. So instead of cancelling the project, I proposed expanding it to include photography everywhere in the product. The strategy I proposed is what you see today.

Ready to go deeper?

Ridd here 👋

Ryan dropped more knowledge bombs in our interview than just about any conversation I’ve ever had. That’s why I asked him to share this guest post :)

It’s rare to meet someone who has the wisdom and a unique ability to teach it to others. It's no wonder his courses are some of the most popular on all of Maven.

So if you’re looking to go even deeper I can’t recommend learning from Ryan enough 👇

He has two offerings that I think you’ll love:

(you can use the code DIVECLUB to get $100 off either one too!)

1) Describing the ROI of Design

Articulate & demonstrate the value of your Design work in a way that business stakeholders understand, appreciate, and reward

👉 Check it out

2) PM Masterclass for Designers

Master product strategy & development to drive impact, gain influence, and ship the best design work of your career