Dear (none)Designer,

Welcome back to the thirty-ninth Design at Scale™ Newsletter – focusing on innovation and how design drives change in a large organisation or an agency.

No one would dispute that the primary purpose of every business is to create value while generating a profit. Therefore, a value proposition is a concise statement that clearly communicates the unique benefits and value a company's product or service offers to its target customers. It's essentially the number one reason why a potential customer should choose you over your competitors.

For every business, a strong value proposition answers key questions for the customer. Can we communicate a value proposition for a single design department, let alone a design function within the organisation?

What do you offer?

Organisation: This is often a product or service that customer use for their benefit.  

Design: Unfortunately, not many designers can clearly articulate what they offer and how they might add value to the organisation, let alone to the customer. This misconception often causes unnecessary clashes within the organisation's power play over what the design actually produces, where the leadership starts and finishes, and what responsibilities they hold.

Who is it for?

Regrettably, when we ask "what the design function delivers within the organisation", we often hear that we deliver to the customer. Where in fact the designers never really deliver directly to the customer, but often to their colleague who built, developed, and integrated the code. The design function within the organisation, whether we speak of marketing, brand or communication, always delivers internally first (outputs) before broadcasting to the customer (outcomes).

How does it help them?

The design function within the organisation served a specific need. Generally, the first squad focuses on branding that allows all employees to be seen under a single umbrella. The second squad is marketing, which extends the branding to the customer's hands and their first interactions with the product or service. And then the third squad is responsible for the creation and maintenance of the digital offering's growth (in this case, the product and service again).

It's often misunderstood that the designers for marketing are the same as the designers for a product or service. It's more of an engineering function than it might appear; the rules and the engagement strategies for delivering the proposition are quite different to what marketing or branding is used to. That is why we find so many teams in despair, as they do not know who they are helping and who is helping them.

Why is it better than the competition?

This point brings us to a quite significant difference that we designers experience daily, but very few understand.

The improvement of the brand or marketing message is a reflection of marketing and customer research, focusing on perception and brand positioning.

On the other hand, the improvement of the product or service is inherently tied to the needs of both the business and the consumer. Therefore, to increase revenue, the organisation provides value to the customers on a "the power and control" basis (more time = more control, clear understanding = better decision-making and so on).

This way, the design team provides better outputs that drive overall better outcomes. For example, changing the button has no impact – changing the CTA across 180 different touchpoints and unifying the response drives both business efficiency and customer satisfaction. Quite rightly, from the design perspective, the key characteristics of a good design value proposition are business-oriented.

Clear and Easy to Understand

External view: It should be so simple that a potential customer can grasp its meaning in a few seconds.

Internal view: it should be well broadcast and understood by all business units within the organisation. What the design function brings to the table, and how indispensable it is in the overall delivery.

Specific and Tangible:

External view: It should go beyond generic statements and provide concrete, quantifiable benefits where possible.

Internal view: The majority of design teams focus on outcomes and outputs. To be specific and tangible from the design function's perspective, the design function only delivers intangible outputs that drive business outcomes. Therefore, the design function cannot deliver the outcomes without creating outputs. This is often misunderstood and miscommunicated by service design teams, which mistakenly believe that their decision-making drives outcomes without producing tangible design outputs. Regarding product teams, they often focus on the outputs, forgetting to correctly broadcast the outcomes.

Customer-Focused:

It's not about what your company does, but what the customer gains. It speaks to their needs, wants, and pain points.

External view: Striving for customer success within the product or service is the ultimate goal of every organisation. Therefore, the designed function supports the overall perception of the business.

Internal view: It is quite different. First and foremost, design needs to unify the language. It unifies the visual, verbal, design, and communication language, allowing it to be redistributed across the organisation, and all connections for customers to be unified in the same experience. Design needs to connect other services into a single ecosystem that allows customers to smoothly transition between services/domains/features/transactionservices, transition without recognising they are leaving one platform for another. Ultimately, building a corporate proposition that leaves customers satisfied and wanting to return for more of the service or the product.

Differentiated:

It highlights what makes you stand out from all other available options. Arguably, it's easy to figure out the business value proposition and how the business should operate to fulfil customer desires and generate profit.

But how about a design value?

If we apply all the above to a design department, design unit or individual designer and ask the very same question, "what is the value proposition of your design offer?" we often hear a business description full of organisation jargon that has nothing to do with the design function, let alone the design proposition within your organisation.

First, let's shift our attention away from pixels, colours, and layout, and introduce terms like brand equity, design transformation, and operational excellence. Without understanding these terms, we'll not be equipped to make the difference in selling a design value proposition anywhere. It is not important where the value comes from, whether it is created, communicated, or transferred to the business; it is important that everyone understands the basis of the value at present.

Respectfully, it's not the fault of design, designers or design leaders. Unfortunately, our design education system has never taught us about the core purpose of design integration. Where the value is and how it needs to be communicated. You are either a designer with an MA. Degree in Graphic Design and Visual Communication, or you are an MBA student who understands how to sell design, but does not know the effort that goes into designing a product or service.

This massive gap has been debated for over the last century, especially with the arrival of digital design and its coexistence alongside engineering development, integration, deployment, and constant iteration. Designers are somehow left at the mercy of the business operation principles or highly development-oriented deployment methods that always take priority over delivery.

Arguably, this is not due to the priority of a business or development; it has to do with unifying the design language and communicating the design value proposition internally. An engineering function that has far clearer rules, standards, and delivery techniques. The design often suffers from designers fluctuating between branding, service, research, marketing, and product development to find the next gig. In contrast, our engineering and business colleagues usually stay aligned with their chosen career path for much longer. Therefore, the articulation of the proposition for the business and development is far more solid than for the design.

In conclusion, to connect the dots between the designer's business and development, the designer needs to establish the foundation elements that bridge these two, allowing the communicating parts to create value within the business that is equal to, and sometimes even greater than, that of our business or engineering colleagues. This is not to steer or steal the relationship within the organisation nor to debate their knowledge. It is simply to empower all the parties to become co-partners in delivering the value across the organisation.

For more information, please visit Designa at Scale™ – GRID Magazine, where you can find additional relevant articles that explore high-performing teams, self-organising teams of 001, teams of 010, and teams of 100 that deliver the value proposition within a product-led environment.