Understanding Design As a Function of the Firm

When people think of ‘design,’ they think of it as a practice, a process, a skill, a set of activities. But to appreciate the distinct challenge that design faces within companies, it’s crucial to understand the nature of Design as an organizational function.

A function is a specific area within a company dedicated to a particular type of work, grouping together related activities and responsibilities to achieve business objectives. Every organization will have some set of shared standard and generic functions, such as Sales, Marketing, Human Resources, Finance, Legal, and Customer Service/Support. As every company increasingly relies on technology, Information Technology (IT) has emerged as a standard function. 

Then there will be functions specific to the nature of that organization. For example, a bank may have Front Office functions like Client Advisory, Trading, and Relationship Management, and Middle Office functions like Risk Management, Compliance, and Portfolio Management. Within software organizations, specific functions include Product Management, Engineering, Quality Assurance, DevOps, and Data Science.

Whether generic or specific, two aspects define these functions: the activities they engage in to do their work, and the value they deliver the organization.

Whereas other functions are typically more consistent from company to company (Marketing is always about generating leads and establishing brand presence, Sales is always about acquiring customers), Design is much more variable.

Defining Design as a Function

When addressing the questions, “What does Design *do*? What value does it deliver the organization?,” any specific attempt at answering will either be too narrow (e.g., usability) or too bound up with other functions (e.g., customer satisfaction, which is an outcome of design, product management, engineering, customer service and support, sales, etc. etc.).

The boom in design over the last 20 years has been almost wholly in Digital Product Design—specifically design for web and mobile software. If we look at Digital Product Design as a function, there exists consistency across organizations in terms of activities: upfront user research to understand needs and abilities; insights for addressing user challenges; prototyping to probe various potential solutions; detailed visual and interaction design to determine how the software behaves. 

The overlap of Design and Product Management

While those activities are distinct to the practice, the nature of the value it delivers introduces a complication, namely, the overlap between Digital Product Design and Product Management. Design sees itself as responsible for the user experience, and Digital Product Design’s impact is most evident in how it affects what are typically considered “product” metrics, such as conversion rate, time to first value, engagement, effectiveness, retention, task completion, feature adoption, and satisfaction (NPS or CSAT). Compounding this is how Product Management often owns the decisions that most directly affect the user experience, such as whether or not something is ready to ship. 

The immense potential range of Design

This functional confusion supports the contention that Design can (and should) be so much more than Digital Product Design. When I ran design organizations, I oversaw marketing design as well as product design, which enabled my teams to weave a coherent end-to-end user experience. Industries such as retail, travel, transportation, and health care benefit from practices that cross channels, such as service design and environmental design. Some companies have seen value in establishing a Design Thinking practice that spreads design activities throughout the organization.

To sum up, Design’s impact can be as granular as the pixels in a mobile app, and as broad and strategic as articulating an omni-channel product and service strategy that informs a company’s direction for the next 5-10 years. While such breadth is remarkably freeing, no other single function impacts across such a span. People outside Design (most importantly executive leadership) have difficulty appreciating this potential. 

Design's humanism makes it weird

Adding to this difficulty is the fact that Design practices are rooted in approaches uncommon to other functions. Most functions traffic in certainty, reliability, reductionism, and quantifiability, and thus value qualities like efficiency, scale, and repeatability. Whereas Design draws from humanism, understanding and celebrating people in all their messiness and uncertainty, embracing the full range of emotional valences (from joy to despair). The function places value on the humane, including ethics, inclusion, equity, beauty, and connection. This encourages qualitative understanding, generative practices (exploring many paths), dialectic engagement (creation and critique), holding space for uncertainty and ambiguity, and an aesthetic point of view. All of which can come across as untethered and potentially dangerous to those who don’t share these values.

Defining Design's Value

When considering the nature of the value that Design provides the companies it is part of, the reality is that it just cannot (and should not!) be standardized in the way that marketing, sales, and engineering are. Design's variability and breadth means that it's value is distinct, depending on organizational context.

Returning to the functional frame of Design, what perhaps makes it most strange relative to other functions is that it rarely delivers value directly. Design is like salt or butter in cooking, enhancing and amplifying the output of other organizational functions, often simultaneously, rather than delivering standalone value. 

These cross-functional enhancements often operate subtly. By making communications clearer, Design helps Marketing deliver more leads; increased usability helps Product with core metrics like retention, adoption, engagement, successful use; mapping internal HR processes highlights opportunities for improvement such as speedier onboarding and greater employee engagement. It is those other functions that receive the credit for their improvements, and the challenge for Design is to develop sophisticated ways to track and communicate subtle improved outcomes across multiple teams and their metrics.

These oddities may put the Design function at risk

The challenges outlined above are all a product of Design being a relatively new function, particularly at the executive level (meaning either in, or reporting to, the C-suite). With that newness comes a lack of organizational clarity and established patterns of working. And the rest of the organization often doesn't really know what to make of it.   

If you’re fortunate to be in an organization with greater design maturity, harboring well-established design practices, with teams that are able to connect their work to what the business values, the investment in design will be maintained through thick and thin, as it is seen as essential to their competitive advantage. 

But in less mature environments, where the connection to value remains uncertain, and the practices are perceived as inefficient, inessential, and maybe a little weird, Design organizations face cuts or even elimination. Such precariousness becomes self-fulfilling in these less-mature environments, as Design resorts to short-term and tactical impact, reinforcing the perception that Design is best considered as a production concern, and not a resource for addressing more strategic challenges.

Even if Design has earned the sought-after executive ‘seat at the table,’ it will be the established functions with certain, consistent, near-term value propositions that receive institutional precedence over a new function with softer, longer-term value propositions, staffed by humanist weirdos.

The clarity of the functional perspective

While this functional funkiness sets Design at a disadvantage within most organizations, accepting its reality allows the Design team to engage with greater clarity and awareness, and should encourage the adoption of patterns and practices that allow for the idiosyncrasies (it's what makes design interesting) while better interfacing with the rest of the firm.