My original short-lived title for this report was “5 things you’re doing wrong with your design org” but that sounded far too clickbait-y and judge-y for my liking. And in any case, who am I to say definitively, what is right or wrong for your organization, without having spoken to you, without having met your org, or done any kind of consultation or assessment? My coaching experience reminded me this would be very presumptuous. And even though I’ve experienced and spoken to people from a number of big design organizations in my two-decade career in tech and UX, my research experience reminded me the total number still wouldn’t make my recommendations statistically significant.

Cue: McKinsey.

McKinsey consulting recently published a report: Redesigning the Design Department, which incorporates “data from 3 million designers and 100,000 design departments”, an “in-depth survey of >250 business and design leaders” and “interviews with 30 senior executives in leading design-driving companies”. That’s certainly more organizations than I would be able to observe or experience in my lifetime! So, would their findings align with my own opinions on this, which I have been known to share with other design and tech leaders from time to time!? I was curious to find out!

While there were many eye-opening findings in McKinsey’s report, the following three key points echoed my own experience. I’ve phrased them as questions so you can reflect on your own organization or team:

1. How integrated are your designers into your projects with their cross-functional peers?

In part, McKinsey’s findings surprised me: they found that it doesn’t matter where a design org sits on the org chart. That took me by surprise. But the next part did not: according to their research, *how* designers are integrated cross-functionally into their projects is what matters most.

I have witnessed this first hand: designers that are fully embedded into a cross-disciplinary team; designers that are considered and relied upon as bona fide equal and contributing members of their teams; designers that work “as one” towards a shared goal and are remunerated for the project’s success, are in my experience, much happier, more engaged and have more impact.

Yet I have seen many examples where this kind of integration is not happening. Designers that are isolated; designers that don’t seek feedback on their work from Engineers (design files that get thrown over the wall and designers move on to different projects when it arguably matters most: i.e. when developers are implementing them); designers that are prescribed solutions by their product managers as opposed to having a seat at the table when collaborating on the problem statement. Much of this work is wasted: it’s either not feasible, costs too much to develop, or is missing crucial feedback that would make it relevant. All too often, this work isn’t implemented or is implemented in a way that is very different from how the designer imagined, and morale plummets.

To further reflect on this point, the McKinsey report looks at the financial performance of the companies in their data set and found that the top-performing ones embedded rather than isolated their designers. In my experience, embedding in this way also accelerates shared empathy, improves collaboration, and helps designers learn other crucial skills like technical feasibility, marketing considerations, and patterns relating to tertiary cases and edge cases - all of which improve their design skills. So it was interesting to contemplate whether this kind of impact could translate into the bottom line.

This brings me to the second question, featured in the report:

2. Do your designers have opportunities to learn or have backgrounds in skills OTHER THAN design?

McKinsey’s report found that the most impactful designers understand and have skills other than design. Crucially, the report singles out business skills and commercial effectiveness skills, but I would also highlight the importance of having an understanding of how the technology works. Interestingly, my 2018 article “To grow as a UX designer, think beyond design”, advocated for the same thing: the importance of T-shaped designers.

Design is about purpose, measuring impact, and contributing to business outcomes through solving customers’ problems. I have met some designers who abstract themselves from this or are not comfortable measuring their impact. The more closely aligned a designer is to the user goals and business goals the more insightfully they can propose solutions that achieve both.

Lastly, a more buried/subtle question:

3. How are you using your design resources?

On the one hand, this question can be contemplated in the formal context: the article finds that top-performing companies not only have their design team improve products but also leveraged their talents and methodologies to analyze and improve internal processes. This is a great point and something that is often overlooked.

On the other hand, the article touches on how team leaders and members approach designers: do they prescribe the solution to their designers or do they engage them in the problem and allow them the space to show what’s possible?

This brings me to an analogy that I’ve used from time to time with product managers who I felt were not using designers in my design team optimally (and to the detriment of the designers’ morale): Use your designer as a nutritionist, not a cook. Let me elaborate… A nutritionist helps you with your goals — health goals, such as your target weight, your blood pressure, your cholesterol, etc. They offer strategies to achieve those objectives and provide the necessary support you need to be successful. A cook, on the other hand, takes specific requests, for example: how you like your eggs and what you’d like them to accompany them (scrambled vs. over easy, say; with toast vs. hash browns). The cook may very well deliver excellent-tasting eggs but this kind of interaction allows no room to, for example, inspire you with options involving the freshest seasonal ingredients from the market that day, or that would take advantage of their 10 years of experience experimenting with making the perfect souffle, say. So involve your designers as you would a nutritionist. Share your goals and objectives with them. Invite them to participate (or even facilitate) your brainstorming sessions to maximize the chance of seeing an innovative solution you hadn’t imagined.

What do you think? To what extent are you integrating your designers? Are they developing essential non-design skills? And are there ways you can take advantage of a designer’s talents and experience by approaching them with your goals or in internal process improvements as well as their traditional product responsibilities?

I hope you found this article interesting and that it provides a digestible jumping-off point to read the full McKinsey report. Those of you that know me will already be aware that I am a big fan of the research reports that they have published in recent years — especially “The Business Value of Design” and “Great Attrition or Great Attraction: the Choice is Yours” (the latter of which uncovers the disparity between the reasons employers believe their employees are leaving, versus the *actual* reasons and makes for excellent reading).

Figuring out what makes a cross-functional product and tech team work well together is a passion of mine and takes advantage of my 20 years working in tech and UX, as well as my recent re-training as a coach.

I’d love to help you with your design organization and with your leadership challenges. Especially if you’re struggling with high turnover (PS. you’re not alone) or a stagnant team and can’t figure out why or what to do about it.

Feel free to reach out to me for a virtual coffee (or an actual one if you’re in New York!). I invite you to connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/alexandrahurworth.