Lean in and read on as EY Chief Design Officer Will Shaw comprehensively explains the Leading Design Works Report. And how to successfully design for a corporation and grab a seat and a stake at the decision-making table.
The Leading Design Works report, which Peter Neufeld and I wrote with Nicolás Rebolledo Bustamante and the team at the Royal College of Art, was born from interviews with over 30 design executives. This comprehensive study explores their successes, challenges, and mistakes in establishing design as a strategically important capability in large, complex, highly regulated organizations.
The Leading Design Works Report
Understanding the Value of Design in Organizations
The study was driven by a desire to understand exactly how design realizes its value in organizations. While the value of design has been well explored in various contexts, our goal was to uncover the specific factors that enable design to thrive and contribute meaningfully to organizational success.
Key Findings: The Six Drivers of a Strategically Significant Design Function
What we found was multifaceted, but amidst all the nuances, six things rang out loud and clear. These six drivers form the foundation of a strategically significant design function:
1. Alignment with Organizational Goals: Design must be aligned with the broader goals and objectives of the organization. This means understanding the strategic priorities and ensuring that design initiatives support and enhance these goals.
2. Integration Across Functions: Design should not operate in isolation. It needs to be integrated across various functions within the organization, fostering collaboration and ensuring that design thinking permeates all aspects of the business.
3. Leadership and Advocacy: Strong leadership is crucial for the success of a design function. Design leaders must advocate for the value of design, build relationships with key stakeholders, and create a culture that supports and values design.
4. Customer-Centric Approach: Design must always keep the customer at the center. Understanding customer needs, behaviors, and pain points is essential for creating solutions that truly resonate and add value.
5. Measurement and Impact: It is important to measure the impact of design initiatives. This involves setting clear metrics and KPIs, tracking progress, and demonstrating the tangible benefits that design brings to the organization.
6. Adaptability and Resilience: The business landscape is constantly evolving, and design functions must be adaptable and resilient. This means being open to change, continuously learning, and staying ahead of industry trends and technological advancements.
Insights from Peter Neufeld’s presentation on Realizing the Value of Design in a Highly Regulated Sectors at the Design Matters conference in October.
Need-to-Know Guide:
While these insights are critical for design leaders, they also translate well into guidance for early-career designers. The lessons learned from design leadership success can help new designers navigate their careers and deliver impactful work. Here are some key takeaways for early-stage design professionals:
1. Know how your organization works, economically
Understanding the economic workings of your organization is not a betrayal of customer needs or a submission to exploitative capitalism. Far from it, to be effective as a designer in 2025 and beyond, you need to hold customer needs and business objectives in the same view and be a force to balance them. When there is an imbalance between these two things, organizations fail, and customers go unserved.
2. Understand the organizational priorities
These are wild times for organizations to navigate—strategies are flexible, and priorities will shift. Don’t be a designer that gets caught out when they do. Lift your head and make sense of the context. Read the annual report. Understand the trajectory, and adapt to the change. Be aware of the wider context and ensure you are a designer that has the tools to respond. One-trick ponies don’t thrive in these times.
3. Go beyond the design system
We have spent the last ten years organizing design production. We have design systems that enable us to ship design more effectively and efficiently than ever before. But don’t allow yourself to become a custodian of the design system. As a designer, you have a duty to go beyond the aesthetic layer and the mechanical act of production. Challenge, explore, and find opportunities for innovation that deliver on the organizational objective in new, interesting, and sustainable ways. After all, AI will come for design systems first. We aren’t far off from self-organizing, self-producing, and self-optimizing design systems. Remember that your value is in human insight, understanding, creativity, and ingenuity, not your labour.
4. Customer insight at the heart
Customer insight is a unique and valuable driver for alignment and perspective in large organizations that are often two steps removed from the lived reality of the humans they serve. Take the customer insight that is at the heart of your process and be liberal with it. Use it to bring people together, to align, and to improve. A customer journey view is unique in that it cuts horizontally across organizational silos and shines a light on the needs and goals of your customer in a way that aids organizational decision-making in all capabilities.
5. Measure impact
Design impact will be measured, so take an active part in how it is measured or the business will do it for you. Find the right balance of metrics that measure design quality, business goals, and evidencing regulatory compliance. Build your own dashboard. What are the data points that exist, and what are the data points you need to generate to have a body of evidence that helps you drive improvement in services and experiences while demonstrating impact and progress?
6. Representing design is full-time
It’s easy to show up and deliver a TED-style talk that gets everyone excited, but the real game changes with consistency and longevity. Show up, demonstrate impact, and have a compelling story to tell about the value you are adding. Building trust is a long game. Be consistent, have a clear articulation of the value of design, and be prepared to repeat it until you’re sick of it.
Navigating the ‘wobble’ in design
Design is currently experiencing a multifaceted ‘wobble,’. This wobble is driven by several new and specific factors that are reshaping the landscape of design in profound ways. Firstly, economic uncertainty has created a volatile environment where budgets are scrutinized, and investments in design are often the first to be questioned. The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated this instability, as organizations grapple with shifting market dynamics, supply chain disruptions, and changing consumer behaviors.
Additionally, there is a growing pressure to cut costs across the board, which often leads to a reduction in design resources and a push for more efficient, scalable solutions. The rise of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) is another critical factor contributing to the wobble. AI and machine learning technologies are increasingly capable of performing tasks traditionally done by designers, such as generating design variations, optimizing user interfaces, and even creating entire design systems. This technological advancement is forcing designers to rethink their roles and focus on areas where human creativity and insight are irreplaceable.
Moreover, large organizations are facing increasing pressure to allocate funds to other high-risk, high-urgency capabilities, such as cybersecurity, digital transformation, and sustainability initiatives. These priorities often overshadow the investment in design, despite its strategic importance.
In this challenging environment, it has never been more important for designers to stop asking for a seat at the table and carrying an exceptionalist mindset. Instead, they need to meet their businesses where they need them, demonstrating the tangible value of design in addressing these multifaceted challenges. By doing so, designers can help their organizations navigate this wobble and emerge stronger and more resilient.
Practical steps for early-career designers
Image illustrating a balancing act is sourced from Pinterest.
Here are some of the insights from our study with Chief Design Officers in large, regulated organizations, and how they might help early-stage design professionals deliver with impact:
1. Understand the wider context of where you are operating
Designers need to have a broad understanding of the context in which they operate. This includes being aware of industry trends, economic conditions, and the specific challenges and opportunities facing their organization. By understanding the wider context, designers can make more informed decisions and create solutions that are relevant and impactful and aligned to organisation goals.
2. Use customer insight and design as a force for cross-capability collaboration
Customer insight is a powerful tool for driving collaboration across different functions within an organization. By sharing customer insights and using them to inform decision-making, designers can help break down silos and foster a more collaborative and aligned approach to problem-solving. That is design impact right there. Be the designer who brings people together and drives better decisions and outcomes everywhere.
3. Ensure you hold customer, organizational, and regulatory priorities in balance
Designers need to balance the needs and priorities of customers, the organization, and regulatory requirements. This requires a deep understanding of all three areas and the ability to navigate the often-competing demands they present. By finding the right balance, designers can create solutions that are not only effective but also sustainable and compliant. We have a huge role to play in solving this puzzle, before we get anywhere near figma.
4. Be consistent in how you show up and your impact narrative
Consistency is key to building trust and credibility as a designer. This means showing up consistently, delivering high-quality work, and having a clear and compelling story about the value you are adding. By being consistent in your approach and communication, you can build strong relationships with stakeholders and create a lasting impact.
The future of design
As we look to the future, it is clear that the role of designers will continue to evolve. In 2025 and beyond, designers will need to be more than just craftspeople. They will need to be navigators, aligning and collaborating across functions, and driving impact in a rapidly changing and complex environment.
The insights and guidance from the Leading Design Works report provide a valuable roadmap for both design leaders and early-career designers. By understanding the key drivers of a strategically significant design function and applying these principles in their work, designers can navigate the challenges and opportunities ahead and deliver meaningful impact.
Good night, and good luck.
Fascinated? Get more insights and watch Peter Neufeld’s talk at Design Matters 24 here!
Peter Neufeld at Design Matters 24 in Copenhagen.
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