The investment in experienced design leadership is relatively easy to calculate. Understanding what a business might be losing without it is a far more interesting exercise.
Every business knows what it spends on its people. Salaries appear in budgets, recruitment costs can be calculated and significant appointments are examined against the financial commitments they represent. The questions are entirely reasonable. What will this person be responsible for? What could they achieve that the existing team cannot? And how will the business know whether the investment has been worthwhile?
But there's another side to the calculation that I find considerably more interesting, and it's one that businesses don't always spend enough time examining. What is the company already spending on problems it hasn't properly identified? How much revenue is slipping away through preventable friction, inconsistent experiences or opportunities nobody has had the time or expertise to investigate? And what happens when the same underlying problem is allowed to influence hundreds of decisions, year after year?
Those figures tend to be much harder to find.
A business might have a website that attracts plenty of visitors but generates surprisingly few enquiries. It might have a respected name and an excellent product, yet find itself competing on price because customers struggle to understand what makes it worth paying more for. Perhaps sales are growing, but customer support costs are climbing with them. Or perhaps an ambitious company has invested heavily in technology without establishing whether it solves the problems customers actually experience.
Individually, these can look like marketing, sales, operational or product problems. Sometimes that's exactly what they are. But it's worth asking whether the difficulties are connected, and whether the business has the right people involved in understanding them.
This is where my view of design leadership differs from the rather conventional idea of employing somebody to oversee creative output. I care enormously about the quality of finished work, whether it's a digital product, a visual identity, a beautifully produced publication or the details of a physical customer experience. But the real value of experienced leadership begins much earlier. It involves understanding what the business is trying to achieve, identifying what's preventing it from getting there and helping the people responsible find a better way forward.
If that sounds broader than design, it should. The consequences of design decisions rarely stay within the design department.
Finding the problem before paying for the solution
Imagine a company deciding it needs a new website. Perhaps the existing one looks dated, competitors have moved ahead or enquiries have begun to decline. The brief has already been discussed, somebody has suggested a budget and the expectation is that a refreshed website will help improve performance.
At this point, it's entirely possible to commission some excellent creative work. The new website could be beautifully art-directed, technically sophisticated and considerably easier to navigate. Everyone involved might be pleased with the result.
But what if the original problem was never really the website?
Perhaps the business attracts the wrong audience because its proposition is unclear. Perhaps visitors are interested but cannot establish whether the service is appropriate for them. They may be making enquiries perfectly happily, only to receive an uninspiring response three days later. The sales team might be struggling to explain the pricing, or the company may be making promises that its operations team finds difficult to fulfil.
A website redesign could help with some of those things, but it could also become an expensive distraction from the underlying issue.
This is why I believe it's so important to get upstream of a brief. Before deciding what we're going to make, we need to understand what's happening, what we know, what we're assuming and what we're actually trying to change. It's a distinction that appears in the Design Council's Double Diamond approach, which places discovery and definition before developing solutions. Richard Rumelt makes a related argument in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: effective strategy begins with diagnosing the challenge, rather than confusing an ambition with a plan for achieving it.
Neither idea is particularly complicated. Putting them into practice can be surprisingly difficult.
People understandably want to see progress. A new design gives everybody something tangible to discuss. It's satisfying to approve a visual direction, review a prototype or watch a campaign come together. Investigating the circumstances that created the original problem can feel less productive, especially when it involves questioning decisions that have already been made by intelligent, experienced people.
Yet that investigation might be the most valuable part of the work.
The challenge for a senior design leader is to recognise when the brief is addressing a symptom and have the confidence to say so. Not to undermine the people who prepared it, and certainly not to turn every project into a prolonged strategic exercise, but to protect the business from investing in an answer before it properly understands the question.
Sometimes the research will confirm that the original brief was exactly right. That's useful too. We can then proceed with considerably more confidence about what needs to be achieved and why.
Getting to the root of a problem can also take us somewhere unexpected. Customers complaining about an application might actually be experiencing the consequences of poor data quality, inconsistent business rules or a product strategy that has accumulated too many conflicting priorities. A brand struggling to justify its prices may have excellent visual communications but insufficiently distinctive products, unreliable service or sales teams that cannot explain its value clearly.
Improving those situations requires curiosity about the whole business and a willingness to work with people whose expertise differs from your own. It also demands a certain humility, because discovering the real problem sometimes means recognising that your original assumption, however persuasive it seemed, was wrong.
Good judgement includes knowing when further investigation is justified, when the available evidence is sufficient and when it's time to make a decision. Spending six months studying a problem that could have been resolved in six weeks is hardly a demonstration of commercial intelligence.
The value of a good conversation
I've always believed that great work comes from great conversations. I don't mean the kind where twelve people gather around a table to discuss the placement of a button, or where a meeting ends with an impressive collection of actions that nobody quite understands. I mean conversations in which people share what they know, listen properly, challenge assumptions and become genuinely interested in getting to the bottom of something.
If I wanted to understand why a business was struggling to convert enquiries, I wouldn't begin by asking its design team for their opinions on the website. I'd want to speak to the people handling those enquiries. I'd be interested in the questions customers repeatedly ask, where conversations become difficult, what objections prevent a sale and whether the customer arrives with an accurate understanding of what's being offered.
I'd also want to speak to marketing about the quality and source of those enquiries, finance about their commercial value and the people responsible for delivering the product or service about the promises the business is making. Then I'd look at the evidence: customer behaviour, conversion data, complaints, lost opportunities, research and the workarounds people have developed to get through the day.
The different accounts might reveal a problem nobody had recognised in isolation. Equally, they might show that several people have understood it for years but nobody has had the authority or opportunity to bring the right people together and resolve it.
That happens more easily than we'd like to admit. Businesses develop around departments, responsibilities and reporting lines. People become very good at managing the part of the operation they can influence, even when a recurring problem originates somewhere else.
A customer support team might spend hours helping people understand a product that should have been explained more clearly before purchase. A sales team might develop its own presentation materials because the marketing communications aren't answering the questions prospects ask. Product designers might spend months refining an interface while the development team is struggling with technical decisions made long before they became involved.
These situations all have costs, although they don't always appear under a heading that makes them easy to recognise.
Good conversations help reveal them. Great conversations can lead to people doing something about them.
That second part is important. Research isn't valuable simply because it produces findings, and collaboration isn't successful because everyone feels they've contributed. There has to be enough understanding, trust and shared responsibility to turn what we've learned into better decisions. A design leader needs to communicate frequently, explain the reasoning behind a recommendation and be prepared to adapt when new evidence appears.
It's particularly important to recognise the difference between collecting opinions and conducting research. Asking colleagues what they think can reveal useful concerns, but it doesn't automatically tell us how customers behave or which problems are commercially significant. I'd want to combine those conversations with evidence from the business itself, whether that's product analytics, support enquiries, customer interviews, observational research, sales data or the results of testing alternative approaches. Quantitative research can help establish the scale and distribution of a problem, while qualitative research is often better suited to understanding the circumstances and motivations behind it.
Taken together, they can challenge assumptions that might otherwise survive for years simply because they've become part of how the company describes its customers.
I also think there's a responsibility to make complex matters understandable without reducing them to slogans. Founders and senior leaders are often making decisions with incomplete information and competing priorities. They don't need another specialist discipline presenting its work as uniquely important. They need people who can explain the implications, acknowledge the uncertainties and help them decide what to do next.
Communication is central to making this work. It isn't enough for a design leader to understand the problem personally. They need to help colleagues understand it too, establish agreement about what matters and maintain that shared understanding as projects move towards delivery. I'd much rather leave a meeting with a clear understanding of a difficult problem and a practical next step than an impressive presentation that everyone compliments before returning to business as usual.
What might two percentage points be worth?
It's worth putting some numbers against this, because the financial implications can be rather different from the amounts that initially attract attention.
Let's imagine a business generates 20,000 qualified enquiries each year. It converts 10% of them into customers, with an average sale of £5,000. That gives us 2,000 sales and £10 million in annual revenue.
Now suppose the business improves the experience sufficiently to increase conversion from 10% to 12%. The volume and quality of enquiries remain the same, as does the average sale. Instead of 2,000 customers, it acquires 2,400.
That's an additional £2 million in annual revenue.
If those extra sales deliver an incremental contribution margin of 35%, they generate approximately £700,000 towards profit before accounting for the cost of the improvements and any additional capacity required to serve them.
These are hypothetical figures, not a claim that employing a design leader will magically improve conversion by two percentage points. We'd need to establish whether the opportunity existed, investigate the reasons for poor performance, test potential improvements and measure what actually happened. The assumptions about enquiry quality, sale value, capacity and contribution would all need examining.
But that's precisely why the calculation is useful. It changes the conversation from the cost of employing an experienced person to the value of identifying and addressing a significant commercial problem.
And conversion is only one possibility.
A better-designed product might reduce avoidable support enquiries. Clearer customer communications could prevent misunderstandings that lead to costly rework. A more compelling proposition might allow a business to compete on the strength of its offering instead of repeatedly discounting. Improvements to onboarding could increase the number of customers who actually begin using a service they've purchased, while a more coherent experience might influence whether they return.
Some benefits are immediate and measurable. Others accumulate over several years, particularly when they involve customer confidence, brand reputation or the ability to introduce new products without creating confusion.
Not every improvement will be worth millions. Some won't justify the cost of implementing them. That's why commercial judgement matters as much as creative judgement.
I'd be far more impressed by a design leader who can explain why an attractive idea shouldn't be pursued than one who enthusiastically recommends every possible opportunity. Businesses have limited resources. Knowing where not to spend them is part of the responsibility.
Nobody experiences your organisational chart
Marty Neumeier's The Brand Gap is a useful reminder that an organisation's ambitions and the way people experience it are not automatically the same thing. A company may have a clearly articulated strategy and a distinctive visual identity, but its reputation is also shaped by what happens when somebody tries to buy, use or receive support for whatever it sells.
Take a business operating at the premium end of its market. It might have invested significantly in photography, typography, packaging and advertising. The website is impressive, the brand feels established and the product appears desirable. Then a prospective customer makes an enquiry and receives a poorly written automated response. Or they spend several minutes trying to understand delivery arrangements that should have been straightforward. Perhaps the product arrives beautifully packaged, but the aftercare experience bears little resemblance to what the brand originally promised.
These aren't necessarily dramatic failures. That's partly the problem. Each one can be dismissed as a small operational detail, something for another department to resolve or an issue that doesn't justify senior attention.
Yet the customer experiences the cumulative effect.
They don't distinguish between a brand problem, a customer experience problem and an operations problem in the way the business does. They remember how the organisation treated them, whether the experience matched their expectations and whether they'd choose to deal with it again.
For me, this is one of the strongest arguments for having experienced creative and design leadership involved in the wider business. A company needs somebody who can see the relationship between its proposition, communications, digital products, service delivery and the many practical details that influence customer perception. That doesn't mean one person should control every department or pretend to possess expertise in every discipline. It means there should be a shared understanding of the experience the business intends to deliver, with people able to work across boundaries when something isn't functioning as it should.
This is particularly interesting in businesses where personal relationships matter. Private aviation, hospitality, specialist travel, professional services and high-value retail may deliver very different products, but they all depend on the relationship between an expectation and what happens in practice.
A private aviation business, for example, might have an excellent digital platform for requesting flights. But if the information doesn't move reliably between the customer, charter adviser and operator, the quality of the interface cannot compensate indefinitely. A hotel might have a remarkable interior and beautifully designed booking experience, yet repeatedly disappoint guests through inconsistent communication. An independent watchmaker could produce an outstanding product but lose prospective buyers because its digital experience fails to explain availability, servicing or the purchase process with sufficient clarity.
Different businesses, different challenges. The common opportunity is to investigate the whole experience instead of improving individual parts without understanding how they relate.
I don't think this diminishes the importance of excellent craft. Quite the opposite. The finer details matter because they influence how a business is understood and remembered. But excellent execution becomes far more valuable when it's supported by the right decisions about what the business needs to achieve.
There is also a practical difficulty that is easily overlooked. Maintaining excellence across a business is much harder than delivering one exceptional project. It requires shared standards that survive beyond a presentation, a launch date or the enthusiasm of a particular team. New products are introduced, employees join and responsibilities change. Different departments make decisions under pressure, often with perfectly sensible reasons for doing things their own way. Unless somebody is maintaining a view of the wider experience, the gaps gradually begin to appear.
A business doesn't become exceptional through one impressive piece of work. It earns that reputation through what happens repeatedly, including when nobody is paying particular attention.
When the company is small, the decisions are bigger
I find the argument for experienced leadership particularly compelling in growing businesses, including startups.
In the early days of a company, the founder often acts as the brand strategist, product owner, creative director, salesperson and customer experience team. It may be an arrangement born of necessity, but it can also be remarkably effective. The founder understands the business intimately, speaks directly to customers and can make decisions without asking several departments for permission.
As the business grows, that becomes harder to sustain. More people join, responsibilities become divided and decisions start being made further away from the original vision. What was once communicated through a conversation now needs to be explained through principles, processes and a shared understanding of what good looks like.
The consequences of early decisions also become more significant. A poorly structured digital product may need substantial rebuilding. An unclear proposition can attract the wrong customers, making growth more expensive than it needs to be. A business that has never established consistent creative standards may find itself paying repeatedly to solve variations of the same problem as it expands into new channels or markets.
It's tempting to regard all of this as something to address once the company becomes large enough to employ a senior design leader. But by then, some of the most influential decisions have already been made.
Of course, every business needs to be realistic about what it can afford. A young company with limited funding shouldn't automatically build an expensive permanent leadership structure before establishing that the investment is justified. Experienced expertise can be brought into an organisation in different ways, including a permanent appointment, a fractional leadership relationship or a focused period of strategic consultancy.
The important question is what kind of decisions the company is making and what it might cost to get them wrong.
A founder with a promising product and an ambitious growth plan may get far greater value from somebody who can challenge the proposition, structure the customer experience and establish a sensible approach to product development than from commissioning a succession of isolated creative projects. That person should understand when to bring in specialists, which capabilities need to be developed internally and where the business genuinely needs to invest.
There is an important distinction between buying design work and building an organisation that makes better design decisions.
The first may give you an excellent result for a particular project. The second can influence what happens on the projects that follow, including those nobody has imagined yet.
For a startup, that ability can be particularly valuable because the room for error is so limited. A larger business may have the financial capacity to absorb an unsuccessful project, repair a poor customer experience or rebuild technology that hasn't developed as expected. A smaller company may not enjoy the same luxury, especially when several important decisions depend on the same pool of investment.
It seems strange, then, that experienced leadership is sometimes seen as a reward for becoming successful rather than one of the ways a business might improve its prospects of getting there.
Give people responsibility for outcomes, not just output
There's another reason companies sometimes struggle to realise the value of design leadership: they recruit somebody senior and then involve them too late.
A leadership team establishes the commercial objectives, decides which product to build, agrees the functionality and commits to a delivery schedule. The designers are subsequently invited to improve the experience, establish the visual direction and make the finished product attractive.
There can be plenty of worthwhile work in that arrangement. But the opportunity to influence the underlying proposition may already have passed.
If the organisation wants design to contribute more substantially, its leaders need to involve the right people while important questions remain open. What problem are we trying to solve? Which customers are we trying to serve? What makes this worth pursuing? How will we know if it succeeds, and what will we stop doing to make room for it?
That requires a different relationship between design and the rest of the business. It's less about a department receiving instructions and more about people with different expertise working together to make better decisions.
It also places greater demands on the design leader.
They need to understand commercial priorities, technical constraints and the operational realities of delivering what they recommend. They should be comfortable speaking with finance, product, engineering, sales and customer-facing teams, and able to recognise when somebody else's specialist knowledge should change their recommendation. They need to build trust, develop talent, maintain standards and communicate direction clearly enough that good decisions continue to be made when they're not in the room.
I think this is especially relevant as artificial intelligence changes the tools available to designers and the speed at which creative work can be produced.
AI can help teams explore ideas, analyse information, generate alternatives and accelerate parts of the production process. There are genuine opportunities in those capabilities, although their value depends on how intelligently they're introduced and used. What they don't automatically provide is a sound understanding of the business, reliable judgement about competing priorities or accountability for the consequences of a decision.
Producing more options isn't particularly useful if nobody has established which problem deserves attention.
The leadership challenge is to make better use of the capabilities available, human and technological, while protecting the quality of thinking behind the work. Sometimes that means adopting a new tool. Sometimes it means improving a conversation, changing a process or questioning whether the proposed work needs to happen at all.
And because design is ultimately delivered by people, good leadership also has to create the conditions in which they can do excellent work. Talented designers need clarity about what matters, useful feedback, opportunities to develop and enough trust to challenge ideas constructively. They need to understand the reasons behind decisions rather than simply being handed a list of changes.
A leader who improves the judgement and confidence of an entire team can have an influence that extends well beyond their own individual contribution.
There's also an important distinction between delegating work and giving people meaningful responsibility. A team can be exceptionally busy, deliver everything on time and still have very little influence over whether the business is solving the right problems. I'd rather see talented people understand the intended outcome, contribute to the decisions that shape it and take appropriate ownership of the results.
That requires trust from leadership and accountability from the team. Neither works particularly well without the other.
Measure what matters, then keep learning
I don't think any serious discussion about the value of design should avoid the question of evidence.
McKinsey's 2018 study of 300 publicly listed companies found that those in the top quartile of its design index achieved 32% higher revenue growth and 56% higher total shareholder returns than their industry peers over the five-year period examined. The study identified characteristics including senior-level design responsibility, cross-functional working, customer research and the measurement of design performance.
It's an interesting finding, but it needs to be understood properly. It demonstrates an association between design practices and stronger business performance. It doesn't establish that design alone produced those results, or that employing a particular individual will deliver a predictable financial return.
For me, the more useful lesson is that strong design appears to be connected with how a business operates, not simply the quality of the work its designers produce.
That brings us back to measurement.
If the ambition is to improve sales conversion, we need to understand the existing performance, the quality of the opportunities being generated and where customers encounter difficulty. If we're investing in a digital product, we should know whether people can complete the tasks that matter, how effectively the product supports its intended purpose and what it costs the business to operate and maintain. For a service organisation, we might examine repeat purchasing, customer retention, response times, avoidable complaints or the effort required to manage a booking from beginning to end.
There isn't a single measure that works for every project.
The important thing is to establish a sensible starting point, decide what improvement we're trying to achieve and gather enough evidence to understand whether the changes are working. Sometimes that's straightforward. Other times the results take longer to emerge, or several changes make it difficult to isolate the contribution of one particular initiative. We should be open about those limitations instead of turning every project into an implausible success story.
Research matters throughout the process, too. I'd want to understand how customers behave before developing a solution, involve them while ideas are being explored and learn from what happens after delivery. The launch of a product or website is an important milestone, but it isn't the end of the opportunity to improve it.
That mindset also makes it easier to acknowledge mistakes.
A test might show that a proposed feature isn't useful. A new experience may perform less well than the previous one. Research could reveal that an assumption shared by the entire leadership team was wrong. Those aren't reasons to abandon an evidence-led approach; they're examples of why it's valuable.
The objective is to make better decisions over time, not to establish that every initial idea was correct.
It's also worth remembering that some of the most valuable improvements are relatively unremarkable when viewed in isolation. A clearer explanation, a simpler process or a better way for colleagues to share information may never become a celebrated case study. But if it saves time, prevents mistakes or helps customers complete something that previously frustrated them, the benefit can accumulate every day.
An organisation doesn't need every initiative to be revolutionary. It needs enough of the right improvements, delivered well and sustained over time, to make a noticeable difference to its performance.
The expensive part is what nobody notices
Perhaps the most difficult thing about making the commercial case for design leadership is that the investment is visible while many of the costs it could address remain dispersed throughout the business.
The expense of a new appointment appears in the budget. So does the cost of a website, a research programme or additional product development. But there may be no single figure for the customer who never enquired because the proposition was confusing, the unnecessary support requests caused by poor communication or the opportunities lost because one team didn't have access to information held by another.
Nobody necessarily totals the cost of reworking projects because their objectives weren't established properly, or the cumulative expense of inconsistent decisions across a growing organisation. Those things become absorbed into normal operating costs, delivery schedules and explanations about why performance hasn't quite met expectations.
Some of those problems are inevitable. Others are entirely preventable. Distinguishing between them is part of the work.
I also think it's important to be realistic about what an individual leader can achieve. A talented person cannot compensate indefinitely for a business that refuses to examine its assumptions, doesn't make room for collaboration or expects fundamental problems to be solved through cosmetic improvements. Experience and judgement matter, but so does the willingness of the organisation to use them.
When that relationship works, however, the opportunity can be substantial. A senior design leader can help a business identify where its efforts are best directed, recognise problems that cross departmental boundaries, develop the people responsible for delivery and bring greater consistency to the experience customers have of the organisation. They can connect ambitious ideas with the practical realities of making them work, and keep asking whether the result is achieving what the business actually needs.
There will still be occasions when the answer is a beautifully designed website, a new identity, a better digital product or a carefully developed campaign. I hope so. I love seeing excellent creative work brought into the world, and I have no interest in reducing design to a collection of spreadsheets and performance metrics.
But the finished work should be the consequence of good thinking, not a substitute for it.
Which brings me back to the question of what experienced design leadership is worth.
There isn't a universal answer, because the value depends on the business, its circumstances, its ambitions and the particular challenges it's facing. An appointment that makes little commercial sense for one organisation could be among the most valuable investments another makes. The difference isn't simply the size of the company or the amount it's able to spend. It's the scale of the opportunity, the responsibility involved and the extent to which the right person can help bring about a better result.
Nor would it be responsible to suggest that employing an experienced design leader automatically produces millions in additional revenue. Every business is different, every appointment carries risk and commercial success depends on far more than one person's contribution. A good leader should be the first to acknowledge that.
What I would suggest is that businesses examine the decision with the same curiosity and commercial discipline they'd apply to any other significant investment. Look at the ambitions, understand the obstacles, investigate what isn't working and identify where better leadership, research and creative judgement could make a material difference.
The answer might be that the business needs to recruit. It might be that a different arrangement makes more sense, or that the immediate priority lies elsewhere. Either way, the decision will be stronger for having examined the real problem.
Because the most useful question was never simply what it would cost to bring experienced design leadership into the business. It's what the organisation might achieve with the right person involved, how much value is currently being overlooked and what it stands to lose by allowing the same problems to continue.
That's a conversation worth having.