Managing for design excellence

Find out how some of the world’s leading design teams are managed, how design teams work within global businesses, and why leadership matters.

Putting the right people – and the right processes – in place

What lessons about managing design and designers we learn from eleven world-leading companies?

To understand the way design operates in leading global companies, the Design Council undertook its most in-depth study ever. Researchers visited the design departments of eleven companies (Alessi, BSkyB, BT, LEGO, Microsoft, Sony, Starbucks, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Whirlpool, Xerox and Yahoo!) all world-leaders in their fields and all with a public commitment to the use of design to improve their brand strength and product and service offerings.

All the companies we visited have invested heavily in people, processes and infrastructure to make design work in their businesses. Looking across the eleven companies, we can see some common themes emerging, with key areas of focus. The study shows that design has helped many of these companies respond better to management challenges that will be familiar to many businesses – including integrating, managing and motivating designers within the organisation.

Key activities undertaken by almost all include:

• Ensuring strong, visible leadership of the design function
• Fostering a corporate culture that values design
• Integrating design activities as tightly as possible with wider business processes
• Equipping designers with broad, business relevant skills beyond their core functional capabilities
• Maximising senior management support for design
• Developing and using design tools and techniques
• Promoting formal but flexible control of the design process

The Eleven lessons study shows that design plays a fundamental role in the success of many of the world’s leading companies and it picks up plenty of tips and design tools which smaller businesses can take advantage of.

Leadership

Most successful business processes require good leadership. Design is no exception. The 11 companies from our study show that leading by example is a good way to make sure design is an important business practice.

A defining factor in the companies interviewed in our survey is the presence of one or more design champions who drive the development of the design function and its recognition internally and externally.

Some of these design leaders have been responsible for a very radical change in the profile of design in their company, while others have transformed the processes by which the design function operates. All of the heads of design we interviewed were charismatic, passionate and skilled in design subjects and were capable of communicating their activities in a commercial context.

Extending the influence of design upstream and downstream in the business was a priority for most of the leaders we spoke to. Upstream influence gives design input into product and service roadmaps and top level brand values. Downstream influence helps to prevent the dilution of design intent in the production and delivery phases of the product cycle.

Design champions in our survey also shared a strong interest in the development of talent in their departments. They emphasised the importance of maintaining a creative and inspiring environment for the designers they employ, but placed equal focus on the development of new skills to help their designers work more effectively in the wider context of their organisations.

The position of the design champion varied significantly in the companies we visited. In some cases design leadership emanated from the CEO, or from senior management and was pushed through the company in a top-down approach. In others, the leader of a smaller team was the instigator for design, driving a bottom-up approach and expending significant effort ‘selling’ the value of design to more senior personnel.

In some cases, changes in corporate strategy or market conditions provide the catalyst for a transformation of the role of design within an organisation. For example, as Xerox changes from being a vertically integrated designer and manufacturer of equipment to being a horizontally integrated business services organisation, the role of design in the company is also changing. Design champions within Xerox say that design’s role in the organisation will change from being a horizontal function, which plays a limited role at select points in the product engineering process, to being a vertical function, informing all of the company’s activities, from board room to product end-of-life. Many of the activities of the design team at Xerox are geared towards achieving this goal.

Culture

All the companies interviewed were open about their design processes and happy to share these as part of this study. This signifies a level of comfort with the design process that they use.

Bar any directly commercially sensitive methods or data, the companies were eager to communicate about their design expertise and confidence in their design process. In some cases, the existence of a robust and functioning design process is seen as one factor that may attract the most able designers to apply to the company.

Having this attitude and confidence in the design process, and being willing to communicate externally about it has a subsequent positive impact on the corporate brand. The Desk Research Report drew on the example of Philips Design, and pointed to the way in which the company builds its ethos and image on its creative processes and regularly presents at conferences sharing its best practice and design process. Consequently, Philips’s confidence in its methods strengthens its design-led brand values and profile.

Indeed, the companies that participated in the design process study were equally adamant that design, including its processes, internal profile and the product or service generated, is a key element in developing and enhancing brand qualities for commercial leverage. In fact, their participation in the design process study demonstrates their confidence about the methods, tools and techniques used in executing design within the business.

Companies that recognise that the relationship between corporate growth and strategic design decisions, and present their design-led thinking as a central component of the business, do more than produce a product. They are able to build on their reputation for design and design process and create a sense of emotion and desirability around their standard product or service. The company’s market, customers and stakeholders subsequently are quick to identify and establish a link between design and brand equity.

Integration

Design can’t be treated in isolation from other business processes: designers have always needed to interact with commercial functions, with manufacturing and with product or service support. Multi-disciplinary teams and working processes are a key feature in many of the companies from our study.

While these interactions are an essential part of the design process, they can be carried out in many different ways. For every company in our survey, managing the interactions between the design function and other parts of the organisation was a key concern.

Interaction requires more than regularly scheduled meetings, however. Designers, engineers and commercial staff often look at the world in different ways. They each speak their own language and can be motivated by rather different concerns.

For many of the companies in our survey, these cultural barriers were overcome by educating designers in the language of other functions.

At Yahoo!, and LEGO for example, designers must be able to speak fluently about the commercial implications of their design decisions. At Xerox, designers are fluent in the analysis methods and processes used by their engineering colleagues.

For many of the organisations in our survey, strong interactions between designers and other functions are achieved not by building formal communication processes, but by integrating the designers directly into cross functional development teams.

Yahoo!’s AGILE development process is a good example of the way cross functional teams are operated, with frequent formal and informal exchange of information between team members from different disciplines.

At Microsoft, engineers, product managers, designers and user researchers are all part of the process of developing a new product or service. The central driver for multidisciplinary working throughout the design process at Microsoft is a focus on the user, with team members all equally engaged in finding solutions that adequately address user needs.

Integration has gone so far at Microsoft that the company argues that everyone involved in its development process – including the users, executives, developers and programmers – is a designer.

Skills

While the eleven companies we spoke to employed designers with expertise in different design disciplines – such as graphic design, product and industrial design, visual communication and human interface expertise – in these organisations there is a common requirement for, and emphasis on, a wider skill set.

There was a clear and strategic requirement from the heads of design in these companies to recruit and train designers who demonstrate multi-disciplinary working, business acumen and strategic thinking.

The types of skills highlighted by these companies can be delineated using the following characteristics:

• Business acumen: An understanding of the business and the ability to put design solutions through the test of business objectives and priorities is key for most businesses.
• Design management skills: Given that many businesses now have outsourced manufacturing and commodity activities, the design process can equally be a design management process. And where design is outsourced, this can be about managing design implementation remotely.
• Multi-disciplinary skills: Whether it’s an understanding of software programming, materials development, higher levels of technology or user research methodology, designers are expected to actively and effectively engage with other disciplines. The purpose is for them to understand the touch-points that design has with and its effects on other parts of the business, and to learn how to work with these in practice. This involves learning different ‘languages’ and using appropriate communication tools to achieve cross functional and cross departmental project management.
• A ‘go-getter’ attitude: Designers need to be inquisitive, daring and take initiatives to move ‘beyond the drawing board’ and act strategically. They need to seek opportunities to engage with the wider business and use their design expertise to spot areas for innovation and improvement.
• User focus: Again, given the emphasis on the user in these companies, it was seen as important that designers could understand and interpret user needs.
• Evangelising: Companies expect their designers to act as advocates for design within the business, and to be able to promote its role, benefits and importance to other functions and departments.

This follows on from a general trend in many sectors where employees with a cross-function appeal and style of management are sought-after.

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, has pointed to the necessity for ‘T-shaped employees.’ He describes them as: ‘people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing to try to do what you do. We call them ‘T-shaped people.’ They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T – they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behaviour that point to a universal human need. That’s what you’re after at this point – patterns that yield ideas.’

Senior management support

Corporate and senior management support for design is beneficial. The success of the design process in a business is augmented when there is buy-in from – and acceptance of its value by – senior management.

In the companies we surveyed, we saw three primary drivers for top management support of design.

• Design’s role as a value creator
• A new focus on user needs
• Design as a tool to deliver the brand

In many of the companies we spoke to, the successful completion and communication of a single design project that fulfilled one or more of these drivers was a decisive factor in achieving top-level support for the design function. Whirlpool’s Duet washing machine was more popular and more profitable than any machine in it’s history. BT’s Home Hub wireless router helped to redefine the organisations’ position in the minds of its customers and Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class Suite was a decisive differentiator in a highly competitive market.

Recognition of design’s role as a value creator

Where senior management accepts that design itself is crucial to the success of the company’s products and services, this has a positive impact on the buy-in to the design process and its links with the company’s overall new product development processes. This is particularly important where design can be used as a key way of differentiating products and services from those of competitors.

At Whirlpool, for example, the use of design to produce highly successful, high margin products has driven a wider management enthusiasm for the application of design across all brands and product ranges. Today the role of design is accepted across the organisation and is seen as inseparable from the company’s overall investment in, and emphasis on, innovation.

While design is most commonly used to increase the customer’s perception of product value, it can also cut costs. At LEGO, productivity increases and radical inventory reductions have been an important result of the design process, which successfully reduced the number of bricks produced from about 14,000 shapes and variations to just 6,500.

A new user focus

A second and very significant source of support for design and consequently design process comes from the growing centrality of the user to the company’s strategy. Organisations that deliver complex and sophisticated products and services are increasingly recognising that usability issues are becoming the biggest barrier to success.

Today, these companies are paying extremely close attention to user experience and needs. They invest heavily in user research during the design process, and realise that designers can play a significant role in the translation of user needs into appropriately designed products and services.

Design to deliver the brand

Brands are hugely powerful things. They are also tricky to manage. Whether companies, like Whirlpool, need to cost-effectively manage and differentiate a diverse brand portfolio or whether, like Yahoo!, LEGO or Starbucks, they need to make a successful brand work in a growing variety of product and service contexts, design input can be instrumental in successful brand management.

Whirlpool’s platform and brand studios, for example, have helped the company to greatly increase the use of common parts across its different brands, while actually increasing brand differentiation and the number of markets served.

At Starbucks, the use of design filters to evaluate every product or piece of merchandise is helping to deliver a consistent user experience and brand recognition as the company’s offering diversifies rapidly.

The design process study findings show that senior management support for design is on the increase, with several of the companies having convinced senior management of the real impact of design in only the past decade.

Tools of the trade and methods

The companies we visited use some key tools and techniques in order to manage their design processes in an effective and consistent manner.

Design methods such as sketching, prototyping, and storyboards are all used throughout the design process to develop and demonstrate the potential of a product or service.

Several of the participating companies’ design processes included the practice of documenting design methods in a central resource. For some, this resource constituted the only formalised element of a design process, whereas for others it was just one key component.

Methods banks

A handful of the companies in the study used the central documentation and communication of design methods as an important part of the design process itself. Consequently, a need had been identified for design methods to be logged and communicated widely within the company.

Often this takes place through an intranet or a methods bank where methods are uploaded by users with descriptions, videos, sketches or flow-charts. Live discussions or blogs can take place around each individual method topic, and users are encouraged to contribute, discuss and exchange experiences.

A few examples of such methods tools include LEGO’s Design Practice and emerging methods bank, Microsoft’s User Experience best practice intranet, and the methods section of Starbucks’ online workflow management tool.

Given the proximity of design and brand in BT, their brand intranet could also be included as an example of a methods tool through which brand guidelines are communicated both internally and to external design agencies.

The capture and re-use of best practice design methods in ‘banks’ or programmes such as these are considered to encourage best practice in design, avoid re-work and improve robustness and efficiency of outputs.

Capturing knowledge

In some companies, other departments, functions and experts are given equal access to methods resources, and are encouraged to contribute as well. In these instances, the resource is populated by views from across the business and becomes less design-driven.

This makes it more widely relevant, intelligible and current to different functions of the business, such as programmers, developers or user researchers. At Microsoft, software developers, user researchers and designers alike would access and contribute to the internal User Excellence Handbook.

Given that companies such as Microsoft believe that employees across the board – and not just designers – can contribute with innovative ideas and reflections that are valuable to the company’s products and services, this open source mentality makes sense.

The practice of documenting design methods has some key benefits for the company:

• Design methods are fundamental tools for designers and help to illustrate the important ways in which a designer works. Documenting them in a formal tool shows the designer and the company that their work is valuable, appreciated and has tangible outputs.
• Knowledge management and transfer is another driver for documenting design methods, enabling both other designers and non-designers to access a bank of methods and best practice in design or user experience. This is often made possible on a global level, covering a multitude of teams and markets.
• Where methods banks or similar tools are made accessible to external users, the company can benefit from demonstrating its expertise in design and development and willingness to communicate with its users, building the company’s reputation for design.

Design methods help to define the project that will prove a product or service’s business potential and bring it through development and implementation phases. Having a resource that advises on this helps process planning and management.

Formal design process management

The majority of the companies we interviewed had a formalised design process which they used in new product and service development.

In some cases, such as for Microsoft, LEGO, Sony, Whirlpool, Starbucks and Xerox, this process was clearly structured, documented and communicated both within the immediate creative team and to other departments or groups involved in the new product or service development process (such as engineers, software developers, research & development staff, and user researchers).

Other companies who outsource most of their design implementation work focus more on a design and brand management process which takes the design project through to implementation, and to varying degrees pulls the project back into the in-house design team for creative iteration and development.

It is important to note, however, that the design process used by these leading corporate users of design, no matter how formalised or documented at the time of this study, is under continuous review.

As and when difficulties or challenges are identified as part of the process – perhaps as the result of changes in product and service, competitive context, user context and needs and other influences in the business – the design process is adjusted and revised accordingly. Many of the companies noted that if the design process were to be reviewed by this study in a year’s time, it would already look different.

It is likely that the main four stages of the ‘double diamond’ design process model used in our analysis, would survive such changes and iterations. However, the methods used, the differing emphases on different stages and the individuals and roles involved are all influenced over time.

The core stages of any design process can be expanded or retracted to accommodate a particular project and context to reflect individual needs and requirements as they pass through the design process.

One particular trigger for this might be changes to the role of design in the company, which might see design’s role stretched both upstream and downstream in the product development process.