When your best work gets tossed

"I've watched it happen too many times. You spend weeks researching, prototyping, testing. The users love it. The data backs it. Then someone in the room says "I don't like blue" or "my wife thinks this is confusing" and suddenly everything's back on the table. Design decisions get discarded like they're optional decorations, not strategic choices backed by evidence. In most companies I've worked with, design is an afterthought."

"Here's what makes this infuriating: the evidence that design creates business value is unambiguous. McKinsey studied 300 publicly listed companies over five years and found that top-quartile design performers achieved 32% points higher revenue growth and 56% points higher total returns to shareholders. The Design Management Institute tracked design-led companies for a decade and found they outperformed the S&P 500 by 211%."

"Yet design teams get cut disproportionately during layoffs. We lose budget allocation fights. We remain stuck in service organization roles while marketing and product management sit at the strategic table making decisions about what we'll build. The problem isn't that design lacks value. The problem is that we - as a profession - never learned how to prove it in language that organizations understand."

Extensive research, prototyping, and testing produce solutions with strong user approval and data-backed rationale. Subjective stakeholder preferences frequently overturn evidence-backed design decisions, leaving strategic choices vulnerable. Top-quartile design performers achieve substantially higher financial outcomes: McKinsey found 32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher total shareholder returns over five years. The Design Management Institute found design-led companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 211% over a decade. Despite clear returns, design teams are disproportionately cut during layoffs and often remain relegated to service roles while other functions control strategic direction. The core issue is a systemic inability to articulate design value in organizational terms.

Read at Medium