How to demonstrate the value of your design team in 2025

As organisations enter 2025, the failures of 2024 provide valuable lessons. Design leaders have a pivotal opportunity to redefine their roles and amplify the impact of their design team through improved critical thinking, and disruptive and strategic innovation, driven by continuous learning and discovery.

Below are five actionable strategies for achieving outstanding results for their design team distinguished by commitment and contribution.

1. Prioritising business-centric design leadership

The gap: Priorities don’t align

Many 2024 initiatives faltered due to misaligned priorities between design and business objectives.

The shift: Clarify overarching business goals

Embed design leaders into strategic decision-making forums, aligning their expertise with core business-centric (OKRs) such as customer retention, digital adoption, revenue growth, cost modelling, and operational efficiencies. A Forrester study highlighted that design leaders who integrated business-centricity into their processes achieved a 30% increase in customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.

Take action: Connect the dots to core business objectives

Develop frameworks that link design outcomes to employee experience and financial performance. Create a compelling vision supported by a shared language with executive stakeholders. Be sure to always align with a sponsored coalition consisting of data, product, technology, and marketing business leaders. 

2. Championing data-driven storytelling within your design team

The gap: Data is clearly missing

A lack of clear and compelling storytelling, coupled with poorly written OKRs, left design efforts falling short of their mark and undervalued last year. This highlighted a critical gap in the alignment of pre-planning and delivery readiness activities before project kickoff.

The shift: Make use of AI-powered analytics tools

Better utilisation of storytelling frameworks, leveraging advanced predictive analytics to correlate design improvements with metrics such as: 

• CSAT
• Time-to-market improvements
• Behaviour-driven outcomes
• Error handling reductions
• Overall consistency of experience

Take action: Put data on display

Equip your design team with the right tools for data visualisation and OKR creation, implementing narrative-driven stories that highlight the role of design and research in achieving long-term, scalable business success. Do this among your key stakeholder partners before any solutions are created, ensuring you have a quorum of committed leaders around the table.

3. Embracing cross-functional innovation within your design team

The gap: The collaboration deficit

Internal Design Teams continue to struggle with effective cross-functional collaboration, creating significant barriers to demonstrating their full value. Research from the Nielsen Norman Group indicates that project-specific collaboration challenges include unclear roles and responsibilities, negative ownership, and a lack of shared goals—all of which can lead to additional delays and continued cultural inertia among stakeholders. Siloed approaches, such as “throw-it-over-the-wall” handoffs and exclusion from strategic planning, result in unnecessary friction, increased costs, and a reputation for being disconnected from practical realities.

Take action: Implement hybrid collaborative design models for your design team

To achieve this, design leaders must:

• Reimagine design team structures to facilitate integration, such as embedding designers in product or business units and operating as a specialised Center of Excellence (CoE) that is a combined, centralised, and embedded function.
• Establish shared processes and tools that ritualise design sprints and regular pre-planning / alignment sessions, to ensure commitment and consistent participation from all stakeholders.
• Invest in collaborative orchestration capabilities, training designers in business, technical, and operational fundamentals—improving communication skills to bridge gaps between disciplines.

4. Redefining success metrics for your design team

The gap: The measurement misalignment

Design Teams have persistently struggled to demonstrate their value through metrics that resonate with executive leadership and business owners, creating a fundamental barrier to securing investment toward future growth opportunities. Many designers continue to believe their work has a measurable impact on business outcomes, contrary to the belief of their product peers who don’t share the same level of confidence. This measurement gap manifests in several problematic ways across organisations. For instance, many Design Teams still rely on activity-based metrics (e.g., number of screens produced, projects completed) rather than outcome-based results tied to both long and short-term behavioural objectives.

The shift: The strategic measurement opportunity

Organisations that successfully connect design metrics to business outcomes secure significantly more investment and influence. McKinsey research shows companies with robust design measurement frameworks receive 1.7x more design investment and are 2.3x more likely to include design leaders in strategic decision-making. Mastercard and Salesforce, for example, have developed frameworks that link design improvements to quantifiable business metrics, resulting in increased investment and elevated strategic design profiles.

Take action: Building effective measurement systems for your design team

To create effective design measurement guidelines:

• Collaborate with Finance, HR, and Business Intelligence Teams to identify metrics that Design can leverage to further communicate progress, impact, and influence. 
• Develop balanced scorecards that capture user, operational, financial, and strategic metrics.
• Invest in measurement infrastructure and skills, such as dashboards that visualize the connection between design changes, business performance, and product usage.

5. Prioritising the employee experience through targeted cultural transformations

The gap: The employee experience blindspot

While customer experience has received significant attention, the employee experience remains an under-utilised opportunity. Only 23% of internal design teams actively participate in shaping employee experiences, despite EX growing in significance and importance to executives.

The shift: The employee-centred design opportunity

Applying design thinking methodologies to the employee experience will undoubtedly drive measurable business outcomes. McKinsey research indicates that companies in the top quartile for employee experience demonstrate higher profitability and customer satisfaction. It’s widely acknowledged that a great product reflects a strong culture. ServiceNow and Philips, for example, have utilised design thinking to enhance onboarding and internal tool adoption, resulting in reduced waste and delivery times as well as a decrease in support ticket creation.

Take action: Transform the employee experience 

To transform the employee experience:

• Establish roles in the employee experience ecosystem through partnerships with HR, IT, Data, and Operations. 
• Develop specialised research methodologies focused on cultural anthropology to extract more contextual data insights—look deeper into behavioural and communication patterns, design, and digital fluency through active stakeholder participation and contribution.
• Create measurement frameworks that connect experience improvements to business outcomes, such as productivity, team effectiveness, and retention metrics.

The path forward for your design team relies on a greater commitment to innovation and human-centred behavioural design

To this day, some Design Teams continue to operate following traditional patterns, isolated from business strategy, focused almost exclusively on screen-based visuals to improve customer and brand loyalty. Without a purposeful disruptive change to how these teams operate, they will likely see further diminishment of their organisational influence and resources. 

However, design functions that transform their approach across the five dimensions outlined above can reclaim strategic relevance and demonstrate measurable business impact. New benchmarks for leading Design Teams are already being rewritten, and they are being anchored in digital business strategy, technology, partnered collaboration, research, data, and innovation.

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