When I started at Salesforce in 2010 there were around 30 product designers and, by the time I left in 2021, the design organization had expanded to more than 300.

In that time I worked on several core products, from lead designer in Service Cloud to crafting a five-year vision for Developer Experiences to running multiple design teams across Salesforce’s platform tools.

The most constant influence on what we shipped wasn’t what end users were telling us or what showed up in research. Instead, it was usually Salesforce’s growth strategy — a heavy focus on sales and marketing with feedback loops that shape product roadmaps.

This isn’t a criticism… the strategy works well. In my 10 years of employment, Salesforce’s revenue increased nearly 20 fold:

The factors that drive this type of growth are somewhat formulaic in that they can be modeled and projected into the future. It’s this observable model of growth that I see as an under-appreciated factor of successful product design.

I’d like to share three key insights from my time at Salesforce on how an understanding of a business’s operating model can enable design teams to be more successful.

It begins with a look at sales.

Who signs the contract?

Most significant Salesforce contracts are likely to be large 1000+ employee companies. The following data shows a breakdown of Salesforce customers by employee counts and revenue:

Do you know the average size of the customers purchasing the software you’re designing? If not, you should. Much of the culture of modern product design is derived from standards and expectations of building consumer-oriented apps. The Facebooks and Airbnbs of the world are delightful to use, but the users of those products are also the ones making the “purchase decision.”

The same is not true of large companies purchasing enterprise software. In this case, the buyers and the users are not one-in-the-same. As a company grows, those that make purchasing decisions are more likely to be removed from the end-user experience, which can be illustrated like so:

Compounding this concept is that, more often than not, the decision to buy is done by a “buying committee” with an average of eight people (2019, TrustRadius). Even if all eight were end-users, in a company of 1000, that’s .8% of the employees making a decision for 99.2%.

The truth is that this model of buying presents a conflict of interest: while the Chief Technology Officer might give a critical approval to buy a piece of software because it works for her architecture needs, she very likely won’t be the one using it every day.

This encourages enterprise software companies to be more eager to sell to the CTO as opposed to delighting end-users; marketing a broad set of software capabilities that deliver on customer business goals is more likely to get the contract signed than a world-class end-user experience.

Takeaway: Every designer should understand the relationship between the Buyers and the Users of the products they design.

Some things that can help:

• Utilize user studies and other research activities to increase the presence of the user’s voice in the product roadmap. Data is hard to ignore.
• Invite a product VP or sales engineer to share sales processes and growth strategies in order to increase the business acumen of the team.
• Watch for patterns of disparity between the design team’s ambitions and the reality of what gets built. Frequent or large deltas are a good sign that design is not aligned with the business model (or vice versa).
• Doubling down on Design Thinking can help build trusted relationships while demonstrating the return on investing more in design.

At Salesforce, design continues to get an ever more prominent seat at the table. Though as you’ll see next, another valuable metric is the ratio of R&D investment to that of sales and marketing.

How does the business make and spend money?

For most SaaS (Software as a Service) companies, if a new contract is signed on the last day of the current fiscal year, only a single day’s worth of that contract would be attributed to that fiscal year. Yet, they still have to pay the sales reps their commissions.

On paper, this results in high marketing and sales costs for the current fiscal year compared to the revenue being generated for that same year:

As a consequence, sales and marketing costs are generally higher than the amount the company has to immediately reinvest in R&D (not to mention the fact that Salesforce just spends a boatload of money on that area of the business). However, over time revenue compounds with subscription growth enabling a slow drip of increased spending on R&D:

This operating model does not scale in step with revenue growth. The same percentage of money put into sales and marketing does not continue to return the same relative revenue. And so, as a SaaS company matures it tends to turn to innovation through increased R&D spend over time to continue to grow.

It’s critical for a design organization to understand where its business is in this cycle of maturity. An early-stage startup is more likely to have high R&D spend as is a behemoth social media app, whereas a mid-cycle SaaS company might have a different focus.

Salesforce is trending toward a higher value on R&D, though it hasn’t always been the case and historically it’s been an obstacle to becoming a “design-led” organization. I believe that’s changing and over the next few years, we’ll see a shift from a generic platform to more specific and precise products where design is the differentiator.

We’re already seeing this in Salesforce’s investment in solution-specific product offerings like Industries, Essentials, Work.com, and most recently in its likely acquisition of Slack, which has the potential to dramatically shift the focus on quality end-user experiences.

Takeaway: How much of the revenue “pie” does your R&D team receive? Are your design team’s visions in line with the reality of what the business cares to solve? And how might you begin to shift the status quo?

Consider:

• Aligning with the reality of how revenue is distributed can help set healthy expectations and more methodical individual or team growth metrics. Conversely, you might use this data to argue that a change is needed.
• If you find yourself within a sales & marketing-led organization, get closer to those parts of the business. Try inviting those departments to design sprints in order to bring alternate insights to difficult problems (in both directions).
• Consider presenting to sales teams in order to educate them on how design can be wielded in sales discussions as a key differentiator to alternate competitive solutions.
• Designers can get burned out in environments where scope is constantly reduced from ideal solutions due to the realities of funding. Consider having a constructive team discussion about how to address the topic.

Design has an important role to play in businesses of all sizes and operating models. It’s critical to understand the business in order to maximize impact. Next up, a look at how redefining competition can transcend business models.

What is the real competition?

The word competition has taken on a very specific definition. In sports, the competition is the team on the other side of the field. In dating, competition is other single people. In business, competition is often seen as the other companies in your industry.

What if I told you that those were some of the least important forms of competition? Other forms of often-overlooked competition include:

• In sports, the competition to winning might not be the other team, but Netflix and its ability to detract from your team’s desire to train.
• In dating, your date might not be comparing you to their past matches instead, you might be competing with their text messages at dinner.
• In business, conflicting incentives or archaic processes might be holding your company back from its true potential to dominate a product space.

Introspection might just be more beneficial than traditional competitive analysis; self-improvement begets progress.

A powerful case study in a healthy organization moving mountains is in Salesforce’s overhaul of their legacy application a few years back:

This was such a massive undertaking and I don’t think there are many people, even inside the company, that fully appreciate what Salesforce was able to accomplish. This was a complete re-architecting and redesign including the invention of several new technologies to power the app.

Though, honestly, this example is a bit deceiving. The total reimagining of ALL of Salesforce was only made possible by 1) a company-wide mandate handed down from the very top and 2) a mad scramble and focus across every single product team. That’s pretty rare.

In spite of this success — and as a result of the nature of Salesforce’s continued operating incentives — there’s still much left to be desired around fit and finish or fully cohesive experiences.

An example of business incentives winning over quality design is in the header of the Salesforce Lightning app. The action icons (each implemented by a distinct product team) all have different sizes, alignments, hover/active states, drop-down menus, and unpredictable results:

This header is one of the most visible and used elements in Lightning. Yet, none of these teams would directly benefit from delivering a more unified header experience, instead, they are measured by the ACV (subscription revenue) or adoption of their individual features.

While seemingly a minor annoyance (Salesforce won’t lose any deals over the poor fit and finish of the header), this problem is emblematic of trends of organizational values that end up compounding into larger concerns — like a multitude of redundant automation tools that do similar things.

The incentives to release a feature quickly can often eclipse incentives to collaborate across organizational silos or to even revisit a feature after it’s been released; good-enough-to-make-the-sale is usually good enough in enterprise products.

This notion probably stings a little bit for us designers. The nature of a business is to find a balance of costs that ensure the lights will still be on tomorrow. If a business finds a model that works, it’s difficult to change… even if sometimes at the cost of the design team’s hopes for end users.

Takeaway: Consider what internal competition might be holding your organizations back from their full potential and what antidotes might exist to help alleviate them.

Some things I’ve seen work well:

• Design systems or guidelines can help patterns scale with the product as it grows. Salesforce design has found success in the Lightning Design System, increasing consistency AND efficiency.
• Design strike forces. At Salesforce they’re called CCPIs (Cross Cloud Pattern Integrations). If there’s an issue important and prevalent enough that can gain executive sponsorship, a grassroots effort might solve it.
• Two book suggestions: Radical Candor by Kim Scott (to gain an appreciation of having difficult conversations) and Competing Against Luck by Clayton M. Christensen et al. (to understand the true nature of competition and designing for Jobs to be Done).

Ultimately designers need to first come to terms with the existing status quo of design at a company then go about analyzing the incentives that perpetuate the patterns they hope to change.

(For what it’s worth, I do believe that the majority of the design of Salesforce products is 2nd to none in enterprise products thanks to a multitude of highly talented humans. The above criticisms are simply to illustrate how business incentives can, and do, impact design).

I believe that in addition to the concern of user experiences, the practice of product design needs to evaluate and apply design thinking to how the shape of a business impacts the success of the products being released.

To learn more about how design is becoming more critical to Salesforce’s success visit https://www.salesforce.com/design/

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These opinions were all my own and not that of Salesforce’s. My analysis of Salesforce’s operating model and revenue strategy are based on observations from all publicly available information. Do not make investments based on this article.