This text was originally published in Portuguese on the Echos Design Thinking School blog.

It's 2022.

It’s not yet another year for design manifestos in Brazilian companies — unless the intention is to preach to the already converted or to scream into the void. The number of Brazilian startups has increased significantly in recent years, and large e-commerces and banks in the country have adopted both design teams and agile methodology. The future has arrived, as William Gibson would put it, and just as unevenly as he had predicted.

Despite the considerable evolution of the profession in 10 years in our country (and also outside of it), appearing from new open positions on websites to publications in large-scale vehicles and the non-stop proliferation of professionalizing courses, we still march in timid steps. Why would that be?

From the classes in which I teach, occasional lectures and recurring LinkedIn inboxes, the question arises — how do I make design respected in my organization?

This question hides many doubts.

It ranges from how to make different areas of the company design partners, to how to explain what design does broadly, and to what it is specifically delivering in an organization. It also encompasses the desire of each asking person to have a brilliant career and to participate in serious and truly strategic decisions of the company.

On the other hand, every time someone starts to wonder about it and starts talking about go-horse, that person shies away from what they should really be doing to achieve their goal. It might place them in the role of a victim— or, at least, a dialogic view, of design versus others — that will not help you get things done.

I want to share some insights from these years of career working with user experience in digital agencies, consultancies and, finally, startups.

Design and effort

Once upon a time, a team member reached out to me. She rightly wanted to discuss her place in the company. She had a lot of doubts.

It wasn’t an easy conversation for either of us. I remember saying to her:

“Sometimes you give it all you got, the client loves it and the design works. We need to talk about it. But other times, you give it all you got, and although the client loves it, the design doesn’t work. And there are still other times when you give your best, the client doesn’t love it, and it doesn’t work at all. We need to talk about it too, and just as naturally.”

If you are reading this text, you can certainly imagine the situation. As design becomes a more and more established profession, you also have access to more industry references, more methods and frameworks, and more baggage. You take your job seriously. Therefore, you want to make the most of it all and show that what you do is capable of generating value for the company you work for.

Doing things the right way, in any industry, takes a lot of effort. In design, this is not more or less true — it just follows the general rule. But when I talk about effort in design, I raise the question — is the energy we put into solving a problem proportional to its size and relevance?

This question is crucial when analyzing portfolios and in job interviews. Of course, we look at the more technical and tangible dimensions of design — such as, for example, careful visual design, good information architecture, and interaction design decisions that reduce user doubts and effort. We also see if the candidate really understands the problem.

In some cases, the candidate is not considered for a position because they have become a slave to form at the expense of content. They were so preoccupied with the execution that they did not question enough. But at other times, a candidate can create a process with so many steps, with so much information gathering that is just not used. When asked about the size, they cannot say how it changed the final result and they still say that there were frictions in the organization during the process.

If you really want to be a successful designer, a golden tip:

Look for the proportionality between your effort and the task.

Understand the reality of the company, understand the size of the problem and why each of them is important to its mission. Don’t start anything without understanding the purpose. And then adapt. Negotiate the process in the company — and understand that it will be a progressive change towards your dream. Google’s Design Sprint works like the book because Google’s context allows it. The Agile methodology needs to be adjusted to the reality of each company that adopts it.

Effort checklist

• Create processes for P, M and G initiatives, considering the information that the company already has, its capabilities and available budget;
• Check the potential size of each opportunity you work with;
• Know the technology production capacity in each sprint — so you can slice your work.

Understanding your effort in this way, perhaps the strain you put on yourself will change.

Design and impact

Design and other innovation catch-alls carry the torch of bringing about change by championing the interests of real people. They seek to provoke discussions that turn the helm of the corporate ship towards a better destination — more prosperous, less crowded, more renowned.

It is a nice vision. It is Sisyphus-like undertaking. How can you, even in incipient areas, without senior managers sponsoring you, accomplish what needs to be done? The empathy discourse is very convincing in mainstream media articles and documentaries, but it often falls short of roadmap prioritization.

In less mature and bold organizations, the value of design starts at the rows of a spreadsheet. To be more explicit: before you can propose a radical shift in product approach, you need to create a history of measurable impact on slices of the customer journey. Before design can produce anything substantial in the long term, it is non-negotiable to reveal short-term value.

This impact rationale has a lot to do with the discussion I had with my former team member. We cannot just analyze things in light of how hard we try — we need to have mature, truthful conversations about how well design is working. And even when it works, let it be known that there will be detractors. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.

When your effort aligns not only with the design philosophy but with corporate needs, you can start to have an impact.

The first layer of impact can only happen when, instead of systematically denying yourself because you don’t agree with the approach, you commit to making it happen no matter what. Eyes on the target free up your mind and energy to make small, speculative design changes — more than one — and hypothesis-based targeted research, all contributing slowly and surely to the result. You don’t want to be a detractor yourself — you want to be a good sport, doing everything you can to find that A-HA that will allow you to make the final tweak, the big turnaround needed to hit the goal of the month. This is the role that design, as a facilitator, can play.

Such a line of thinking displeases many designers. It seems to them that they are colluding with businesses whose practices they don’t condone or are miles away from consumers’ mental models. I understand the inconvenience — but you can hardly accelerate a company’s change abruptly. It is a process of acculturation.

Incremental innovation is easier to carry out than disruptive innovation, up to the point where there is almost no option but to do something that breaks with the current model, seeking a new market or business model.

Your biggest ally for change are numbers. That’s why so much emphasis is put on User Experience Metrics courses, Analytics and companies celebrate their Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and scores on user reviews website (such as Brazilian ReclameAqui).

What often is forgotten is the fact that a number is nothing without quality. Think of it like food calories. 500 calories in a hamburger is very different in nutrients than a balanced meal. Also, those 500 calories will largely depend on the body that absorbs them — your age, metabolism, and so on. And finally, a once in a lifetime 500 calories intake doesn’t decide your body for the rest of your life. It is the continuum that will determine what happens to the person.

In a business context, it’s not much different — ​​celebrating 60 NPS points doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know the market average, don’t look at how it relates to new customers or retention of existing customers, and don’t keep an eye on how that changes over time. A single number is a photo. It’s not a movie.

Impact checklist

• Partner with business analysts to estimate initiatives and compare results
  Think scientifically: have a control cell, and gradually introduce A/B testing;
• Have clear and debated hypotheses. Treat each small change as a block to the big change you want to bring about;
• Look for market benchmarks to scale impact;
• Pay attention to how numbers change over time.

Once you have a critical mass of short-term impact, you have more confidence — personally and in relationships with others — and the body to start proposing bigger, longer-lasting things and process changes.

Start today

My conversation with my former teammate about her place in the team did not decide her life. Last night’s hamburger didn’t stir the ship of my health. It is clarity, combined with consistency, that generates a brilliant career and good health — not to mention, of course, the eventual chance.

Do you really want to change the design culture in your company?

If you really want to embrace the cause and make design respected in your company, you need to have a serious and difficult conversation about your effort and start analyzing its impact. It’s a route. Start today.