It’s Time for Business Leaders to Embrace Enterprise Design

In the business world, design was once seen as … fluff. Aesthetically pleasing, perhaps. But not essential.

Now it’s 2021 and no one would deny the business value of enterprise digital design: reduced product development time, more cohesive customer experience, enhanced ability to scale.

And yet, in just the last month, I’ve heard …

The Head of Product Sales won’t meet with the Head of Digital, because Sales has an established process that generates tens of millions of dollars a year and it works. So, thanks, but we’re not interested. 

Colleagues who work in-house at a global brand, where the “design system” is limited to typeface and color, tell me they have huge budgets for localizing digital, adapting creative and (re)building necessary technology – so who needs an enterprise system?

A leadership committee is completely committed to establishing a cohesive customer experience … provided that it doesn’t impact the transactional systems customers interact with daily. 

Business unit leads can’t get the attention of the UX/digital group or who are denied the most trivial modifications to support the business, because the UX group is too busy on maintenance.

And the enterprise design, which in theory could provide significant value to the organization, instead is relegated to the periphery, away from programs, products and people who are the organization’s true value drivers. 

Enterprise design systems, by and large, are designed to meet the needs of users – a reasonable enough approach. But enterprise design system budgets – and strategic decisions around priorities – all of that gets approved several rungs up the corporate ladder. And while these top executives may acknowledge enterprise design’s theoretical benefits, they don’t necessarily see it as critical to meeting their core business objectives. 

It’s not that these leaders lack vision. In fact, what they want is a grand, unified vision: We call it “The System.”

The System addresses a business-centric, agreed-upon set of objectives. The System gives business leaders confidence – and the language to articulate that confidence – that critical business outcomes are the primary drivers of decision. And they want assurance that the myriad creative, technical, product and operational decisions that ultimately follow are made in the service of this prime directive. 

Oddly enough, defining The System is the step most enterprise design initiatives skip. 

At VShift, we subscribe to the power of The System for a simple reason: it works. We help executive leadership develop a shared vision of what’s possible and then ensure alignment down and through the organization – all of this before we get to styling buttons, picking grid systems, setting up scrums or doing component audits.

The System’s digital initiatives must support core organizational business priorities
and KPIs:

• Business objectives: Document the brand’s mission, capture executive leadership priorities and delineate group-level objectives.

• Customer experience and digital objectives: Articulate and align customer goals with primary business objectives.

• Operational objectives: Describe operational outcomes relevant to cost-savings and speed to market can be amplified by scale and volume.

Be sure stakeholders receive the education, context and nurturing necessary for
them to provide broad buy-in for The System and its intended outcomes and
objectives:

• For leadership and business owners: Emphasize business objectives and demonstrate how these are supported by the digital objectives.

• For functional and discipline stakeholders: Focus on the tactical, demonstrating how the design system will lead to wins in their specific programs.

Stakeholders may assume The System will be rigid, expensive and slow-moving – a boondoggle without any meaningful application. Like any other initiative, it needs marketing:

• Establish concepts and a vision: Create realistic comps and communicate The System’s expected impact via presentations, roadshows and videos.

• Establish product relationships: Help stakeholders see The System’s adaptability and applicability to a range of needs, outcomes and product types.

• Establish beacon projects: Start small, achieve a visible success and then expand outward. Once in market, The System becomes its own best advocate for expansion.

If you’re following the beacon project approach, you need to meet the needs of
the specific product and simultaneously lay the foundation for as-yet-unknown future
products:

• Establish guiding principles: Get agreement on parameters such as UX objectives for product types, guidelines for information density, brand fidelity requirements and more, to ensure a continued unified approach.

• Define key components and assets: These foundational elements should be used consistently and evaluated regularly.

• Evolve when necessary: Rather than jam a square peg into a round hole, have a process in place to add new, complementary components when needed. 

The System requires informed, cross-functional teams that understand the business
context and strategic rationale for The System and can apply that knowledge to
day-to-day business decisions.

• Recruit a SWAT Team: Motivated, multidisciplinary change agents are the best personnel to handle your projects.

• Keep your VP-level decision makers happy: Ensure The System is aligned with their yearly roadmap, turning them into advocates and evangelists.

• Don’t stop learning: Conduct work sessions with a broader group of UX, product and digital professionals in the organization to learn about their priorities, process needs and how they would (or wouldn’t) apply an enterprise design solution.

Executive leadership demands strategic alignment and organizational consensus. Our approach to The System provides a blueprint and methodology for achieving objectives and having a lasting and durable impact on the organization’s success.