Getting started as a newly appointed design leader
Transition into your new role successfully by mastering four critical tasks.
Congratulations on taking one of the most fascinating, inspiring, and creative of executive positions. The role of the chief design officer (CDO) is less well-defined than the more established C-suite positions. While the role provides an unmatched opportunity to create unparalleled value, it is not without its unique challenges: As CDO, you are expected to be able to switch at will between analytical and creative, design and business, empathetic and directive. This is no small feat. To help ensure your long-term success, get a head start by quickly tackling the following four critical challenges:
1
Manage expectations
Using analytical leadership to influence the CEO and your peers
Nurturing cross-functional talent across your design team
Manage relationships
2
Fostering continual iteration across business functions
Secure early wins
3
Focusing on your users’ needs and experiences
Stay on top
4
By Ben Sheppard and Sarah Greenberg
Getting started
Deliver early visible results to boost your influence with the CEO and the rest of the C-suite.
1. Manage expectations
2. Manage relationships
3. Secure early wins
4. Stay on top
The chief design officer is a senior role. You are expected to bring the same level of leadership, rigor, analytics, and focus on business outcomes as your CFO, COO, and CMO colleagues are. Don’t expect them to automatically understand design or the value it brings. It is your responsibility to explain and translate the commercial power of design and customer centricity in a way that is relatable, as well as to be their guide and interpreter in coupling their objectives to the passion and drive of your designers.
In modern design leadership, there should be a balance between quantitative and qualitative insight. Start by identifying and quantifying your company’s ambition by setting a “North Star” metric. Then use a holistic metrics system to secure investment and manage team performance. This in no way takes away from the craft that designers bring to work each day. Ultimately, the metrics chosen must resonate with the entire top team while still enabling design teams to be creative with their solutions.
Using analytical rigor to translate your work efforts into measurable and visible early results will help establish your authority and credibility among your new peers. To enhance collaboration, aim to support any new initiatives with clear and understandable metrics and goals for your C-suite colleagues.
TEST YOUR COMPANY
See how you score on the McKinsey Design Index
The business value of design
DIVE DEEPER
Start by:
identifying a critical user-centric target or metric to showcase early measurable results and build trust with the C-suite
bringing the voice of the customer into the board room in a way that leads to making better strategic decisions
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Quantitative
Qualitative
Next section
Overcome potential “us versus them” dynamics within your design team by fostering collaboration across the organization.
Your success as a design leader will be measured by that of those you lead, and it’s important to remember that the success of designers relies on more than just their own skills. It relies heavily on cross-functional collaboration and understanding. Historically, many of your designers may have felt like the ugly ducklings of the company: not fully appreciated or understood by the rest of the organization. Conversely, they might have felt little incentive to build bridges and learn how other parts of the business work. Early in your tenure, make sure to take responsibility for correcting this counterproductive us-versus-them dynamic wherever you find it.
You have many tools at your disposal to foster a cross-functional culture. During recruitment, you can check to make sure that designers have the skill and will to integrate with others in the business. You can train designers on business skills (and vice versa). And you can align the incentives of teams to ensure that design and customer experience are valued equally with cost and time-to-market. Explore as many ideas early on to see what works best for your organization.
Aim to overinvest in integrating and supporting your top design talent. A top-5-percent designer in your company might deliver more than ten times the business value of an average colleague through standout insights and solutions. Find these people, understand what motivates them, and help them thrive. Recognize that what will attract, inspire, and retain them might not be traditional “business” career paths.
Good design is good business: A conversation with John Maeda and Hugo Sarrazin
integrating business and collaboration skills with your designers’ focus and passion for their craft to encourage cross-functional understanding
finding, motivating, and supporting the top 5 percent of designers in your organization
Business skills Exploration Alignment
10x
A top 5% designer might deliver more than ten times the business value of an average colleague
Previous
Reach across silos to spur collaborative, design-driven wins.
Much like how it takes a village to raise a child, it takes many functions to bring a product or service to market. Every day, you will need to influence these other functions to ensure that the customer-experience and design requirements are married with requirements for project management, finance, R&D, and marketing and sales. From day one, start forming alliances with colleagues across the organization by offering your guidance and reassurance for working with design teams.
Your organization will likely need to have flexible, iterative cross-functional processes to test concepts and prototypes early and often with users and other functions, before costly decisions are committed. Start by developing a shared language, one that will transcend new ways of working together and reduce overall project risk and cost, considering the varying investments in time and resources that designers require early on in projects.
Fostering continual iteration across functions will be critical to delivering timely user-led products and services. Focusing on key strategic relationships will help smooth potential obstacles that might prevent these new processes from taking hold.
McKinsey Quarterly 5/50: The midlife of design
creating a culture of trust and communication among business functions
recruiting collaborators and training others in the organization on design and design thinking
Flexible Cross-functional Iterative
Develop early critical insights that demonstrate the value of integrating physical, digital, and service design.
Only five years ago, being a chief design officer in your industry might have meant you focused only on physical hardware design. Design of software, service, digital, even social media might have all been handled by other colleagues or third parties. That world is gone. Customers’ expectations for a seamless experience highlight the need to understand the entire customer journey in order to avoid common pitfalls.
Start by mapping your customers’ most important end-to-end journeys, identifying any pain points. You may need to reach out to your company’s marketing, product-development, R&D, sales, and digital-marketing teams in order to consolidate all the information, but it’s worth taking this on. Doing so will elevate your personal performance, as well as that of your company’s. Then, for each customer pain point, challenge the organization to create at least one physical, one digital, and one service solution. This encourages a shift in creative thinking rather than sticking to one’s comfort zone.
The chief design officer is uniquely positioned to help challenge your company to find the right combination of physical-, digital-, and service-design solutions that best solve your users’ needs. Look beyond what you sell today and consider whether your company should design the solutions in-house or if a third party would be better suited.
The CEO guide to customer experience
clarifying which executive officers—yourself included—have responsibility for which parts of the user experience
understanding your users’ needs across the entire customer journey and prioritizing the users’ experiences on a daily basis for your organization’s employees
Physical
Digital
Service
