About Impact. Presenting the Change You've Made Through Your Decisions as a Designer
#55: What to do when you can't directly connect your impact with ROI.
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About Impact. Presenting the Change You've Made Through Your Decisions as a Designer
Solving difficult problems.
Finding and unlocking new opportunities.
Growing business.
On top of being the voice of the users, these three are the most important reasons why we, UX and product designers, are being hired.
If your role is linked with an area of business that impacts ROI, you can probably quite clearly tell in what way and by how much your design improves the company’s revenue. However, for designers working on some products or their specific areas, it’s much more difficult to track and bond how their decisions impacted revenue and other well-known metrics such as conversion rate, monthly active users, customer lifetime value, etc. If that happens to you, and you are thinking of updating your portfolio with some of your recent work, you might encounter a pickle: how do I present impact?
In this article, I will demonstrate what other types of impact we as designers can have besides revenue. I will also cover an interesting technique for presenting the impact that spreads across various departments of your organization and different personas using your product, which I learned a couple of weeks ago at the Leadership Ateliers event in Berlin.
Non-ROI types of impact
Besides bringing money directly to the company through sales and subscriptions, there are other areas that we, as designers, can impact. If you are working on an enterprise product (or a back office product, if you will), you might have an impact on some of the following:
Saving time
Improving internal metrics (eNPS)
Simplifying internal processes
Reducing human error
Saving costs
Enhancing internal teams’ capacity
Improving trust
Reducing the number of calls to customer support
Improving developers’ experience
Let’s delve into some of those in detail.
⏱️ Saving time
Imagine a scenario where employees of your organization spend some time, let’s say 30 minutes a day, to make something manually that could be automated. It could be many employees, let’s say a hundred, doing the same manual thing every day, five times a week.
If you and your product team can build an automation of this burden with relative ease, then you might end up with a similar statement in your portfolio:
Thanks to the feature we’ve built, we have saved 13,000 hours of manual work annually, which our employees can use to do something more creative.
My product team and I once automated an email that was manually crafted by a team of four people every single day of the week. The team spent roughly 45 minutes every day preparing data that would be sent to the customers via email.
We have saved roughly 1,100 hours of manual burden annually and improved the experience of this notification by customizing the data according to the customers’ contracts and geography.
💸 Saving costs
There are many ways to reduce the costs of our organization, from expensive licenses that could be cut, through complex processes that we can simplify, to manual and tedious work that can be automated.
While not all ideas apply to all product teams and types of organizations, there are two universal examples of saving costs as a designer:
Early ideas validation.
Components library (or full design systems for more mature orgs).
Let’s talk about the first one:
Imagine that the work of your eight-person product team costs the organization roughly 80,000 USD monthly. In a scenario where you don’t validate your idea early, the team goes straight into building a new functionality, which will take a whole quarter and cost roughly 240,000 USD.
After the launch, customers aren’t excited about the new functionality. It doesn’t exactly solve their problems, and it’s not necessarily what they have expected. Their trust in your organization is falling a bit, but it’s not the end of the world. It seems that the functionality can be fixed, leading to increased adoption. It will take an additional month of work by the team (80k USD).
Customers are finally happy about the newly rolled out functionality. The final cost of building this feature is 320,000 USD. How much money could you save if you validated the idea with the customers first?
Let’s say you create a prototype or mockup within a couple of days and use the next few days to probe 5-10 customers. To simplify the math, everyone on your team gets paid 10k USD a month equally. If your PM had helped you talk to customers over these two weeks, the total cost of this research would have been 10k USD.
You found out what has to be built and increased your chances of success. Let’s say the development time won’t differ from the first scenario, and the cost would stay the same (240k USD). Customers are pretty happy about the new functionality, and the adoption rate is high.
If we add the 10k USD you spent on initial research, the total cost of building this feature would be 250k USD.
Money saved: 70k USD.
Of course, these are the top-of-the-napkin calculations, and the world is not that simple. But the fact is that early idea validation increases the chances of making a bet on the right thing, reduces the final cost of development, and increases the product team morale.
Presenting the impact
I went to Berlin to join 80 other design leaders this May at the Leadership Ateliers event. I learned so many things here that I would love to share with you, but I will start with quite a simple one, which was also one of the most eye-opening.
The impact that we as designers have is rarely a single thing. It spreads across many teams, departments, customer segments, and user personas. We can simultaneously simplify a process, enable a new way of working, save time for our employees, reduce costs, and increase business metrics.
As Steve Jobs once said, we can connect the dots after some time.
I learned this technique of presenting impact from Ryan Scott (previously at Airbnb and DoorDash). Ryan led a class on data and metrics during Berlin’s Leadership Atelier event.
Here’s an example of the impact that I made with one of the products I worked on recently. For more context, that’s a natural catastrophe analysis platform used by an internal team of analysts at ICEYE. The output of their work is later leveraged by two segments of customers, insurance and governmental crisis response agencies, for decision-making before, during, and after natural catastrophic events such as floods, wildfires, and hurricanes.
What do you think of this technique? Would you use it to map the impact that you’ve made and present it in your portfolio?
Do you struggle to map your impact if it’s not directly related to the company’s revenue?
Let me know in the comments!