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Open questions in software marketing

As a humble reminder, we’re out at a conference this week. We’ll be back the week of May 19.

One of my favorite things about software is how there are so many bespoke cases that people end up with these roiling debates about how to do a thing. “Don’t charge less than $50 a month,” one says, forgetting that this is literally how dozens of thriving businesses work. “Never have a free plan,” they say, even though many businesses, including one I work for, use free plans as ways to cleanly ladder people into revenue generation.

And so there are still quite a few open questions. These are “myths,” I guess, to some, but for us they’re rules that just happen to get broken a lot. Let’s go through some of them, and outline some exceptions and contingencies.

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#198
May 8, 2025
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The steps of (re)positioning

As a humble reminder, we’re out at a conference this week. We’ll be back the week of May 19.

We’re aware that our positioning towards software is the most important technological event of the past century, and as a result, some people have questions about how we did it. We’ve undertaken a few initiatives, some done, some still in progress:

  • Rework our website to reflect our new focus on software, which we wrapped up last week.

  • Start from basics. Paid members have already received a couple of lessons on pricing & onboarding, with more to come.

  • Outline a few years of new lessons on increasingly granular topics. Hoping to do this on the plane in a couple of days.

  • Relationship building. Figure out where to speak next, who to talk to, etc.

Let’s talk about lesson planning. Content ideas are shockingly easy to brainstorm; you just need to make the writing prompts to get you going when you’re in front of a blank screen. I got this idea from Naomi Dunford at IttyBiz and have adapted it for our use.

First, come up with a few primary topics that fit your positioning. For us, that involves:

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#197
May 6, 2025
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What is the baseline anatomy of an onboarding sequence?

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, May 13 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!


Onboarding is massively important, but it usually doesn’t lend itself well to specific design patterns, since the goal is to create a specific outcome that is specific to your product’s value. In this lesson, then, we’ll talk about some of the principles that onboarding should follow, and dive into some examples.

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#196
May 1, 2025
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The advisory role

They say that a pilot earns their paycheck every tenth landing. The theory: the plane mostly flies itself when everything goes well*. When you need to do something more complex – like, say, fly into ORD mid-derecho, as I’ve had the unfortunate fate of experiencing – then that’s where your expertise kicks in.

I have had the good fortune of earning my paycheck this past month, for all of my clients, for reasons both obvious and not obvious. One client watched a vendor turn usurious with a day to go in the contract; another lost a key staff member; a third shared with me a big, intractable problem around onboarding. In each of these, we flew into the storm, stuck the landing.

The common thread is advisory, brought about through establishing the expert position ahead of time. Expertise can be publicized in the form of whitepapers, process documents, surveys, books, and reports. Most of you know we’re experts in what we do, but many others, including some who hire us(!), need a little budging.

Because what we do is value-based design, but how we create value is through advisory. It doesn’t take long for people to start asking us bigger strategic questions that, on face, have nothing to do with the actual practice. But they have everything to do with the way the business works, and there’s always something deeper to explore.

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#195
April 29, 2025
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What is the baseline anatomy of a pricing page?

Now that we’re focused on software, it’s time to turn our attention back toward a big topic: pricing pages. In this lesson, we’ll outline the baseline anatomy of a pricing page, so you can make sure yours is doing as well as possible before you start to break rules or make improvements.


The rest of this post is available to members. Upgrade now to get:

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#194
April 24, 2025
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How many designers does it take to change a light bulb?

Why did we put a light bulb there? What is the point of a light bulb? Where are we attempting to put light, exactly? Are people really asking for light here in the first place? Could this be more easily solved by simply cutting a hole in the ceiling and putting a skylight in there? Do we need light when it’s dark out?

Why did the light bulb fail? Don’t we have LED lighting now? You can just buy a light that lasts for 15,000 hours and be done with it, so if the light failed and it is LED, why? Faulty wiring? A power spike? Do we need to make a warranty claim? Do we need to open up the ceiling and figure out what happened? If the light isn’t LED, why do we have incandescent or CFL bulbs in the first place?

What was the temperature of the light? Why? What is the function of the space? Are we talking a nice cozy home, or an office, or a hospital? Or maybe it’s a design consultancy where we need fully neutral 5000K daylight bulbs everywhere, so people can make sure their colors render properly?

What is our prior knowledge of this light? What value are people getting from this light? Have we talked to anyone? Why not?

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#193
April 22, 2025
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How will value-based designers respond to current market conditions?

Oh lawd, we’re talking about tariffs.


The rest of this post is available to members. Upgrade now to get:

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#192
April 17, 2025
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Draft’s Employee of the Month for April 2025

Our monthly office hours for paid members is today! Join us at 1p Central Time to chat about all things value-based design. Happy to answer any questions or pressing issues you may currently have. Find out what 1p Central Time is in your time zone here. If you’re a paid member, our meeting link is at the end of this email. If you sign up between now and 1p, we’ll send the meeting link your way.

—

New event alert! I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be doing live teardowns at MicroConf Remote in May. Come through! Submit your site! I promise to be firm but kind as I lovingly rip your work to shreds.


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#191
April 15, 2025
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How do you connect sources of truth when defining, adapting, and measuring processes?

In our previous lesson, we defined & discussed process design. In this week’s paid lesson, we’ll connect that lesson with our evergreen piece on sources of truth go in depth about how we can connect sources of truth to yield deeper insight.


The rest of this post is available to members. Upgrade now to get:

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#190
April 10, 2025
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Winter 2 (what’s next for design)

Many wild events have happened in Draft’s history, and you could conceivably pick a few to qualify as the wildest. My consistent pick for the wildest happened in 2023, when design began the deepest winter in the industry’s whole history while we also had our second-best year ever.

Four things happened all at once:

  1. We came to a global consciousness that design is a form of leveraged power, and those in power took it from us.
  2. People in power wanted everything to happen faster, and since design frequently slows things down, design got cut.
  3. Other tools appeared that appeared to make design more efficient to those in power. Whether or not this is true remains an open debate, but I think nobody is debating that people in power think the tools make design more efficient.
  4. Global fascism, which has caused numerous tech workers to go on strike from the industry.

None of which are great! But again, we also had our second-best year ever – because prospective clients recognized the value of our work, and decided to take a chance on us.

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#189
April 8, 2025
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A short-but-sweet guide to process design

In our previous two lessons, we set forth the idea of executional velocity and described why it’s important for teams to pursue, especially those that are beginning to scale. Usually that happens through the intentional creation of structured process.

In this lesson, we’ll talk about how to design a process, and how to apply your design skills to the creation of generous execution in any organization.


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#188
April 3, 2025
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Notes on the rework (avoid deck chair moves)

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, April 15 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!


We are never not reworking the stupid website. The world changes; you change; you adapt. Since we’re usually busy serving our clients – and since we’ve been fully sold out since 2022 – I don’t know if we make changes often enough, but we eventually get around to it. Last week we got around to it. We got rid of some things, reworded some other things, and scrubbed a position that was no longer working for us.

The goal is correct plumage. You are signaling to a person in a way that solves their urgent, expensive problem. You do so in a way that reads the room & meets the moment. When it works well, you find kindred spirits. When it works poorly, you try to do everything for everyone, and you bungle your positioning.

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#187
April 1, 2025
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More questions on executional velocity

In last week’s masterpiece, we coined the term executional velocity and answered a few questions about it:

  • What is executional velocity?
  • What’s the difference between executional velocity & productivity?
  • How can we identify the main operational issues that harm executional velocity?

This week, we’re going to answer a few more questions:

  • Why isn’t executional velocity discussed more broadly?
  • What’s the relationship between executional velocity & key business goals?
  • Under what circumstances might additional executional velocity not be desirable?
  • What are some of the ways that we can address normalized deviant practices that actively harm executional velocity?
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#186
March 27, 2025
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How to practice value-based design in a smaller team

I printed a few copies of our WTF notebook, and I’m seeking beta testers. Hit reply with your mailing address if you’re able to use it for a bit and provide me with brutal, unflinching feedback in return.


Our recent paid lessons have focused on some of the dynamics that occur in teams that are over, oh, say, 7 people. By that point, roles are defined, people wear fewer hats, responsibility gets meted out, and power structures become more readily apparent.

Most businesses are this large, but what if yours isn’t? How does value-based design manifest in smaller teams, or with solo practitioners?

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#185
March 25, 2025
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What is executional velocity?

I’ve been lucky enough to watch several dozen growing businesses from the inside over the course of my career. Some have been successful, scaling effectively and growing into new markets. Some have been… less successful. And really, the thing that separates the two is execution. What defines the ability for a team to do things, and do them well?


The rest of this post is available to members. Upgrade now to get:

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#184
March 20, 2025
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Contemporary design is a messy human problem

Our monthly office hours for paid members is today! Join us at 1p Central Time to chat about all things value-based design. Happy to answer any questions or pressing issues you may currently have. Find out what 1p Central Time is in your time zone here. If you’re a paid member, our meeting link is at the end of this email. If you sign up between now and 1p, we’ll send the meeting link your way.


We wrote a brief guide to why we use email when communicating with people. This joins a few other explainer bits that outline our principles & motivations.

Precisely three of you wanted a WTF notebook. I may print some as zines for my close people. We love a fun side project.

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#183
March 18, 2025
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How do you incorporate called experiments into your existing prioritization?

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, March 18 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!


Let’s say you ran an experiment, and it had a notable result. Win or lose, doesn’t matter: you felt something. Surely it will affect the prioritization of your existing work.

In this paid lesson, we’ll talk about how – and what to do about it.

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#182
March 13, 2025
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WTF

I was recently at dinner with a dear friend who went independent after a decade of working in a consultancy. One day a while back, the consultancy got a new CEO. For their first few months, the CEO would walk around with two notebooks. One was the regular ol’ black notebook that you expect every knowledge worker to have. The other was red, and it had the letters WTF written on the front.

Every time the CEO heard something that sounded absurd or horrible to them, they would put their regular notebook away and write it down in the WTF notebook. As you would expect, being the CEO of a new-to-them company, they rapidly filled the notebook.

I think of this often as a consultant. I am frequently called to be present in WTF situations. Some are obvious, but most are not, or they would have been addressed without me in the room, right? It’s incumbent on me to figure out the real reasons I’m hired, which are frequently subtle, requiring some digging. You ask questions, poke around corners, pull on threads, and find an expensive WTF.

Dan Luu’s immortal, essential “Normalization of deviance”, a URL I have memorized, speaks to this issue:

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#181
March 10, 2025
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How do you address the Big Problem?

There is always a Big Problem. Sometimes the Big Problem is stated; sometimes you must figure it out yourself.

Your goal as a value-based designer is to laser-focus on the Big Problem until it is comprehensively solved. Then, you either find yourself another Big Problem, or you run out of them and show yourself out. In this lesson, we’ll cover some example Big Problems, layout the process for identifying them, and provide next steps.


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#180
February 20, 2025
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Good software is as little software as possible

Our monthly office hours for paid members is today! Join us at 1p Central Time to chat about all things value-based design. Happy to answer any questions or pressing issues you may currently have. Find out what 1p Central Time is in your time zone here. If you’re a paid member, our meeting link is at the end of this email. If you sign up between now and 1p, we’ll send the meeting link your way.


After some current events, it’s come to my attention that some of you might want to know more about my tech stack.

I hold a few key principles in order to remain in right relationship to software:

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#179
February 18, 2025
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Money sent, thanks

There’s a meme in my consulting circles:

$500 client: “I just feel as though with this investment I am about to make in you, that we should understand how our lives are about to change and I need results and you need to bring them, I am entrusting you with our livelihood and lives.” $50,000 client: “Money sent, thanks”

In this week’s paid lesson, we’ll talk about how to generate more of the latter for you.

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#178
February 13, 2025
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On rest, again

I got interviewed for 10-Minute Ecom Success, because I’m the kind of person who can sum up a total design worldview in precisely 10 minutes. I think this turned out pretty good! My thanks to Marc for having me on the show.


Last year, I took one look at the 10-day weather forecast in Chicago and booked a flight to another continent, because I’m normal and reasonable and do things that are universally correct. You would do this, too. You work in ecommerce; you went through the holidays; you’re tired; the two-week break was not enough. Holiday closure is not vacation, either, not when the whole rest of the world stops and that’s why you give yourself permission to follow suit.

I, somewhat famously, very rarely take vacation, which is a bit the curse of running an independent business, a bit the fact that I like my job, and a bit the fact that I simply forget to, that living here is great, that vacations often involve trips and rest. I still worked a little in Paris. I did some housekeeping over the holidays. I took intermission from content in October & November, faded back a little. But I still worked that whole time; you just couldn’t see it.

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#177
February 11, 2025
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How do you create a voice & tone guide?

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, February 18 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!


I’ve talked around the concept of voice & tone in past lessons, but we’ve never stabbed it dead. That happens today.

In short, voice is the essence of your brand’s approach to communication, and tone is how it changes over time. Put another way, your voice is the person, and your tone is the circumstances.

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#176
February 6, 2025
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Not everything is measurable

New case study: We redesigned Buttondown, which is both the best way to start a newsletter and the reason why you’re reading this. We’re proud of the work we’ve done, and grateful that it resulted in a 18% conversion rate bump.

If you run a software business and want to make the most of your inbound traffic, get in touch.


I’ve been reading an excellent book by David Baker recently, and one quote feels very Draft-y:

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#175
February 4, 2025
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How do you manage phantom changes to your design?

Value-based design is grounded deeply in delegation process, where it’s clear who gets to change the design and when, and it’s clear what happens if someone wants to change the design.

When these processes break down, the value-based designer loads their business’s home page and sees something surprising. Surprises are, of course, signs of low-quality decision making in immature organizations, so in this lesson we’ll talk a little about what happens when you encounter phantom changes – and how to change internal processes so they’re unlikely to ever happen again.


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#174
January 30, 2025
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Four more answers, roughly

Let’s answer four more of Scott Berkun’s questions today. We already did three. That was fun, right? Four more.

If I know PMs and VPs often know little about design, how can I stop being surprised and disappointed? And instead be better prepared to handle these common situations?

I’m uncertain what designers are being surprised & disappointed about here, but I can guess a few:

  • Work not shipping
  • Fiat plays
  • Terrible questions
  • Critiques gone off the rails
  • Being fired
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#173
January 28, 2025
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What are the primary concerns after design ships?

Shipping does not conclude design, because only the death of business is able to conclude design. That notwithstanding, there remain deep questions about what happens to design after it’s put in front of customers.

In this lesson, we’ll talk about the measurement, governance, and maintenance of quality design. Both of these are essential forms of design, and they tend to be overlooked in organizations that incorrectly believe that design “ends” once it’s been shipped or, worse, handed off to be built. How do we stick the landing?


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#172
January 23, 2025
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Notes on spaceholding

Our monthly office hours for paid members is today! Join us at 1p Central Time to chat about all things value-based design. Happy to answer any questions or pressing issues you may currently have. Find out what 1p Central Time is in your time zone here. If you’re a paid member, our meeting link is at the end of this email. If you sign up between now and 1p, we’ll send the meeting link your way.


When we think of spaceholding, we normally resort to a personal context, where we console someone in crisis or grief. Or maybe we’re on a therapist’s couch, and they’re doing the work of spaceholding.

That is not what happens in design. When we speak of spaceholding at Draft, we specifically mean the process of managing the emotional & energetic tenor of others in order to get work shipped. It isn’t a whole lot different from what happens on the couch, but there’s a whole set of mostly-unspoken professional rules around it.

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#171
January 21, 2025
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How do you work with tap targets?

Imagine an invisible grid of boxes superimposed on your site. Tapping each one does something. The rules aren’t immediately clear – you need to create an interface for that. These are your tap targets.

Take a slider. You would think that tapping only the slider would control it. In practice, though, there’s an area around the slider that controls the same thing. You can safely tap white space, control the slider, and never think twice about it.

This separation between control & intent is a key pillar of mobile-first interface design. In this lesson, we’ll talk a little about tap targets, and outline how to use them in your app.

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#170
January 16, 2025
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What is the present moment for value-based design?

What does the present moment look like for value-based design? There are numerous opportunities for profit generation. Points of leverage always exist for us.

On the more production-grade end, design is load-bearingly critical in down-funnel activities. After all, you can never have a too high-converting checkout form.

It’s also highly useful in the more performance-based aspects of tech work, especially now that we’ve all learned to code & measure our impact. A faster-loading pricing page is likely a better-converting one.

Speaking of pricing pages, design will niche to supporting individual activities. “Pricing designers”, “onboarding designers”, and “checkout designers” will come to exist. From specialization comes real expertise.

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#169
January 14, 2025
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Why is consultative positioning essential for the ongoing practice of design?

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, January 21 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!


Happy new year, y’all. Feels good to be back. Got a fun one this week.

In his recent excellent book The Four Conversations, consulting consultant Blair Enns describes a term called the flip, where a prospective client begins to view you as a consultant, not a contractor.

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#168
January 9, 2025
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A brief literature review on the structural remediation of design

Intermission is over. I emerged from deep rest, deleted all of my unread email, and now here we are. I hope you had a good few weeks.

First, I wrote some text about a gift I gave to myself, which was a long time coming.

When I wasn’t cooking on the aforeposted gift, I spent most of deep rest reading. Of the topics I circled around, the most Draft-pertinent regards the ongoing structural remediation of design.

The past two years have witnessed a significant collapse within contemporary design. A few hundred thousand of us were laid off by businesses who chose to abandon design. By abandoning design, businesses became more hostile towards customers. A few high-profile incidents occurred, and a term got coined, but we are really only witnessing the beginning of tech’s find-out phase.

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#167
January 7, 2025
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How do you define, create, and maintain sources of truth?

When a team size increases past 1, it’s necessary to create a source of truth for coordination, delegation, and ongoing reference. That includes:

  • What needs to be done
  • What’s already been done
  • Conversations around how to execute on what needs to be done
  • The results of any learning or research

This is 101-level business practice, but we see organizations messing things up in key ways. In our final paid lesson before we enter deep rest for the holidays, we talk about how to create & manage sources of truth in any organization.

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#166
December 19, 2024
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11 questions, three answers

I got interviewed on Step by Step Business. Parmesan is also depicted on the aforelinked.


Scott Berkun is smarter than me. He wrote the book I wish I had written in this moment. His work pushes us to be better designers. And recently, he wrote a post that asked eleven questions that should be in every designer’s browser history.

While I don’t know if I personally search the web in complete sentences like that, the questions are excellent. They’re also kind of hard! Some of them likely have book-length responses, or they involve practicing design for decades. At least one of them has a really spicy answer. Another is probably answerable with therapy.

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#165
December 17, 2024
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How do you gather power once you start on a new team?

Continuing from last week’s lesson, we’d like to go deep on what happens when you start on a new team: what power you have, how you can change behavior, and how you can gather power going forward.

Power is the most important component of design. After all, learning design is pretty easy, but how do you get it shipped? How do you measure its impact? How do you get an impact?


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#164
December 12, 2024
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The gradient

Things are, broadly, bad. They are bad in the tech industry and bad in the world. They are bad for many reasons, and one of those reasons is that we keep using software that happens to be run by bad people.

We don’t intend on doing this. We all started using the bad software with good intentions. In this post, I’m going to outline why this happens at a very comically high level, and then I’ll leave the “actionable steps” to all of you, because you’re smart adults who can be left to their own devices.

As a disclaimer, I’m about to diss a direct competitor of one of Draft’s clients, but it wouldn’t change what I’m about to say here.

The newsletter

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#163
December 10, 2024
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What’s the relationship between power & expertise?

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, December 17 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!


Over the past year, we’ve spent a lot of time talking with designers about the dynamics of leveraged power. Since design is a form of leveraged power, it’s important for us to understand how power is created & worked with in any organization.

Done well, this allows our designs to ship with minimal interference. Critique goes easily. People trust you more. And you get that “seat at the table” with less mess.

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#162
December 5, 2024
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Objections: auditing, addressing

When people are in the market for something, they come to your site, browse around, and have opinions. Since the fundamental question of the web is “why wasn’t I consulted”, it is necessary for us to understand what those opinions are and what we can do about them.

When someone has a conception of your business’s offerings that might hold them back from purchasing – and I mean purchasing, where money exchanges hands – we call that an objection. If the objection isn’t addressed right away, people are likely to bounce at the point of maximum interest in your product.

It’s our job as designers to understand what those objections commonly are, and how we can address them before they cause us to lose customers.

Before the internet, it used to be that you would more easily understand what the objections were – and how to head them off. People would come into your business, ask questions, and you’d use your own skills to answer them. Maybe you’d even adapt what you offer to meet their needs.

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#161
December 2, 2024
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An eternal Black Friday of the soul

I’ve really enjoyed how thirsty stores are this Black Friday season. It’s a whole season now! I always track the first time when I see the first mention of Black Friday on any store, and this year it was September 20. It wasn’t even fall yet, and someone came out and provided early access to Black Friday, in defiance of god.

Does anyone believe this? Black Friday primes the consumer. Everybody comes in, buys at once. This is notionally good for consumers (one day, thank god) and it sucks for everyone else (imagine your warehouse, delivery networks, etc over the following week). Stretching Black Friday is notionally good for customers if and only if they believe they’re maximizing their deals.

One of my clients put up early access to Black Friday a couple of weeks ago, and they wondered why sales slowed. There are two theories:

  • People don’t believe it’s the actual sale yet. They think they’re likely to get bigger discounts on Black Friday itself. Priming them for Black Friday is giving the opposite effect of what’s intended.
  • America is fascist and everybody is afraid to buy stuff.
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#160
November 26, 2024
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[VBD] One last question

Hi! Just popping in to let you know that our sale on our self-paced workshop has closed.

We’d love if you could fill out this brief one-question survey to let us know why you didn’t move forward right now:

Why didn't you enroll in our workshop at a discount?

  • Too expensive
  • Don't need it right now
  • Already know everything in it
  • Want to learn something else from you (hit reply & tell us!)
  • Some other reason (hit reply & tell us!)

Thanks for your interest, and we wish you the best in all of your efforts!


This was a draft issue of Draft's Letters. You can subscribe, unsubscribe, or view this email online.

​
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#159
November 22, 2024
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[VBD] Discounted enrollment closes TODAY

Hi there! Just wanted to let you know that discounted enrollment in our self-paced workshop ends at 5p today.

That’s in eight hours. Don’t sleep!


This was a draft issue of Draft's Letters. You can subscribe, unsubscribe, or view this email online.

​
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#158
November 22, 2024
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Intermission: migrating our paid community

After two months of work, we’re finally ready to finish migrating all of our membership benefits over to this list. In this letter, we’ll talk about what we’ll be doing going forward.

What happens now

We used to post lessons, new design decisions, and office hours to a separate website. Now we’re posting them here, paywalled for paid members.

In short, paid members won’t have to check a whole separate website, and free members will see some paywalled emails. That’s it.

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#157
November 21, 2024
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Notes from intermission: what happened, what’s coming

Intermission is essentially over.

Us

Here are some bullet points:

  • We’ve folded our paid community into our letters going forward. Email gets read. Our writing exists to be read. Conscious attention to the practice is necessary if we’re going to survive the next decade.
  • We’re going to continue making the next book, but when things are ready it will be distributed… quietly. Think “our laser printer + handwritten letters” quietly. Kindred spirits only for now. This will be our final update until it’s ready for wider consumption, which may be never.
  • Updates will be more freeform going forward, and they may not happen exactly on Tuesdays, or every Tuesday. This is more in alignment with the practice, which must be protected, of course.
  • We finished everything we wanted to do in intermission early. We’re still going to rest a little between now and when we said we were going to resume work. Creating more spaciousness can only help the business. Within apocalypse, it is structurally necessary to create periods of deep rest & spaciousness. After all, we’re sure to uncover things that we hadn’t thought about before!
  • Paid updates will be on Thursdays, usually. Previously they were sporadic. Now they will be less sporadic.
  • Towards that end, this Thursday we’ll be sending our first paid member update summarizing a few changes and providing next steps.
  • We’re accepting new consulting work for kickoff in April 2025. You may apply here, or get a retainer to start a conversation now and skip the line.
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#156
November 19, 2024
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[VBD] Why VBD now?

Hi! Just a heads-up that our self-paced workshop is available for 40% off for only a little while longer. Our limited sale ends this Friday, November 22nd, at 5p CST. Don’t sleep!

In the meantime, we’ll talk about what happens when people don’t practice value-based design. Because that’s the norm, right?

But look where that got us.

Design is in crisis

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#155
November 18, 2024
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[VBD] Some wins with value-based design – and a discount for enrollment in our workshop

In our book about value-based design, we have a whole section that focuses on case studies over portfolio pieces.

The most essential part of a case study isn’t the design. It’s the numbers that resulted from your design.

In short, you should be able to point to shipped design and say that the business was impacted by a certain amount. Our own case studies all have numbers attached to them.

Numbers create your reputation.

We’re lucky to function in an industry that is designed, but doesn’t really use design. Put another way, they look pretty but don’t do a great job of listening to their customers. That’s created a big opening for us.

We’ve used value-based design to create outsize change, sometimes doubling our clients’ revenue and radically reworking how they do business. Our average annual revenue bump is over 15% as of press time.

But it’s not just us. Others are practicing value-based work quietly, too:

Nick made intimidating research tools approachable in their workshop, and provided clear examples of how even small-scale analysis & testing could enhance my existing services. As a visual designer navigating a conversion-focused industry, I feel better equipped to find & showcase the impact my work has for my clients. This course will give you confidence to measure your design decisions in pursuit of better ones.

— Jamie Sanchez, Curiouser

I utilized Nick’s teardown service for one of my clients in the travel industry. Given the pandemic situation, they have been hit hard, and we needed to get an expert opinion on the messaging and conversion process. Nick’s advice and “fresh set of eyes” were crucial in determining how we attacked the client’s landing page and reframed messaging. Eventually, we produced a new page that increased conversions by 111%. That is not a misprint. The results were fully A/B tested in Google Optimize.

— Josh Frank, Test Triggers

And they’re getting a lot out of what we teach:

After working in web design for a decade, I still found myself having “ah-ha” moments while reading Nick’s book. Reading and internalizing Value-Based Design could very well be the difference between being a good designer and a great designer.

— Kurt Elster, Ethercycle

You can do this, too

What will happen in your career after practicing & promoting value-based design?

  • You’ll have a sense of what works. Hardly anyone in our industry really understands what will work for the businesses that they serve. By researching customer behavior and evaluating the health of a business, you’ll be more informed in critiques, meetings, and discussions of new work.
  • You’ll design for usability, accessibility, and inclusivity, because you already have a precise understanding of how each makes for good business.
  • You’ll think impartially about design, not in terms of what’s currently trendy or flashy. This makes it considerably more likely that you’ll build usable and helpful products right out of the gate.
  • You’ll be able to advise on business strategy more confidently, which means you’ll be able to bring design into strategic conversations more effectively.
  • You’ll progress in your career more quickly; perhaps you’ll end up in a creative director role, or you’ll be given executive responsibilities.
  • If you’re independent, you’ll beat the feast-or-famine cycle by bringing in more stable, durable work, allowing you to grow a high-quality, functional design practice.
  • You’ll get paid more, because your prior track record will show that you’re a reliable and successful hire.
  • You’ll be a lot more likely to end work every day proud of what you do.

There’s no better time to start than now.

Today, we’re opening a limited discount for our self-paced workshop, and we’d love to see you there. Head there and get 40% off today – no code needed. The discount expires soon, so you’ll probably want to act while you’re still thinking about it. Hooray!


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#154
November 14, 2024
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Intermission: wrapping up, spaceholding, taking care

We’re near the end of intermission. A few things to keep in mind:

  • We’re still in the (long, slow) process of integrating our existing mailing list with the private community. Progress has been made, but as mentioned: long, slow.
  • We’ve compiled enough for a book of text, but given the current vibe weather it may no longer be structurally relevant. As a result, it’s been relegated to the “fun hobby that will turn into a zine someday” bucket.
  • We now have an introductory course around value-based design that will greet newcomers to this list. Once people complete the course, they’ll be able to read the rest of the list.
  • Speaking of what we’ll post here, our updates will be considerably more freeform going forward. We believe most common design discourse isn’t focused on the necessary work of understanding & leveraging power, and so we’ll be following a path that looks a little different.
  • Draft will be closed for holiday break starting on December 20, so we won’t be writing then anyway.

A brief life update, which is about as much of a bummer as you would expect it to be

I spent the past week mostly doing what you would expect: disassociating in a park in Amsterdam, looking up real estate in Amsterdam, and moving large sums of money around my bank accounts while in Amsterdam. I have also been on a series of brief 2.5-hour calls, and being in Amsterdam is quite nice for these because nobody in the states wakes up until around 2p local time, so I get a lot of time to do the aforementioned activities before the calls begin.

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#153
November 12, 2024
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[VBD] Some frequently asked questions about value-based design

By now, you’ve learned what value-based design is, what it involves, and why it’s important. You also haven’t unsubscribed from my list and salted the earth! Feels nice, y’all.

In this lesson, we’ll talk about some of the skeptical questions we hear from people about value-based design. Shockingly, it is not a totally uncontroversial practice! So let’s answer these one by one.

Why can’t design just happen on its own?

First code, now this. Isn’t all of this non-design beside the point?

It is, yes. In an ideal world, we’d be specialists, doing design qua design. We wouldn’t have to learn code. We wouldn’t have to learn measurement. We would stay in our lane and be trusted to make all of the big decisions.

But design, when it works best, makes big decisions. That means design needs to be supported by those in power. And in order for that to happen, design needs to prove itself.

Our work doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in an organizational context. And if you’re going to push any work across the finish line, you need to know both how it’s built (code!) and how it’s supported.

So no, design can’t exist on its own. It might have functioned in that capacity back before computers existed, but that doesn’t give us a pass now.

Why is it incumbent on the designer to measure design?

For a few reasons:

  • You get to control the conversation. Trust me, it’s far easier for you to do your job if you’re able to define the terms of how its impact is measured. Critique becomes easier, follow-through becomes easier, and the client is usually happier.
  • You get to connect the work to its outcomes. If someone else is defining success for a project, design may be cut out of the process entirely. By both designing and measuring, you make that less likely to happen.
  • Design, as a practice, is arbitrarily defined. Who said that design didn’t have to involve measurement? AIGA? Paul Rand? Why are we taking this as an accepted idea in the first place?

In short, if you define the terms of the game, then it’s a lot easier for you to play it. Why wouldn’t you do that, if given the opportunity?

Wouldn’t it be easier to find someplace that supported design, instead?

Everybody knows that executive support is required for design to succeed. What would that even look like, though? Someone having blind faith in your process and giving you a sandbox to play in? Somebody picking up the Tim Brown book at an airport newsstand, reading it on the flight, and becoming converted to your way of thinking?

The world doesn’t work like that.

What do you think motivates people to buy design? Is it because Steve Jobs held up a cell phone onstage in 2008? Is it because design helps people? Or is it because design helps both people and business?

It’s tremendously myopic to think that people will just blindly believe in us. We have to do the work to show that what we do matters. We haven’t done enough, and we probably won’t do enough for at least the rest of my career.

Isn’t it sad that we have to make design serve capitalism?

Honestly, it’s just sad that capitalism still exists in 2024. So I feel this, y’all. But ultimately, we’ve gotta eat. Capitalism is how we do so.

If you’re looking to practice creative work without serving capitalism, you might want to become an artist, instead. You’ll find that art is still a capitalistic thing, but at least you’ll be able to do what you want without having your clients change the work.

If you’re looking to burn down the system and start over, there are many resources & spaces for you to do so, and this mailing list is unfortunately not going to be one of them. I personally do what I can to link & build in my local community, and then I keep the lights on during the day. I suspect I’m not alone.

Expand the practice & profit

In short, design isn’t doing enough to prove its value in 2024. And we all probably think we are. After all, design appears to be everywhere now. Why wouldn’t people get it?

That doesn’t change the fact that people don’t get it. It’s on us to show them. This is a tremendous blind spot in our industry, and you need to get conscious to it.

That’s why we’ve put together our self-paced workshop.

By learning how to expand your practice to understand how it’s viewed, you’ll be able to control the conversation around your impact. You’ll be put in higher-leverage situations. And you’ll get

We want nothing more than to see more designers succeed, especially given the headwinds we’ve all faced over the past couple of years.

Design has a place. It’s time for you to take it.

On Wednesday, we’re opening a limited discount for our course. It will never be this cheap again. We’re excited & honored to welcome you in.


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#152
November 11, 2024
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[VBD] The three pillars of value-based design

Design is in crisis.

Designers are being laid off en masse in a broader power grab amidst a major economic downturn. In fact, layoffs.fyi shows over 535,000 people laid off since the beginning of 2022 – which, granted, are not all designers, but.

Our field became commoditized as buyers misunderstood the process & impact of our work. Incompetent people in power think they can practice some form of unresearched “design,” and then they make machines do it for them. Fortunately, there is a better way, and that is to restore design to its original purpose – which fundamentally can’t be automated.

Since our publication of the evergreen Value-Based Design five years ago, the kind of design we practice has only become more urgent. Tech writ large has focused too much on power & vibes, and not enough on creating durable business. Communities exist that fight against all of this, but they’re few & far between. People are learning the true purpose of design, but slowly, gradually, in small places.

Fortunately, everybody has to start somewhere. You can, too. Value-based design has three key components: research, measurement, and experimentation.

Pillar 1: Research

Design represents the union of business goals with customer needs. Research is essential to any design process. As a result, value-based designers must research customer behavior and desires, in order to create something that works for everyone.

Put another way: you can have pretty without research. You can even have functional, or useful. But you cannot have design.

Research activities include:

  • Interviewing customers on the phone or Skype.
  • Running post-purchase surveys.
  • Planning, executing, and analyzing deep-dive annual surveys of all customers.
  • Running usability tests of example transactions, either in person or remotely.
  • Performing card sorts of existing product offerings.
  • Running and exploring heat & scroll maps.
  • Segmenting and exploring analytical data.

This pillar is the most “design-y” of the three. It’s the one that, as of this writing, designers are practicing most frequently.

Yet it’s also the mandatory part of design that is incorrectly cut from budgets, devalued internally, and executed sloppily.

Fortunately, within a value-based design practice, researched ideas are more likely to translate into long-term economic wins for the business. This is because the other two pillars of value-based design serve research’s core function: to understand the motivations, desires, and needs of paying customers.

Pillar 2: Measurement

Value-based designers measure the economic impact of their design decisions – as well as the long-term economic impact of their work.

This means the value-based designer spends a lot of time in analytics tools, business intelligence dashboards, and click & scroll maps.

Measurement is holistic and all-encompassing; it doesn’t apply to one single decision, but to the overall portrait of the business’s health over time. Put another way, value-based designers not only measure the impact of specific decisions through analytics; they also assess overall changes in behavior, trying to understand what customers are doing and why.

Value-based designers also create new metrics that act as proxies for business success. For example, corporate messaging platform Slack discovered that teams which send 2,000 messages in aggregate are 93% likely to stick with the platform, grow, and ladder up to paid plans. It stands to reason, then, that Slack’s fundamental goal is to get people to send more messages – not necessarily to convert right away.

Finding the goal for your business is not easy, and it may shift over time. Yet doing so will result in a greater focus on what matters to the business – both experientially (for the customers) and economically (for the business’s continued growth and success).

Designers farm this work out to executives, sales, marketing, or “data people” at their peril. Measurement is the core way that most businesses make decisions. Designers who incorporate measurement into their skill sets are more likely to be given a proverbial seat at the table – without having their decisions overridden by the HiPPO.

Always remember that value-based design helps a designer get closer to the inner workings of a business’s operations. A designer can’t do that by ceding control of their business’s most important conversation.

Pillar 3: Experimentation

The third pillar of value-based design measures the economic impact of design decisions through experimentation. The reasons for this are twofold:

  1. All design is speculative until it’s put in front of paying customers. Experimentation allows you to understand the specific impact that a design decision will have on the business.
  2. Experimentation is a hedge on risk. Keep what works, throw away what doesn’t, and grow the business accordingly.

Experimentation is an extension of the scientific method to the design process. First, you state a hypothesis: that a specific change (the design decision) will improve a specific metric (e.g. conversions, ARPU, etc.) by a specific magnitude (5%, say).

Then, you send equal proportions of the control (the original design) and the variant (the new design) to your customers.

Finally, you measure which performs better, use your findings as research to inform your future design direction, and repeat with a new change.

Done right, experimentation allows the value-based designer to surrender their ego to the needs, desires, and motivations of the business’s customers – which ultimately puts the customers in control.

Formerly the sole purview of internal, home-rolled frameworks and cumbersome, hard-to-understand enterprise apps, experimentation has never been easier to execute.

With contemporary experimentation frameworks, the value-based designer can rapidly prototype new, research-based decisions, measure their economic impact on the business, roll them out to all customers, and measure their long-term influence on the business.

Another world is possible

I recently had a friend visit for the weekend who works in the industry, and she sighed that everybody is now focusing on revenue as a metric. Of course they are. They run businesses. That’s the whole point. I did what I could to hold space, but I was privately delighted, since our consultancy has focused exclusively on value generation since our founding.

Since launching our value-based design workshop a few months ago, we’ve watched people notch quite a few wins in their own work. Some learned how to research better. Others figured out how to run experiments to de-risk business operations. Still more are incorporating our process holistically into their roles. Even developers are taking notes from our playbook! We love to see how beautifully cross-disciplinary this work can be.

Over the next few days, we’ll talk more about what value-based design can be for you and your practice – and how you can take action to join our growing movement.


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#151
November 8, 2024
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[VBD] How value-based design came to be

Before we go into detail on value-based design, it’s worth talking about how it came to be. After all, it’s not how most design is practiced (yet!) – and by talking about the history, you’ll get a clearer sense of the context.

How design was

The kind of design we’re talking about here was first called “applied art” or “commercial art” back in the days of handmade advertising. Now, design is better defined as shipped work for active businesses that are able to take money for goods and services.

After World War II, the advertising industry revolutionized graphic design. Ad agencies built their success on pitching emotionally driven brand narratives to business, hoping that their work would translate to real business gains – because there was no real way to precisely measure their work’s effectiveness.

What design became

It’s hard to put a price on emotion, and advertising happens entirely before money changes hands. Yet graphic design proceeded to root itself in the precedents set by the advertising industry for the next 40 years – and user experience and product design followed suit.

This situation is changing. It’s now possible to measure the precise consequences of specific, technological design decisions at scale. And it’s already shaping the future of our industry.

At the same time, most people graduate from school – usually, as of press time, art school or a coding bootcamp – and they practice design without much understanding of the context in which they exist.

I won’t mince words: if you want to be on the right side of history, you’ll join the ranks of those who are already practicing value-based design. Value-based designers know what success looks like, and they have little to prove. They work quietly, speak softly, command respect, and make a mint.

Value-based design as response

Design’s purpose is to provide economic benefit for businesses. The best way to do that is by clearly articulating, reinforcing, and promoting the value of design within a business. Design affects how the business is perceived, how a product operates, and how the business’s service is executed.

Every design decision has a corresponding business ramification. And it’s possible to measure the economic impact of design decisions, so that you can make a more forceful case to those with the power to pay for design.

Every time designers fail to do this, design loses its way. Think about a time when you worked on a project that didn’t focus on business needs. (We’ve all been there.) Perhaps it was a rebrand that didn’t measure the effect on the business afterward, or didn’t ask customers what they looked for. Surely there was a business reason for the project: defending against competitors, perhaps, or freshening up a stale design. If the project had no purpose, it wouldn’t have been approved in the first place.

But if there wasn’t a way to assess whether the project was successful, then why did the design team put in so much effort? If there wasn’t a clear motivator for the design direction, how were you able to effectively critique any finished work? Why were design resources allocated at all?

There might be cultural precedent for the importance of design, but that won’t sustain our industry in the long term. We need a new way to approach design that focuses on how it serves others. We’ve developed a practice that’s focused equally on what design is and how it’s received by a business’s customers, which we call value-based design.

My own journey to value-based design

For over a decade, I practiced design like most people do: by taking projects and doing good work. But it was messy, and I, like most of you, struggled to be accepted in various organizations. Why was I doing projects that didn’t have a good chance of succeeding? Why was the work being chosen in the first place? Where did the money come from? What happened to the work after it left my hands?

I never got adequate answers to these questions until I founded a business of my own and grew the practice such that I could sit alongside executives. Turns out, most decisions aren’t made with design in mind, both in terms of process and product. And when you’re a designer watching all of this, you get to wondering how you can meaningfully influence the final product.

After all, even if you have a seat at the table, you can still be ignored at the table.

What will design be?

Think back to our lesson a couple of days ago, where we talked about risk. What do you think people are thinking when they wonder whether to buy design from you? Whether they choose to hire designers at all? Are you a low-risk investment, or an unknown variable?

Design works best when it shows its power & expertise to those with the ability to buy it. Knowing this, we propose an expansion of a designer’s practice to include activities that both connect to design and influence business. Much like the debate over the past decade about whether designers must code – which, for the record, largely got settled in favor of code –value-based design focuses on three main components: research, measurement, and experimentation.

In our new self-paced workshop, we go deep on each of these components, weave them into a typical designer’s practice, and show you the best way to exert your authority & expertise.


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#150
November 6, 2024
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[VBD] On risk – and why people buy design

Welcome to our little mini-course about value-based design! Feel free to reply & introduce yourself. We want to know who’s here and how we can help!


Let's talk about risk.

We'll talk about design, too, but then we’re going to talk about risk again. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll go through some first principles about why we’re all here and what makes our work a little different.

Risk

So what is risk, denotatively? It feels slippery. Risk is usually a thing one feels: “oh, that’s risky.” But in business, risk is quantifiable, and it’s defined as the probability that a business will profit from anything that it invests in.

Every single line item in a business’s balance sheet carries some amount of risk, and all investments come with some amount of uncertainty. But many things are lower-risk than others. For example, my accountant is pretty low-risk, since the dude keeps me out of hot water with the government, and he probably helps me save a lot on my taxes. I’m pretty sure that my book printer is low-risk, because every time I write a new book, I happen to make back the cost of them several times over. My editor is low-risk because I always badly need an editor.

You get the idea.

Design

What does risk have to do with design? Well, design is bought. And it’s bought by businesses. There’s someone buying work from you, and they are absolutely doing risk calculations every time they hire you.

This makes the creation of economic value absolutely vital for design to continue existing.

We have historically not stepped into our authority on this. Lots of us get out of art school and we expect to have jobs, to be respected in those jobs, and to get an impact.

At its best, well-supported design is a way of exerting power in an organization. In practice, though, the overlap between design & impact is not a circle. This is because:

  • Most people make design decisions in every organization, regardless of role, and regardless of whether they call those decisions “design.”
  • Most designers are expert in design, but not in the soft power that’s necessary to make sure that high-quality design ships & is governed well.
  • Organizations are complex. Design is frequently unsupported by those who aren’t the buyer or project champion.

We do a great job with design. I’m really unconcerned about designers’ ability to design well. I don’t even remember the last time I wrote a lesson about design qua design. What I am concerned about is the fact that designers don’t know how to make work that is actual, how to get an impact, and how to be respected in their roles.

Risk again

Reducing the perception of business risk is a solid first step. The more we convey to teams that we’re a good return on investment, and the more we consciously back that up with the work we perform, the more likely we are to flourish as a profession.

Designers can have real business impact by:

  • Understanding & responding to the felt needs of our customers.
  • Experimenting with our work to make sure that we’re not creating any harm, either to the business or our customers.
  • Measuring & sharing the ongoing impact of our work.

We’ve put together an approach to design that anyone can practice, regardless of their design know-how or existing role – and right now, we’re offering a workshop that teaches you everything you need to level up your game & get a seat at the table.

In the coming days, we’ll walk you through what you can do to get the authority you deserve. Stay tuned!


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#149
November 6, 2024
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