In 2009, I published a book that did well and was immediately out of date. Mobile as an idea was only a year old. I ended up rewriting the book, put out a second edition in 2013, and now that’s almost sold out, too.

In 2019, the spiritual successor to that book arrived in the form of Value-Based Design. Six years later, someone recently asked me if I now have to rewrite it in response to recent developments in my industry.

The answer is no, and that’s not because I’m a tremendously lazy person who is too busy cooking & petting dogs to rewrite their book. Value-Based Design doesn’t need an update because the techniques surrounding value-based design are evergreen. In fact, the reasons designers get hired are evergreen.

Value-based designers are hired for the same reason that anyone else is: to increase revenue, decrease costs, or decrease risk. There are two headwinds facing our acceptance, though. First, our expertise was at one point decoupled from all of this, making it harder for us to prove our existence. And many organizations took the functions of value-based design and internalized them broadly, which is good for design but less good for design experts.

The latter means value-based designers thrive best in an advisory, consultative role, so they can shift cultures to focus more on customers and gather evidence. There remains a strong demand for cultures to adapt to value-based design.

The former is our fault, really, and it comes from our inability to understand the power inherent in making design decisions. You never ship research, only the results of that research. In practice, that means people are hiring you as a force multiplier on execution, helping the whole organization make better decisions faster. People are hiring you for your ability to bring clarity, meaning, and focus to their organization. When was the last time you heard of a designer talk about their work in that way?

Either way, neither of these ideas have anything to do with tooling, new technologies, or even geopolitical developments. They have everything to do with the way in which those in power – those who buy design – respond when they think of what design is and what design does, neither of which any designer has ever been able to agree upon. Do they hear “design” and think that it’s a necessary profit center? Or is their association less charitable? It’s our responsibility to guide them.