Designing in a Post-Design era
tl/dr: In the post-design era, designers must pair strategic thinking with business acumen, using empathy to solve both user and business challenges if they want to remain relevant.
As a designer in the post-design era, here’s what you need to know: design alone won’t cut it anymore. No one cares if you’re super slick in Figma or Design Systems — that’s just table-stakes. Strategy and business skills are becoming essential designer tools. Post-design era designers are going to be all about finding creative solutions to business problems, not just user-focused ones. Yes, you can argue you already do this, as the products and services you craft aren’t developed in a vacuum. But how much time honestly did spend on questions like: How much should users or customers pay for it? Who should pay? Where can they buy it? How is it different from competitors? Should it be bundled with other products or services? These are the types of questions we, as designers, need to starting answering —or at the very least, understanding.
Just like it always was. It’s all empathy
Empathy is still key, but it’s no longer the sole domain of designers. In a typical cross-functional team, each member directs empathy in different ways. Engineers often focus empathy on the product, Product Owners on the business, and designers on the end users, the customers, consumers… whatever words you use for a human who is buying and experiencing what they design. But in the post-design era, designers need to extend their empathy beyond users to the business itself. This means empathizing with all stakeholders—employees, shareholders, managers, partners, and, of course, customers—anyone invested in the business’s ability to consistently deliver valuable products and services.
Common sense, right?
Yes. But hang on — isn’t that what the Product Owner does? Yes and no. A good Product Owner cares deeply about the user experience, but their empathy is generally business-focused, ensuring that product development aligns with organizational and business goals. There are of course, exceptions, but generally, this is what happens — the business school-trained MBA will override the design school-trained designer with some robust logic and a quiver of spreadsheets.
Post-era designers make bridges
This is the bit when strategy comes in. To be a successful post-design ear designer now, means you need to build strong bridges that connect design execution with business strategy. It’s not enough to craft a user-friendly product — you also have to ensure it solves a real business challenge and be able to demonstrate how. The post-design era designer now has to play in both business and design to remain relevant. In essence, bringing business into the design process and design into business processes (loosely paraphrasing Tsukasa Tanimoto’s work here).
How to bring business to design
Ensure the design effectively solves a real business challenge.
Articulate design in the terms of impacts and metrics that resonate with business stakeholders.
How to bring design to busines
Use your design tools, frameworks, and mindsets to solve business challenges.
By using a combination of business and design frameworks, alongside the designer’s mindset, designers can create agency when tradeoffs need to be made and tackle business challenges with confidence. This approach allows us to speak the language of both design and business, bridging gap. It’s how I operate today, and I can testify that it works. Honesty time. I’ll admit — it feels strange at first. And a world away from user experience, aesthetics, and functionality. Talking about, pricing models, and market differentiation can create some serious imposter symdrome issues let me tell you. But with persistence, and reading of broing business books, it becomes clear and when it does it is liberating and empowering.
Broadly speaking, I categorize design challenges into four types. Each requires design and strategy to interact differently, whether it's scaling growth, optimizing operations, driving innovation, or transforming organizational culture. Let’s break these down:
Growth challenges
Growth is the lifeblood of any business, but it can take different forms. Startups often prioritize growing users and engagement, while more mature businesses might focus on growing revenue and profits. Some of the key questions designers need to consider include:
How do we increase revenue?
How do we attract more customers?
How can we increase average transaction size?
What is the optimal pricing strategy?
How can we increase market share?
What is our go-to-market strategy?
Which channels and partners should we collaborate with?
What is (or should be) our position in the market?
Operational challenges
Delivering value while capturing some for the business is a challenge for startups, scale-ups, and mature organizations alike. Designing and implementing resilient operating models is a critical, yet often overlooked, part of executing design strategy. Designers need to address challenges like:
How can we optimize our cost structure to increase profitability?
What is the right business model to create and capture the most value?
How do we deliver on the value we promise to our customers?
What service operations and support mechanisms best align with our strategy?
How can we optimize business processes to reduce waste?
How do we translate strategic vision into actionable objectives?
How do we measure and monitor organizational performance?
Product & Innovation challenges
This is familiar territory for most designers. Whether it’s developing a specific product or crafting an innovation strategy, many clients struggle to extract the maximum value from their investments. Designers must answer questions like:
What is the value proposition and strategy for this product?
How can we link our product roadmaps to our overall strategy?
How do we innovate at scale while ensuring returns?
How can we prototype products, revenue streams, and business models to minimize risk?
How do we create and manage an innovation funnel?
Organization challenges
The way we design products and services directly impacts an organization's structure, culture, and behavior. Designers need to help clients tackle questions like:
How do we align incentives and behaviors to capture value?
How can we improve the employee experience?
How do we embed new technologies into existing processes?
When should we invest in new technology, and why?
How can we foster a more innovative and agile culture?
A Designer’s mindset in a post-design era
You could argue that Product Owners and Management Consultants address these same business challenges, and you’d be right. But what sets us apart as designers is our mindset. We tend to approach problems from a place of curiosity and humility, with a willingness to experiment and learn until we find the right solution. This mindset—often referred to as abductive reasoning—works well in contexts with poorly defined constraints, high complexity, incomplete information, and constant change.
Start with the extremes and move inward (Roger Martin’s integrative thinking is a great primer on this).
Begin with qualitative research and use quantitative analysis to validate it.
Be comfortable with uncertainty, using prototypes to reduce risk.
Use experiments and iterative learning paths to find a scalable solution.
In contrast, Product Owners and Management Consultants often come from a more analytical mindset, seeking to devise the "correct" solution and eliminate as much risk as possible along the way. This mindset (primarily deductive reasoning) works well when variables are known, and the goal is to optimize for a predefined outcome.
Both approaches—deductive and abductive reasoning—are valuable and complementary. Neither is better than the other, much like comparing a wrench to a screwdriver. Together, they complete the toolbox, but for designers to thrive, we must incorporate a few more skills.
Frameworks, tools & practical stuff
There are a number of tools, frameworks, approaches that we use in business design — many of them similar to, and borrowed from, classic management consulting tools. Similarly, many of these tools and frameworks are used by service and experience designers already. I steal equally from business and design - I have no shame!
Strategy and Growth:
Business Model Canvas
Porter’s 5 Forces
Ecosystem Maps
Blue Ocean Canvas
Discovery Driven Planning
Financial Modelling
Operations and Organisation:
Operating Model Blueprints
Process Flow Mapping
Value Trees
Prioritisation Frameworks
Product Roadmaps
For more tools check out Tom Cleary’s curated list with explanations. Inthe not too distance future, I’ll dive more deeply into some of the tools and when and how to use them to deliver impact with your usual. If you have any questions in the interim, drop me an email.