At our most recent Leadership Round Table, a room full of design and business leaders spent a good chunk of the discussion on one question. Does the ongoing campaign for design to earn a “seat at the table” help the case for design, or does it work against it?
The consensus that emerged, and the one I keep coming back to, was that the campaign itself might be the problem. Every time design builds a standalone case for its own existence, it reinforces the idea that design sits apart from the business.
I think that is worth sitting with because it changes what a hiring manager should ask a design leader to prove.
Judge design by the decisions it improves
Here is the shift in framing that matters. Instead of asking what design contributed on its own, the better question is whether product, engineering and the wider business are making better decisions because design was involved.
Better decisions look like specific, ordinary things. A feature that did not get built because research surfaced a problem before it shipped, or a risk that got caught in a review because a designer flagged a usability issue that would have cost far more to fix after launch.
A commercial outcome can also improve because the experience changed customer behaviour in a way the business could see and measure. None of that requires a design-only metric.
The evidence lies within the business result itself, rather than in a parallel report that explains design’s role in producing it.
That is a different discipline for a design leader to build than the one required to produce a compelling ROI slide. It asks for earlier involvement, better relationships with product and engineering leadership, and a willingness to be judged by outcomes that are not exclusively design’s to claim.
There is a further benefit to that shift. When design’s influence shows up inside a decision that reduced risk, avoided wasted investment or moved a commercial number, it does not need to be defended after the fact.
The value is embedded in the outcome, rather than something a design leader has to reconstruct and justify later in a retrospective, a slide deck, or an annual review.
That reframing gives you a structural test for evaluating a design leader, whether you are hiring one or reviewing someone already in the role. Ask:
- Is design consulted before a build decision is finalised, or told about it after the fact?
- Does the design leader sit in the same planning conversations as product and engineering leadership, or a separate one that reports up later?
- Can they name a specific product, engineering or commercial decision that went differently, and for the better, because design was involved before it was locked in?
If they cannot answer that last question with a real example, that tells you more about how design is positioned in your organisation than any dashboard would.
Stop building a standalone case for design
A design-only dashboard, a design-specific KPI, a slide built to justify why design deserves more say in decisions all come from a reasonable instinct. Nobody wants to be brought into decisions after they are already made, and building a case to be let in earlier feels like the fix.
The trouble is that a separate case for design’s value treats design as a function outside the core business, one that must prove itself worthy of inclusion. Product and engineering rarely have to run that kind of campaign.
They are assumed to be inside the room because the decisions being made are theirs to shape.
That difference in assumption matters more than it sounds. A function that has to campaign for a seat is treated as optional until it proves otherwise, while a function assumed to belong in the room does not carry that burden into every conversation.
If design keeps building its own business case in isolation from product and engineering’s decisions, it keeps confirming the very framing it is trying to escape. The stronger move, and the one raised at the Round Table, is to stop trying to prove design’s standalone value at all.
That does not mean design stops measuring anything. It means the measurement moves away from design-only dashboards and toward the same commercial and product metrics product and engineering are already judged against, with design’s contribution visible inside them rather than alongside them.
Apply this in your next hiring or performance conversation
This is where it becomes a hiring question rather than an abstract one. How you evaluate a design leader, and what you expect them to prove early in the role, changes depending on which of these two positions you hold.
If you are still asking a design leader to build the strongest possible standalone case for design’s value, you are asking them to solve the wrong problem. You are pushing them toward a slide deck and a metric that lives in a design silo.
That pulls them away from the harder, more useful work of getting embedded in decisions before those decisions are locked in.
Are you hiring someone to defend design’s existence, or someone whose presence changes what gets built and how well it performs?
Stop asking a design leader candidate, or someone already in the role, to justify design’s value in isolation. Use the questions above instead, and pay closest attention to whether they can point to one specific decision that went differently because they were in the room early.
Ready to talk about your next design hire? Get in touch.
Liam
Design, Creative & Research Recruitment
Last updated: September 2026
