Background

As Product Designers nowadays, we realized that we couldn’t only depend on our crafting skills to increase our value. It was different from what it used to be 3–5 years ago when fewer UI/UX designers and anyone who could use Photoshop, Sketch, or Figma worked in this tech industry. Today, We need to increase our value by understanding that this all-tech industry isn’t only about solving user problems. But, it more focusing on how our beloved stakeholders can gain more revenue from our tech organization.

Problems

The first problem is, that most designers still only focus on frameworks like design thinking, design sprint, etc. Are you still thinking that we must use the framework or methodology during our design process? In my opinion, that’s the issue. In reality, we can’t always use those principles in every condition.

If we use the ideal design thinking process, normally it will take more time to provide the final design, until we can deliver it to the dev team. Or if we want to use design sprint for 5 days, all people in the team always have tasks to do, it will be difficult to arrange the schedule. So, in reality, we often get problems in implementing these methods.

Aside from methodology, as designers, we often too focus on the visual stuff. Without understanding better about how this beautiful visual design could help the organization to survive.

So do you understand the issue here? as a designer, we often ignore the business stuff. We are too focused on our own work, without knowing how all these designs could help the company to survive.

Solution

It’s similar to how we think we will solve the user problem. We just need to shift the paradigms that what we solve is mainly not only the user problem but also our stakeholder problems.

What are the stakeholder problems? Normally it’s all related to valuation or revenue. And these goals normally will be manifested as OKR or KPI. And from those OKRs will be implemented as feature initiatives, and then become a backlog.

So, as a designer, you need to understand that every backlog is related to a certain goal. And most of the time it will be related to money (revenue/GMV). If you understand these roots, you can explore solutions that are related to the OKR.

For Example,

You are working in an e-commerce tech company. The main OKR is Revenue and GMV. Are there any other metrics that could be related that you could explore?

You could explore increasing the conversion rate or decreasing the average time during the checkout process.

Why? When the number of users who made the checkout process is increasing, it will directly affect the number of GMV and revenue.

And how about decreasing the average time? The faster the user makes transactions, it is also faster for the company to get revenue.

So after understanding the metrics scope, you will be able to explore a better design exploration that will be directly related to the main OKR, and of course, if you support the company to get better revenue, its chance of survival will be increased.

Conclusion

How to understand these business points of view about OKRs and metrics? Be a good mate with our beloved Product Manager. Always ask them during stakeholder interviews or backlog grooming, so you will understand the scope of your design, and how you could make a good design solution to support the metrics.

Thank you.