Master Thesis: defining the value argument for design
Throughline
Design leaders act as translators who, within their given organizational context, continually convert design efforts into credible value claims and then into persuasive practices that secure and sustain design’s legitimacy over time.
This takes place through three aspects of design advocacy:
Organizational context
In this chapter, I explain the context of advocacy: why it happens in the first place, and within what circumstances.
Advocacy begins with power geometry. Where design sits (embedded vs. centralized; close vs. distant from decision forums) determines which arguments are audible. Resourcing, leadership turnover, and literacy asymmetries create friction that advocacy must keep in mind and absorb.
Practically, leaders first perform their own organizational ethnography: who owns the budget, who decides who gets to work and who doesn’t. The early goal is to locate leverage such as supporters, tackle burning issues, and identify points design can use later.
Context often becomes input: change it and the advocacy problem changes.
Organizational Position of Design
- Design’s structural placement conditions advocacy.
- Centralized teams offer coherence and scale but risk isolation.
- Embedded models gain proximity yet can fragment.
- Seniority and executive access vary (often no Chief Design Officer), shaping whether design enters strategy or remains delivery-focused.
- Under-resourcing (e.g., one designer to dozens of developers) can further marginalize influence.
Nature of Advocacy Work
- Advocacy appears as everyday work that expands design from execution toward upstream problem framing.
- Leaders mature the function amid uneven literacy, reframing design from “making things pretty” to stewarding customer knowledge and improving decisions.
- The purpose of advocacy is proactive role-making: moving design upstream while building organizational understanding of its broader scope.
Internal Stakeholders and Audiences
- Audiences include executives, peer leads, and middle managers with diverse priors.
- At board level, finance/metrics often dominate; middle management may favor copying competitors or skipping research.
- Literacy varies by department, shaping receptivity.
- Positive exposure to good design creates allies; absence of exposure sustains stereotypes.
Constraints and Enablers
- Barriers include legacy hierarchies, siloed structures, mindset inertia, and scarce resources.
- Enablers include executive sponsorship, rising design literacy, and process changes that integrate design.
- Success stories tied to KPIs build legitimacy.
- Over time, these forces can elevate design’s standing and open earlier involvement.
Having understood some of the why and in what context design advocacy happens, we turn to the core value arguments which design leaders use.
Advocacy content
The “what” of advocacy is a portfolio of lenses that can be recombined: customer connection, integration/efficiency, differentiation/quality, and strategic lensing.
The customer is most often at the center of the argument. Integration follows, promising tighter delivery loops, efficiency and less re-work.
In low-literacy pockets, design is often framed as a way to differentiate the product from other companies, and as design gets closer to strategic level influence, the same work can also be framed as option creation and foresight.
In this chapter, I will highlight some things you mentioned, you can comment on those as well.
Design as Connection to Customer
- Design positions itself as the organization’s voice of the customer.
- Research, journey maps, and direct user exposure correct internal bias and de-risk bets.
- Leaders gain confidence they are doing the right thing for customers and the business.
Design as Integrator and Efficiency Enabler
- Design acts as the glue bridging silos and aligning product, engineering, and business.
- Early testing and prototyping prevent rework, saving time and money.
- The claim resonates with stakeholders focused on speed, ROI, and execution risk.
Design as Differentiator and Quality Standard
- Design elevates experience quality and brand trust when features converge.
- Consistency in high quality contributes to market-relevant outcomes.
- Some contexts avoid this lens when markets are less competitive, companies are more mature, or to avoid reducing design to aesthetics.
Design as Strategic Lens and Vision Caster
- With credibility, design contributes to upstream framing and futures work.
- Rapid prototyping informs strategy and option creation.
- This typically happens in more mature contexts after prior wins earn strategic access.
The following aspects help support the four core lenses, but are cited less often:
Consistency through Design Systems
Shared standards and systems create coherence at scale, reduce ambiguity, and compound trust over time - often becoming a subtle, durable differentiator.
Culture Change and Evangelism
Design talks, internal cases, and applying design to internal processes keep practices from regressing amid turnover and legacy habits.
Creativity as a Sustaining Resource
Some leaders emphasize designers’ unique capacity to envision non-obvious possibilities, tying design to innovation.
Communication tactics
Persuasion rests on executional communication: “the how” of advocacy.
Leaders prefer to “show, not tell”, using artifacts/prototypes and translating design concepts into business language (KPIs, ROI, efficiency), emphasizing metrics and external legitimacy (data and benchmarks).
They also highlight participation and small wins, using sustained repetition (cadence, showcases, allies) to help bring design forward.
These practices convert abstract claims into evidence stakeholders recognize, allowing credibility to accumulate across layers of the organization.
Tangible Demonstration: “Show, Don’t Tell”
- Persuasion starts with visible results: small demos, quick examples, and vision designs.
- Concrete artifacts shift conversations from opinion to evidence.
- Demonstrations accelerate influence.
Prototypes and Artifacts
- Mock-ups, journey maps, and customer videos serve as shared references.
- They align teams, reduce ambiguity, and de-risk investment.
- Even rough models invite concrete feedback and validation.
Translating Design into Business
- Leaders mirror stakeholders’ vocabulary: revenue, efficiency, risk, ROI.
- Avoid design jargon; connect outcomes to existing metrics and decision horizons.
Metrics and External Legitimacy
- Arguments are substantiated with quantitative indicators and benchmarks.
- Numbers are essential for attention, prioritization, and resource decisions.
Participation and Small Wins
- Co-testing, workshops, and pilots invite skeptics into the process.
- Hands-on exposure builds empathy and produces incremental wins that travel.
Sustained Advocacy and Repetition
- Credibility compounds through cadence: repeating messages and showcasing outcomes.
- Cultivating ambassadors across levels keeps design visible and normalizes practices.
Synthesis
For design leaders, advocacy is a system with three responsibilities.
First, diagnose context continuously: track where decisions are made, which metrics matter this quarter, and where literacy is changing.
Second, allocate value lenses deliberately: pick the lens that serves the current forum’s incentives, and support it with the minimum viable evidence stack (demo → user proof → metric).
Third, let the wins leave a trail. Each successful demo, small talk or conversation helps reinforce that design really does bring value. And over time, these traces accumulate: standards cohere, numbers reappear in reviews, stories are retold by non-designers, and the the organization sometimes shifts.
In that narrative, design stops arguing for its place because the place is already woven into how the company remembers, measures, and decides.