How Design-Led Companies Win - and Everyone Else Plays Catch-Up

Design isn’t about shipping prettier UIs. It’s about reorienting the business around experience.

Most companies claim that design matters, but unfortunately, few act like it. We can see it in the products they ship and those we use every day. As a product person, it is hard to engage with any subpar user experience and not feel frustration, annoyance, or even anger. (It drives my wife crazy.)

What I learned at Slack is that design isn’t the cherry on top or the final touch of polish. It’s the organizational principle and architecture at the heart of building products that define a category.

Design is not just a visual layer, but a way of thinking that forces clarity, empathy, and rigor across every function. When it’s missing, even the best strategy becomes vulnerable, and growth flattens. I saw this at Envoy, where five years of COVID-driven feature-factory production had stalled innovation and flattened growth.

This post isn’t about cleaner lines or sleeker buttons. It’s about treating design like a central nervous system, not a coat of paint. You’ll have to rewire habits, politics, and sometimes your own instincts. But the payoff isn’t aesthetic. It’s a compounding strategic advantage and sustainable growth.

💸 Why Do This?

What I'll walk you through below is a lot of work. And it’s hard work. So why invest this energy when you’ve got so much to do? So much to build. Simply put, it’s the return on investment. But it’s hidden or hard to see ROI that is the issue.

The greatest challenge to investing in design and user experience is the often indirect connection between it and revenue.

Add a feature a customer is asking for, and the account executive will tell you they can close a contract. This is alluring. It is also the genesis of feature-factory companies that peak and then plateau.

Design-led companies aren’t just building better products; they’re building bigger businesses.

Figma grew from zero to over $700 million in ARR within seven years, capturing more than 75 percent of the UI design market along the way.

Notion grew to about $300 million in revenue by 2024, and crossed the 100 million user mark in record time.

Even incumbents have proven the case. Airbnb, founded by a designer, has prioritized experience from the start. In 2024, it recently posted $11 billion in revenue.

These companies don’t treat design as polish. They treat it as infrastructure.

How do you do this? Read on.

✅ Build Design-First Teams

Post-Outlook and Slack, at every company I played a role at, this was the hardest shift to make. Orient your product development process to involve design from the start.

PMs need to think in terms of flows and not feature lists. Step back from the screen and understand the context of the user. What is their journey and what is the journey of their company? Where does your product fit in that journey?

Engineers need to understand that UX debt is real debt. It could be the most important debt for the longevity of the business. This is often the hardest concept to convince engineers to adopt. For them to make a change to a product that ultimately will “do the same thing” is often counterintuitive and not seen as “productive”. This is especially the case if you’re not getting support tickets or bug reports.

🛠️ Invest in Design Infrastructure

Invest time and resources into the tooling of the design team. This will pay dividends going forward. If you do everything else right, design will become your bottleneck to velocity. Design infrastructure introduces design scale.

Provide your design team with the best and latest tools. The tools designers use need to inspire and motivate. They want to learn from the best, and they can do that by using the best tools.

This means deploying Slack, not Teams. Notion, not Confluence. Asana, not Jira. Yes, you’ll need to figure out how to build a process that does not pool or isolate data across your process. But this isn’t hard. It’s just work.

Create and maintain a design system. This sounds basic, but so few companies do this. It is treated as a nice-to-have or something that is built over time on the side. This is a strategic mistake that will cost you in velocity moving forward.

Prioritize consistency and accessibility. I continue to hear from companies complaining that they have to invest in accessibility. Not only is that questionable from an ethical perspective, it’s short-sighted (excuse the pun) strategically.

In the Outlook Mobile team, we were initially forced to learn about accessibility. As an engineering-heavy team, it was hard for folks to invest in changes that would result in a product that would essentially “do the same thing” (see above).

However, through a deeply experiential approach to get the whole team to understand what using a product is like to use when you’re short-sighted or colorblind increased our collective empathy. This resulted in us building a much better product for those without accessibility challenges.

Last, but not least, you must budget for design research and iteration. It takes time for us to step out of our own world and get to understand that of people who are completely different to ourselves.

Different cultures, different languages, different challenges and constraints. It takes investment to gather and embody this learning. But it will pay dividends going forward.

📊 Measure What Matters

Move past NPS. CEOs pay way too much attention to this metric. Yes, it’s a useful tool to get a baseline. But it is incredibly laggy, rarely actionable, and takes a long time to move. There is a better way.

Instrument your product and within the user journey(s), calculate the time to first value. How long does it take for a new user to get value out of your product? What is the action that signifies that achievement?

Map key workflows and measure the percentage of them that are completed. For those that don’t complete, ask yourself and users - “Why did the user start that workflow?”, and then “why did they abandon?”. There is no point making it easier for a user to accomplish a goal they didn’t actually have.

Measure the rate of issues coming into customer support. Their severity and the time it takes to address the issues.

Before we had any instrumentation within Outlook Mobile, we measured the number of 1-star reviews we were getting on the app stores (a lot!!). We categorized them (manually!!) and then addressed the top ranking ones in every week-long sprint. This is what got us from a 2.2 star app to a 4.7 star app and winning the Verge’s best email product on the market in 2017.

🧭 Elevate Design Org-Wide

Design isn’t a service function waiting for instructions to be cascaded down via PMs. It needs a seat at the strategy table. Not only do we get incredible user-centric insights into discussions, but we get visualizations of the company and product vision that motivate and inspire. More importantly, we elevate design as a core company value and cultural touchstone. Everyone becomes a product person.

In practical terms, design should have a strong influence on roadmaps. And not just polish them and help with decks and mockups.

Inform and educate executives across the organization how design drives conversion, retention, and expansion. These conversations bring the subjective down to the objective and practical.

Lastly, work with your marketing team to help sales enablement prepare the sales organization to sell the experience. Not just the features. Move away from check-box comparison tables to deeper value and strategic problem solving.

As a product leader, you will look at all of the above advise and see a tremendous amount of work to be done. None of these are events. It is a process. Get buy-in from your stakeholders and treat the transformation as you would a product roadmap or strategy.

Your customers, users, and your business will thank you for it!