How a High-Performing Experience Design Team Can Drive Massive ROI for High-Growth Companies
High-growth companies are under pressure to scale quickly while still delivering exceptional experiences that keep users coming back. That requires an investment in experience design.
But to get the best returns out of that investment, you need a strategically savvy design team that understands how to align design efforts with business goals.
When experience design teams move beyond simply crafting “nice-to-have” visuals and instead focus on meaningful, ROI-generating solutions, the results can be transformative.
Let’s explore how a high-performing experience design team can drive substantial returns for high-growth organizations and what characteristics make these teams stand out.
The Strategic Value of Experience Design
High-growth companies often face unique challenges: fast-paced development cycles, rapidly changing market demands, and the constant need to stay ahead of competitors.
In this environment, a well-aligned experience design team does more than refine the look and feel of a product – it acts as a strategic partner in crafting a well-rounded experience that customers love.
High-Growth Companies Align Design with Business Metric
Great experience design teams don’t just improve aesthetics or achieve usability goals. They measure their success ultimately by the key business metrics they’re able to impact.
To really deliver strategic value, experience design needs to move the needle on core metrics like user retention, conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and lifetime value.
This means that experience design teams need a seat at the table when the company’s growth strategy and objectives are being discussed. This helps them deliver holistic designs that not only resonate with users and improve usability, but speak to the core factors that drive real business results.
High-Growth Companies Use Data-Driven Decision Making
An often overlooked benefit of a high-performing experience design team is the amount and quality of user data they gather and analyze.
Data on user behavior not only informs design decisions, buthigh-qualoty user research through A/B testing, user interviews, and data analytics can help inform strategic business decisions.
High-quality user data helps business leaders decide how to pivot their product or service and identify the new ideas and features that have a good chance of driving the best results.
Rather than relying solely on gut feelings, intuition, or past experience, data helps ground decisions in observable user behavior.
Key Traits of High-Performing Experience Design Teams
While there are many ways for an experience design team to achieve positive results, the highest performing teams tend to exhibit several common traits.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Top-performing experience design teams don’t work in isolation. Instead, they maintain open channels of communication with product management, development, marketing, and customer support.
By staying closely tied to the evolving needs and specific constraints of other teams, they can create designs that are not only user-friendly but also technically feasible and easy to sell to customers and users.
Agility and Adaptability
The fast pace of high-growth organizations demands an agile approach. High-performing experience design teams embrace agile principles, enabling them to change gears quickly and respond directly to new data or customer feedback in real time.
It’s important to move fast, but never at the cost of quality. The best design teams have direct experience creating high-impact, user-centered designs that adapt with the constantly evolving needs and goals of the business.
A Focus on Scalability
High-growth companies need scalable design systems. Rather than creating one-off solutions, a top experience design team builds scalable design frameworks.
This streamlines the development process, supports a consistent brand identity, enhances the overall look and feel of products and services, and reduces overhead by making future product iterations more efficient and effective.
How High-Performing Experience Design Teams Drive ROI
Whatever the projected growth potential of your company, a high-performing experience design team can add to or accelerate that growth with every dollar it saves or generates.
Here are just some of the critical metrics that a high-quality design team can directly impact to unlock immense ROI for your company.
Increased Conversion Rates
By focusing attention on streamlined user journeys, intuitive navigation, and visually compelling interfaces, experience design teams can drastically improve conversion rates.
When users enjoy frictionless experiences that make intuitive sense, they’re more likely to take the actions that drive business results, such as making purchases, signing up for new features or marketing promos, and completing registrations.
Reduced Churn and Enhanced Retention
One of the biggest challenges that high-growth companies wrestle with is how to reduce user and customer churn. With a strategically-aligned experience design team, every aspect of the user experience is crafted with user retention in mind.
High-performing experience design teams prioritize consistent experiences that make users feel comfortable with the interface and confident in your product or service. This can significantly decrease the likelihood they’ll switch to your competitors.
Lower Support and Development Costs
A well-designed product reduces the need for extensive customer support. When users can find what they need easily and intuitively, they’re less likely to encounter issues that require assistance from you. This results in significant cost savings in support operations.
Plus, by building scalable design systems around what you learn about common customer needs and pain points, a great design team can enable faster development cycles, reducing the time and cost associated with future updates or redesigns.
Amplified Customer Loyalty and Advocacy
High-performing experience design teams know how to build experiences that resonate with customers on an emotional level, fostering loyalty and encouraging advocacy.
Nobody is more likely to recommend your product to others than a satisfied customer. Organic growth through word-of-mouth referrals is like rocket fuel for any high-growth business.
How to Build a High-Performing Experience Design Team
For organizations looking to harness the full potential of experience design, building and nurturing a high-performing team is essential.
But doing so from scratch can be a significant investment. Not only do you have to find and train top talent, but you have to plan for some amount of churn as you take the time to get the team on the same page with your business goals.
High-performing experience design teams aren’t grown overnight. They’re cultivated and nurtured over time as they experience the highs and lows and challenges and successes of a variety of projects and initiatives.
Here’s what it takes to build a high-performing experience design team from the ground up.
Investment in Talent with Diverse Skill Sets
A high-performing experience design team is composed of talented specialists with a mix of UX research, UI design, content strategy, and interaction design expertise.
It’s tempting to look for unicorns who can do a little bit of everything, or to settle for expertise in one area like design, while letting other areas like UX research fall by the wayside. It’s also tempting to hire several average designers when one great designer could be just as effective.
That’s where most companies go wrong. You need a talented team with a diverse set of skills and expertise to really get the greatest ROI possible. A diversity of perspectives, abilities, and experiences allows your team to tackle the most complex challenges and bring a holistic perspective to the user experience.
A Culture of Continuous Learning
High-growth environments require teams that stay on the cutting edge of industry trends, tools, and techniques.
It’s crucial to invest in ongoing education, workshops, and conferences to help your design team stay ahead of the curve, ready to implement the latest best practices that can drive business value and keep you a step or more ahead of the competition.
Collaboration and Clear Communication
Strong communication is at the heart of any successful experience design team (and, for that matter, any high-growth business).
Encourage regular check-ins, cross-functional brainstorming sessions, and feedback loops to ensure that design ideas align with both the company’s strategic goals and user needs.
Design your org chart to break down silos and ensure your design team can reach into every part of the business so it can learn how to truly optimize the customer and user experience.
Iterative Testing and Data-Driven Design
High-performing teams are not afraid to test, fail, and try again. Emphasize an iterative design process grounded in data, with frequent usability tests and user feedback to continually refine and optimize the experience.
Research is often the first place businesses look to cut down on their design efforts. The thinking is that lessons and insights will rise to the surface naturally over time. That’s a false assumption.
User research and data analysis are increasingly becoming competitive advantages. They help you avoid traps that can suck design and development time and resources and focus your efforts on the specific improvements that deliver the highest potential value and opportunity for success.
How Real-World High-Growth Companies Are Getting More ROI from Experience Design
Companies like Airbnb, Spotify, and Slack have seen significant growth due to their commitment to user experience design. Their experience design teams have played a crucial role in developing products that users not only need but also enjoy using.
But these kinds of results are not limited to the biggest, most well-known companies. We’ve helped businesses of all sizes across a variety of industries gain real results by addressing and fixing their deepest core problems.
Drawbackwards helped Matrix Medical Systems save $10 million in software development costs by cutting through the clutter to get to the right solution faster than they were able to manage on their own. Instead of continuing to pay for more developers to try to fix their usability problems over time, our team’s combination of diverse talents, skills and expertise solved their deepest problems in one concentrated effort.
We also boosted by 4x the speed at which an aging legacy CRM software product was able to innovate. Our Drawbackwards team jumped right in, rolled up our sleeves, and designed new innovative solutions so the client team could be freed up to handle their own day-to-day business needs.
That’s the power of a great experience design team. They help you get to the right solution faster than you often can on your own, saving money and creating value for a fraction of the time and resources.
Let Us Be Your High-Performing Experience Design Team
A high-performing experience design team is one of the most strategic assets a high-growth organization can invest in. By aligning with business goals, utilizing data-driven design practices, and fostering a culture of agility and collaboration, a great design team can help you deliver exceptional user experiences that drive measurable financial results.
Great experience design teams don’t just grow on trees. We’ve spent more than 20 years growing ours from the ground up. Yes, you could go out and start hiring and cultivating your own talented designers, developers, researchers, content strategists, and product managers. Or, you could save yourself a ton of money and drastically accelerate your time-to-market and path to product success by leveraging Drawbackwards’ decades of experience.
In an environment where user expectations are constantly evolving, high-growth organizations that prioritize experience design not only stand out but thrive. Good user experience can be at minimum a 1-2x multiplier of business results.
Investing in a top-tier experience design team isn’t just about enhancing the look and feel of a product; it’s about creating lasting, scalable growth and delivering returns that keep your business on track with its high-growth trajectory.
Let’s talk about how we can become your high-performing experience design team and help you solve your biggest UX problems fast.