Design Strategy
What is Design Strategy? (Or is is Strategic Design? I can’t keep track.)
Is it just the plan a design leader puts into place for their own organization? A plan for resources and initiatives? Or is it something more? Is is a stake in the ground meant to claim design’s territory in the corporate landscape? Should a Design Strategy support the overarching business objectives of the company? Or should it support the customer? Or the planet?
I would argue that to be effective any individual team’s strategy must be aligned to the overall company strategy. And that in order to be taken seriously, it needs to put some skin in the game and it needs to include metrics of accountability. It also needs to define a set of distinct, top-line contributions to the company’s success, and avoid framing its value as a supporting player in the contributions of other teams. In other words an effective strategy needs to shoulder it share of the burden of success.
Regardless of whether your CEO views your team as a top-line strategic imperative or not, acting in good faith that Design does in fact contribute to the overall business success, and tracking your design organization’s contribution as such, will give you the means and material to have that conversation.
But before I dive in any future, I want to preface this article by saying upfront that some of the material used in this article was generated from ChatGPT either directly or buy it summarizing content sourced from subject matter experts and combining it with its own generated results. And that specifically the descriptions of the various team strategies are taken directly from ChatGPT. This was done to demonstrate a key point which will be discussed in the article.
Strategy of Strategies
Before we get into Design Strategy, I want to take a step back, and understand the overarching guidance that comes from the Business Strategy.
A Business Strategy transforms an organization’s objectives and goals into an actionable plan, aligning the various parts of the organization, and defining what success will look like for the collective company. Based on research I have done, a Business Strategy is described as:
a long-term plan that outlines how a company will achieve its goals and maintain a competitive edge. It's a roadmap that guides resource allocation, decision-making, and actions to achieve specific objectives, ultimately leading to sustainable growth and competitive advantage.
With that in mind, I went on and pulled together definitions of Marketing, Technology, Product, and Design strategies. I used the framework of searches, subject matter experts, and AI tools to draft these descriptions. Let’s start with the Marketing.
Marketing Strategy
Combining the various results, a Marketing Strategy is described as:
a comprehensive plan for how a company will attract, engage, and convert target audiences to drive demand and support business growth. It defines the company’s positioning, messaging, and go-to-market approach, including which channels to use, how to reach key customer segments, and how to differentiate from competitors. The strategy aligns marketing efforts with business objectives, ensuring that campaigns, content, and programs generate awareness, build brand equity, and support sales outcomes.
That definition is very actionable, and provides multiple pathways toward achieving the business objectives that are both clear and measurable. It is interesting to me as a product person that this definition leaves out specifics about any products or services, and instead focuses on creating narratives about the company and its offerings in order to connect with the target customers. This approach assumes that products and services are impermanent, but that the company and its brand are the long-term assets to be focused on.
Technology Strategy
Taking the same approach, a Technology Strategy is described as:
a detailed plan for how a company will leverage technology to achieve business objectives, drive innovation, and maintain a competitive edge. It serves as a roadmap that defines which technologies to invest in, how they align with strategic goals, and how they will be implemented, governed, and maintained over time. The strategy also addresses the long-term vision for technology’s role in the business, including the tools, talent, partnerships, and risk management practices needed to ensure technology creates sustained value and supports future growth.
Again very actionable and constrained, and again provides for clear metrics to be tracked. This description is purely about technology, regardless of whether that is technology in the product or as infrastructure for operating the business. Like the Marketing Strategy, this definition is not focused on the products themselves but rather on the organization’s use of technology to achieve business goals. This approach assumes that technology like brand is more foundational to the company and its success.
Product Strategy
The resulting description for a Product Strategy is:
a comprehensive plan that guides the development, delivery, and evolution of products in alignment with business goals and market needs. It defines the “why” behind the product by identifying target markets, key customer problems, and the unique value propositions the product will deliver. The strategy includes a clear product vision and roadmap, and informs decisions around pricing, positioning, and prioritization. It ensures that the product creates real customer value, supports strategic objectives, and continuously improves through feedback and iteration.
Again, clearly actionable. And unmistakably focused on the products the organization is producing. This description is the first to introduce idea that these three strategies work in combination; While there is no description of in interacting with technology per se, it does reference how product informs positioning, which is key part of the marketing strategy.
All three of these descriptions make it clear that in practice strategies are a process for ensuring value through measurement and metrics. And more importantly that when the value of the messaging, technology or product diminishes, they will be replaced.
Design Strategy
Now this is where things begin to fall apart… Again using the same approach the resulting description of a Design Strategy is:
a plan for how design will be used to create meaningful customer experiences, strengthen brand identity, and support business objectives. It defines how design contributes to solving user problems, differentiating the product, and ensuring consistency across touchpoints. It also guides how design teams are structured, how they collaborate with other functions, and how design quality is measured and maintained over time.
Let’s be honest: this is more than a little disappointing.
How design will be used - that pretty much sums it up, right? Shouldn’t it be “How design will drive, create, deliver?”
Contributes to solving user problems? What identifying the problems to begin with? Prioritizing them?
Meaningful experiences? By what standard? To what end? Meaningful to whom?
Consistency? Consistent to what? For what reason?
Compared to the other three descriptions there is a clearly no skin in the game. There is nothing that suggests design has any accountability for outcomes such revenue, growth, even retention. Half this description of Design Strategy is about supporting other teams.
But let’s take a step back… Remember at the beginning of this post I called out that the descriptions of the five strategies (business, marketing, tech, product, and design) are pulled directly from ChatGPT. This was done to make a key point. Its important to understand that the genAI tools like search engines, simply aggregate what already exists in the world. They don’t create new ideas; They use their language models to summarize and rephrase content based on their LLMs. While they can edit for things like brevity or tone, they don’t create new content. Which means, dear readers, that this description of a design strategy is based on a collective model of what the design community and others have been publishing about Design Strategy. For too long people—including our own thought-leaders, have been selling design short. Positioning design as a service to be used, focused on consistency over value creation, resulting in the generation of some weak-ass descriptions of design’s strategic value.
Read that paragraph again. This is what we are doing to ourselves.
To position Design as a peer—rather than a secondary support function—to Product and Technology, design needs to clearly and consistently articulate its contribution to business outcomes, not just its executional craft.
Design must demonstrate leadership in:
Defining the problem space, not just solving it—surfacing insights that influence product vision.
Shaping the user customer experience end-to-end, not just the UI.
Driving innovation by exploring possibilities beyond the backlog—what should be built to drive growth not just what’s already scoped.
Reducing risk before code is committed (prototyping & validation) and by creating designs that customers want to want.
Building brand equity and differentiation through experience, not just messaging.
Building a Design Strategy with intention
To do that we need to look at how design can partner with the other disciplines. To find its own space and approach for delivering value and helping organizations achieve their objectives. Specifically let’s understand the connections and gaps between the Marketing, Technology, and Product Strategies with Design’s Strategy.
Design Strategy as the Experience Backbone of Marketing Strategy
Design Strategy and Marketing Strategy share many things in common, especially the desire to understand the customers and to create differentiated, compelling experiences, starting with the aspirations described in the positioning through the experience of actually using the product. Here is how they tie together:
Shared Focus on Customer Insight & Differentiation:
Marketing Strategy identifies who to reach, what to say, and where to show up.
Design Strategy ensures that how & what of the product’s design embodies the brand attributes in distinctive, consistent, and emotionally resonant ways—across every touchpoint.
Both groups need to collaborate to ensure the needs of the various customer personas (Buyer, Influencer, User, etc.) are addressed in the messaging and product design.
Bridging Positioning and Experience:
Marketing may define the brand’s positioning and promise—but design brings it to life through the product design, user experience, tone, trust, and storytelling that manifests through the use of the product.
Marketing and Design can effectively collaborate on how features are highlighted and positioned to ensure the strongest differentiations and clear value propositions to the different personas.
Design can support Marketing by new innovations that extend and reinforce brand equity.
Driving Engagement and Conversion:
Marketing generates awareness and interest; design shapes the experience that moves people to act—through clarity, usability, and emotional engagement.
Supporting Feedback Loops:
Design teams often uncover real-time behavioral insights from interaction patterns and usability testing that feed back into segmentation, messaging, and campaign optimization.
Design Strategy + Technology Strategy = Holistic Innovation
Design strategy and technology strategy are closely intertwined—each has distinct set of skills and tools that play complementary roles in driving business success. A strong design strategy ensures that a technology strategy doesn't just deliver capability—it delivers relevance, clarity, and human impact. Here's how they can tie together:
Shared Purpose:
Both strategies aim to achieve business objectives, drive innovation, and create long-term value. They both focus on the what and how but for two different reasons. Technology Strategy focuses on what technology(s) to use and how to build it. Design Strategy focuses on what the product does, and how people will use it.
Alignment on Value Creation:
Design strategy ensures that technology solutions are user-centered, intuitive, and aligned with customer needs and brand vision.
Technology strategy ensures that those solutions are technically feasible, scalable, and aligned with the business’s infrastructure and growth plans.
From Vision to Execution:
A technology strategy sets the roadmap for infrastructure, platforms, tools, and governance.
A design strategy sets the roadmap for experiences, workflows, and interactions that make those tools and platforms meaningful (and usable) for the customer.
Driving Differentiation and Adoption:
Design Strategy helps differentiate a business by creating compelling product designs and user experiences.
Technology Strategy ensures those experiences are delivered reliably and securely at scale.
When launching a new AI-powered feature:
The Technology Strategy determines the model, data architecture, deployment plan, and compliance controls.
The Design Strategy defines the user journey, the experience, how trust is built, and how the AI output is explained and actioned.
Design Strategy + Product Strategy = Executional Engine
Design strategy brings the Product Strategy to life by ensuring that the product not only solves the right problems, but does so in a way that is usable, desirable, and differentiating. It translates strategic intent into human-centered execution. Design Strategy is a critical enabler of Product Strategy, that relationship frequently results in rapid iterations to both team’s strategies as they cycle through the “make to think; think to make” process. Here is how they tie together:
Focus on the “How” and “For Whom”:
As with Design and Technology, both Product and Design seek to deliver customer value and business growth. To that end they both focus on the what, why and for whom. Product Strategy focus on what will deliver revenue, why it valuable for whom. Design Strategy again focuses on what the product is, why people are using it, and who they are in terms of their relationship to the product (i.e. Buy, Influencer, User, Support, etc.) Together Design and Product are able to deliver meaningful, useful/usable, and differentiated products.
User-Centered Differentiation:
Product strategy may define the unique value proposition, but design strategy ensures that value is expressed clearly and felt by the user—through their on-boarding, experience, and overall product journey.
Together they translate the market insights and customer problems into intuitive product flows, visuals, and feedback mechanisms.
Informs Roadmap and Prioritization:
A good Design Strategy reveals friction points, unmet needs, and opportunity areas that can influence product prioritization and roadmap evolution.
It also complements data and business cases with qualitative insights that inform feature design and sequencing.
Continuous Feedback and Iteration:
Design Strategy de-risks development through iterative prototyping and validation prior to development, ensuring that development decisions are informed by customer and analyst feedback before investing expensive develop costs—this directly supports the product strategy’s feedback loop.
Proposed Design Strategy
We need to take back the narrative about design and how we are seen by our peers and colleagues. We know design can and should play a larger role in the supporting our company’s business strategies.I propose a new description Design Strategy along the lines of:
a comprehensive plan for how the company will create intuitive, accessible, and differentiated solutions to support business growth through adoption and engagement. It guides execution across all product teams to create a holistic experience, ensuring that what gets built is cohesive, compelling, scalable, and—when taken in aggregate—delivers a greater market advantage. The strategy also defines the long-term vision for the company’s future products, including the technological and organizational investments needed to achieve it. The Design Strategy aligns customer insights, technologies, and business goals to create products that solve the right problems, at the right time, delivering customer value while simultaneously reducing risk.
Each organization is unique. As such your Design Strategy needs to be tailored to your company’s objectives, culture, organizational model, and to you—as the leader, and to your team’s capacity and capabilities. But as a profession at a higher level we should align around a common point of view of how Design Strategies in general should be frame. How as a profession we deliver value. Like our peers we need to have a common, clearly actionable description of a strategy that is unmistakably focused on design and provides multiple ways for us to creating value. One that places Design as a peer to Marketing, Technology, and Product in supporting the business objectives and goals.
Final Thoughts
Design should be the CEO’s sidekick. Design should be the CEO’s secret weapon for creating a vision that sticks, that resonates, that inspires. CEO’s should have a designer as a collaborator, to challenge them, push them, and to make both their aspirations and anxieties tangible.
To do that, every design leader needs to take responsibility for how they position design as a strategic value-add, not just for themselves and their team, but for the profession. We all need to reframe design as being not only capable of delivering customer value, growth, and revenue but shouldering the responsibility to do so.
