Is your Design Team proving its value in 2025? 

In 2024, the design industry faced a confluence of challenges that disrupted its trajectory and shook its reputation to the core. Layoffs swept across major internal Design Teams, with high-profile exits being reported across consumer technology, banking, and finance sectors. All this upheaval highlighted not only a volatile job market but also an increasing gap in stakeholder alignment, combined with a radical breakdown in invested commitment by executive leaders.

The quality of experience also suffered, both from the employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) perspective, due to shrinking budgets and overstretched Design Teams, pressured and measured against speed and volume over quality and impact. The result? An enterprise-wide erosion of trust that fractured relationships and the critical partnerships needed for growth and longevity. 

Perhaps one of the most damaging was the continued misrepresentation and misunderstanding of user experience (UX). Many seasoned design leaders cannot understand why many design communities, both internal and external to organizational structures, have defaulted to classifying UX as surface-level outputs and aesthetics rather than the psychological analysis of human behavior. This has caused the industry as a whole to go backward in its evolution, casting a shadow over the strategic value of design.

But all is not lost. As we look ahead, let’s take action to repair the missteps of 2024. By investing in the following, design leaders can achieve outstanding results in 2025.

• Prioritizing business-centric leadership.
• Embracing cross-functional innovation.
• Realigning both business and customer metrics.
• Utilizing data-informed storytelling.
• Championing the employee experience. 

Mistakes made while leading Design Teams in 2024

A Forrester report noted that financial institutions that cut design resources experienced more than a 20% decline in productivity and delivery times. One example is Citibank, which faced significant risks to innovation pipelines and competitive market share due to design workforce reductions.

Other institutions, such as American Express, have continued their strategic retention and investment in Design functions, driving measurable gains in operational efficiency, customer experience, and financial performance. Amex actually managed to reduce design silos by unifying more than 150 Designers under a centralized Enterprise Design & Research Team, enabling faster cross-functional collaboration. Amex’s design-driven customer experience contributed to a 21% year-over-year net income increase ($10.13B in 2024) and record cardholder spending ($1.55T)

Failure to align leadership with organizational goals

Many leaders faced significant challenges in effectively balancing creativity with measurable business outcomes. This difficulty often surfaced from the need to foster innovation while simultaneously ensuring that these creative efforts translate into tangible, quantifiable results for the organization. Research from EY indicated that 40% of organizations lacked clear design and experience-centric frameworks to align creative design approaches with overarching business strategies, primarily because design wasn’t recognized at an executive, business decision-making level.

Ineffective stakeholder partnerships

Design Teams have been increasingly working in isolation, often viewing non-design stakeholders as lacking the right expertise rather than as aligning as collaborative partners. This approach has led to a growing resentment among Product, Marketing, and Engineering Teams.

The situation has been exacerbated by layoffs in 2023-2024, which heightened the focus on the return on investment (ROI) from design efforts. As a result, priorities became misaligned, leading to duplicated efforts and inefficiencies that contributed to compromised quality of deliverables and burnout. 

For instance, Marketing and Product Teams sometimes developed parallel design solutions independently of each other. This lack of coordination complicated processes, created unnecessary friction, and caused significant project delays. In fact, 52% of Product Teams reported experiencing delays due to misalignment between design and development functions.

Operational consequences

• Fragmented execution: 73% of Design Teams reported demotivation due to unresolved cross-functional conflicts, directly impacting productivity.
  
• Quality erosion: Bandwidth shortages forced health care UX Teams to deprioritize Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and compliance requirements, increasing legal risks.
  
• Cost overruns: Banking institutions saw a 22% slower time-to-market realization for digital products due to design-system resistance and a lack of support and commitment from business owners. 

Lack of evolved design and digital literacy

Corporate organizations in health care, banking, and finance rely heavily on technology to drive innovation to maintain that competitive advantage. However, the success of digital transformation initiatives depends not only on technological advancements but also on executives’ ability to sponsor these efforts with a clear and compelling vision. Research suggests that there’s an alarming gap in digital, innovation, and design literacy. 59% of executives say they're actively looking for a new job with a company that's more innovative with generative AI, feeling unprepared to interpret AI-powered insights or foster the iterative mindset required for rapid growth and experimentation. 

Limited training and preparedness

According to research from Forrester, fewer than 30% of executives in 2024 received modernized digital leadership training, leaving the majority unprepared to navigate the complexities of digital transformation programs of work (Forrester Predictions 2024). This training gap is particularly pronounced in banking, and finance, where rapid technological advancements demand a nuanced understanding of digital tools, data analytics, and human-centered design.

Implications for leadership

These missteps have vast implications across multiple different industries. Executives often face challenges integrating legacy systems with new digital solutions, compounded by a lack of training in service design interoperability and data analytics (see McKinsey Healthcare Insights).

Within banking and finance, leaders who don’t balance the prioritization of compliance and security with usability and user experience are missing the opportunities to leverage new AI tools for customer engagement (see McKinsey Banking Transformation Challenges).

UX myths prevail in business decision-making

Back to demonstrating the value of design in 2025: The Five Dimensions of Influence

As organizations enter 2025, the failures of 2024 provide valuable lessons. Design leaders have a pivotal opportunity to redefine their roles and amplify their impact through improved critical thinking, disruptive and strategic innovation, driven by continuous learning and discovery.

Below are five actionable strategies for achieving outstanding results distinguished by commitment and contribution.

Develop frameworks that link design outcomes to employee experience and financial performance. Create a compelling vision supported by a shared language with executive stakeholders. Be sure to always align with a sponsored coalition consisting of data, product, technology, and marketing business leaders. 

2. Championing data-driven storytelling

The gap: Data is clearly missing

A lack of clear and compelling storytelling, coupled with poorly written OKRs, left design efforts falling short of their mark and undervalued last year. This highlighted a critical gap in the alignment of pre-planning and delivery readiness activities before project kickoff.

The shift: Make use of AI-powered analytics tools

Better utilization of storytelling frameworks, leveraging advanced predictive analytics to correlate design improvements with metrics such as: 

• CSAT.
• Time-to-market improvements.
• Behavior-driven outcomes.
• Error handling reductions.
• Overall consistency of experience.

Take action: Put data on display

Equip teams with the right tools for data visualization and OKR creation, implementing narrative-driven stories that highlight the role of design and research in achieving long-term, scalable business success. Do this among your key stakeholder partners before any solutions are created, ensuring you have a quorum of committed leaders around the table.

3. Embracing cross-functional innovation

The gap: The collaboration deficit

Internal Design Teams continue to struggle with effective cross-functional collaboration, creating significant barriers to demonstrating their full value. Research from the Nielsen Norman Group indicates that project-specific collaboration challenges include unclear roles and responsibilities, negative ownership, and a lack of shared goals—all of which can lead to additional delays and continued cultural inertia among stakeholders. Siloed approaches, such as “throw-it-over-the-wall” handoffs and exclusion from strategic planning, result in unnecessary friction, increased costs, and a reputation for being disconnected from practical realities.

The shift: A better design integration opportunity

Organizations that effectively integrate design across functions demonstrate significantly better outcomes. According to the McKinsey Design Index, the top 25% of scorers achieved 32% higher revenue growth and a 56% higher total return to shareholders compared to peers. The opportunity lies in transforming design from a siloed, transactional cost center into a collaborative capability that permeates across the entire organization.

Intuit’s “Design for Delight” methodology, for example, embeds designers within cross-functional teams, emphasizing deep customer empathy, rapid experimentation, and broad ideation—resulting in increased customer satisfaction and improved time-to-market delivery.

Take action: Implement hybrid collaborative design models

To achieve this, design leaders must:

• Reimagine team structures to facilitate integration, such as embedding designers in product or business units and operating as a specialized Center of Excellence (CoE) that is a combined, centralized, and embedded function.
• Establish shared processes and tools that ritualize design sprints and regular pre-planning / alignment sessions, to ensure commitment and consistent participation from all stakeholders.
• Invest in collaborative orchestration capabilities, training designers in business, technical, and operational fundamentals—improving communication skills to bridge gaps between disciplines.

Organizations that successfully connect design metrics to business outcomes secure significantly more investment and influence. McKinsey research shows companies with robust design measurement frameworks receive 1.7x more design investment and are 2.3x more likely to include design leaders in strategic decision-making. Mastercard and Salesforce, for example, have developed frameworks that link design improvements to quantifiable business metrics, resulting in increased investment and elevated strategic design profiles.

Take action: Building effective measurement systems

To create effective design measurement guidelines:

• Collaborate with Finance, HR, and Business Intelligence Teams to identify metrics that Design can leverage to further communicate progress, impact, and influence. 
• Develop balanced scorecards that capture user, operational, financial, and strategic metrics.
• Invest in measurement infrastructure and skills, such as dashboards that visualize the connection between design changes, business performance, and product usage.

5. Prioritizing the employee experience through targeted cultural transformations

The gap: The employee experience blind spot

While customer experience has received significant attention, the employee experience remains an underutilized opportunity. Only 23% of internal design teams actively participate in shaping employee experiences, despite EX growing in significance and importance to executives.

The shift: The employee-centered design opportunity

Applying design thinking methodologies to the employee experience will undoubtedly drive measurable business outcomes. McKinsey research indicates that companies in the top quartile for employee experience demonstrate higher profitability and customer satisfaction. It’s widely acknowledged that a great product reflects a strong culture. ServiceNow and Philips, for example, have utilized design thinking to enhance onboarding and internal tool adoption, resulting in reduced waste and delivery times as well as a decrease in support ticket creation.

Take action: Transform the employee experience 

To transform the employee experience:

• Establish roles in the employee experience ecosystem through partnerships with HR, IT, Data, and Operations. 
• Develop specialized research methodologies focused on cultural anthropology to extract more contextual data insights—look deeper into behavioral and communication patterns, design, and digital fluency through active stakeholder participation and contribution.
• Create measurement frameworks that connect experience improvements to business outcomes, such as productivity, team effectiveness, and retention metrics.

The path forward relies on a greater commitment to innovation and human-centered behavioral design 

The future holds an abundance of promise, encouraging us to meet each of these challenges head-on. This is a call to action to embrace the journey ahead with open hearts and minds, committed to ongoing learning and growth. It invites us to seize this moment as an opportunity to reshape our destinies, lighting the way forward with renewed courage and determination.

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