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:

1

Organizational
context

2

Advocacy
content

3

Communication
tactics

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 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. It 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, process changes that integrate design, and success stories that tie work to KPIs. 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

The dominant value claim positions design as the organization’s voice of the customer. Through research, journey maps, and direct user exposure, design corrects internal bias and de-risks bets, giving leaders confidence they are “doing the right thing” for customers and the business.

Design as Integrator and Efficiency Enabler

Design acts as “the glue” that bridges silos and aligns product, engineering, and business. Early testing and prototyping prevent rework, saving time and money while improving collaboration quality. 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, creating competitive advantage when features converge. Leaders stress how consistent high-quality contributes to market-relevant outcomes. Some contexts avoid this lens if the market is less competitive, the company is more mature, or they want to avoid positioning design as merely aesthetic.

Design as Strategic Lens and Vision Caster

As credibility grows, design can contribute to upstream framing and futures work. Leaders use design’s capability to prototype ideas fast to inform strategy, typically in more mature contexts where prior wins have earned a seat in strategic dialogues.

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 begins with visible results: small demos, quick examples, and “vision designs” replace abstract claims. Producing something concrete shifts conversations from opinion to evidence and accelerates influence.

Prototypes and Artifacts

Mock-ups, journey maps, and customer videos operate as shared reference points that help align teams, reduce ambiguity, and de-risk investment. Even rough models move debates forward by inviting concrete feedback and user validation.

Translating Design into Business

Leaders mirror stakeholders’ vocabulary, focusing on design’s value to revenue, efficiency, risk, and ROI—avoiding design jargon. The reframing connects outcomes to the metrics and horizons executives already use to decide.

Metrics and External Legitimacy

Arguments are substantiated with quantitative indicators and benchmarks. Tying work to numbers is essential for attention and prioritization.

Participation and Small Wins

Co-testing, workshops, and pilots invite skeptics into the process. Hands-on exposure turns minds, builds empathy, and creates incremental wins that travel across teams.

Sustained Advocacy and Repetition

Credibility compounds through cadence: repeating key messages, showcasing outcomes, and cultivating ambassadors at multiple levels keeps design visible and normalizes practices across the organization.

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. Over time, these traces accumulate—standards cohere, numbers reappear in reviews, stories are retold by non-designers—and 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.