#59 Why You Need to Design Strategically
Jill is a strategic and visionary Director with over 12 years of experience. She currently works for Bain & Company as one of their most senior Designers in EMEA.
Throughout her career, she has led and helped international companies and start-ups to innovate, to instill a human-centric design approach, and grow. She designs interactions at the intersection of people, products, and environments, and brings out incremental and revolutionary changes for the people she designs for.
She's worked in London, New York, Abu Dhabi, and Taipei. Her clients include Sony, Tiffany & Co., Kellogg's, BP, BT, Jaguar Land Rover, HSBC, Macquarie, and more.
Follow Jill:
Linkedin: @cyjilllin
Twitter: @jillybeanlin
Podcast Minutes
Table of Contents
00:30 - Episode summary
03:00 - Intro Jill
05:00 - The definition of strategy
08:30 - Enabling innovation with strategy
10:20 - In-house agency vs. embedded teams
12:30 - Strategic design vs. service design
16:00 - Design & product strategy
19:30 - The biggest strategic challenges companies face
26:20 - Combining design & product strategy
30:00 - Ensuring a holistic design in cross-functional teams
35:40 - 3 Tips if you work on/with a design strategy
What is a staff designer?
Jill: The “staff” part in this designer’s role in the firm is bringing design leadership as any part of the design decision-making process, business design, business decision-making, as well as really helping our clients to make the most informed decisions based on human centricity. So my role is possibly going to be a little bit different from the in-house staff part of a designer.
However, I would say the common scene is to really ensure that we'll be able to utilize design to influence any actions, and plans, and be able to help others to envision the future.
How do you see the importance of design for a strategy?
Answer: I really liked is a quote from the book Art of Actions.
Maybe let me just read it out for you,
Essentially, strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling actions to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context.
And this is really beautiful because, for me, a strategy is essentially informing us to make the right decision and to make the right choices all the time.
Strategic design or design, in general, is relative to use a design tool kit to make decisions at any given time. Hence, intrinsically I believe that design by nature is strategic.
Do you think companies see design as a strategic goal?
Answer: I think the maturity is possibly going to be depending on the company's design maturity. And the reason for that is that when you work for a company that is known for strategy, and when you want to add another edition of this strategic thinking, that requires convincing and I request influencing.
That's the beauty and also the challenges of working in my current position. When an organization has hired design maturity, product-centric companies, such as Facebook and Spotify, or take the giants such as Google and Amazon intrinsically have got design baiting as part of their operational model as part of their culture. And this means that design cuts out the designer's role to be elevated and into the playing field.
Where do you see design sitting in an organization?
… tune in to learn more 🎧
