What does success mean for a product or UX designer?
Is it delivering pretty designs fast to the developers, or is it about truly creating customer value that contributes to measurable business results?
At BIKE24, we recognized that true success lies not in the speed we deliver our designs but in their ability to resonate with users and drive meaningful outcomes.
This realization sparked a transformative journey within our design team, shifting our focus from mere deliverables to a deep obsession with customer behavior and business metrics.
The goal - shift mindset to drive outcomes
As the Lead Designer, I was tasked with elevating our design team's impact on the business. Our team was known for creating decent designs very fast, but we struggled to demonstrate tangible value to the company and our customers.
Our primary challenge was to shift the team's mindset from focusing solely on deliverables to prioritizing customer value and measurable outcomes. We needed to prove that design could directly contribute to business success.
The approach I wanted to try
- Create an atmosphere of transparency, collaboration and trust within the design team. Absolutely necessary if you want eveyone with you on a big transformational journey.
- Instill a culture of obsessing over customer value and business metrics.
- Introduce measurable outcomes and implement a system to track wins for every designer.
So, we tried it and here it is how it went.
1/3
Trust, Transparency and Collaboration
Open communication, feedback and brainstorming sessions became the norm.
We initiated weekly team meetings to openly discuss challenges and successes. We always addressed big challenges openly together.
We encouraged designers to share their work-in-progress and receive constructive feedback from one another both in design critiques or async. Furthermore, we conducted design reviews to foster solidarity and improve work quality.
I conducted bi-weekly 1on1 meetings with each designer to build personal connections, to understand individual goals and interests and address concerns and have difficult conversations in a healthy way.
We conducted brainstorming sessions to generate creative solutions. Created an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing their ideas.
Implemented a "no-blame" policy to foster innovation and risk-taking. Out-of-the-box thinking and designs were strongly encouraged.
We develop a shared understanding of how the team will work together and we promoted trust by encouraging autonomy and ownership of projects.
2/3
Cultivating a Customer-Centric Mindset
Align on a common vision - become the most user-centric retailer!
We conducted a workshop where we, together, aligned on a common design vision where we focused a lot on always delivering customer value and solving customer problems. We also extracted common design principles to guide designers in their day to day work. This is where we set the foundations of being obssesed over customer value.
We scaled our research operations by organizing regular user testing sessions and interviews. Integrated customer feedback loops into the design process.
And probably the most important part is that we started to always include the questions "What customer problem are we solving?", "How do you know this is valid customer problem?"" and "What customer value are we delivering?" in all of our feedback sessons and design crits.
3/3
Introducing Measurable Outcomes
How do we know if our solution worked for the customer and business? Metrics.
We discussed what top level metrics are important for the company and after that we worked down to support metrics that are directly affected by our work. We split them like this - direct customer value metrics, reducing risk of feature/product to fail metrics, enabling colleagues and efficiency metrics.
We implemented a little dashboard where we tracked the direct results of the work of each designer on a weekly basis. Of course, these were directly tied to our company and team OKRs. We started with some easy wins to increase motivation and then we kept going.
Tracking and affecting user behaviour via our direct contribution suddenly became an obsession and it was no longer about the deliverables but how the metrics will be inflienced - the outcomes.
Results
Switching our mindset to focus on outcomes rather than outputs eventually led to improving important business and user metrics. Here are some of them:
- Increase conversion rate by at least 10%
- Increase account registrations by 5%
- Increase average order value by 2%
- Increase checkout completion by 1%
- Increase newsletter subscription rate by at least 2%
- Decrease bounce rates by at least 10%
- Increase average product rating by 1 stars and increase nr. of new reviews per day by 10%
- Decrease time to build any landing page by our marketing team by 90%
- We also managed to de-risk greatly some big re-redesign concepts.
Even though we struggled a lot along the way I believe we managed to built a great culture where we obsses more over customer value rather than our deliverables.
Example of how the design differs on a simple registration page.
Page on the left is designed based on stakeholder requirements and page on the right is designed with focus on improving account sign-ups.
What did not go so well.
Obsessing over customer value and metrics did not necessarily lead to improvements in overall visual design. In some cases, we found that designs optimized purely for metrics could lack aesthetic appeal or brand consistency.
With so many metrics available, some designers felt overwhelmed and unsure which data points were truly relevant to their work.
Shifting focus from deliverables to outcomes requires consistent effort and clear communication which means it takes a lot of capacity from the design manager/lead - me in this case.
Key learnings
Small wins are crucial in demonstrating the value of a metrics-driven approach.
Empowering designers with data helps them make better decisions and feel more connected to business goals.
A culture of customer obsession leads to more impactful and successful designs.
Kudos
Even though I led it, this transformative journey would not have been possible without the invaluable mentorship of our Head of Product, whose guidance and support were instrumental in helping me navigating the complexities of this shift.
I am also incredibly grateful to our talented product designers, who embraced this challenge with enthusiasm and an open mind. Their willingness to learn and adapt, even as we forged our path, was crucial to our success. Together, we cultivated a culture of collaboration and innovation that ultimately allowed us to achieve something great—designs that not only look good but also deliver real customer value and measurable business results. This experience reinforced the power of teamwork and the importance of shared vision in driving meaningful change.
