The outcome-driven design team: a BIKE24 case study

What Defines Success for a Product or UX Designer?

Is success about delivering designs quickly to developers, or is it about creating meaningful customer value that contributes to measurable business results even if it needs multiple iterations?

At BIKE24, we realized that true success isn't about the speed of execution but the impact our designs have on users and the business. This understanding led us on a transformative journey, shifting our focus from deliverables to deep customer obsession and business outcomes.

The Problem: Design Wasn't Driving Measurable Business Value

As Lead Designer, I was responsible for increasing our design team's influence on business success. While our team was proficient in crafting well-designed interfaces swiftly, we struggled to prove tangible value to both the company and customers.

Key Challenges:

• Design was seen as a service function rather than a strategic driver of business impact.
• Success was measured by deliverables, not outcomes, making it difficult to show how design influenced key metrics.
• Collaboration with stakeholders was inconsistent, limiting design's ability to shape strategic decisions.

The Goal: Shifting Mindsets to Drive Outcomes

Our challenge was to shift from a mindset focused on outputs to one that prioritized customer value and measurable outcomes. We needed to demonstrate that design could directly impact business success.

The Approach

To achieve this transformation, I focused on four key areas:

1. Building a culture of trust, transparency, and collaboration
2. Instilling a customer-centric mindset
3. Introducing measurable outcomes to track success
4. Strengthening cross-functional relationships and stakeholder influence

1. Fostering Trust, Transparency, and Collaboration

To create an environment where designers felt empowered to take risks and drive change, I prioritized open communication and collective problem-solving:

• Weekly team meetings to discuss challenges, share successes, and openly address obstacles.
• Regular design critiques and async feedback sessions to refine work and improve quality.
• Bi-weekly 1:1 meetings with each designer to understand individual goals, provide mentorship, and navigate difficult conversations in a healthy way.
• Brainstorming sessions to foster creativity and cross-team collaboration.
• A "no-blame" policy to encourage innovation, risk-taking, and a shared sense of ownership.

This foundation of trust and autonomy set the stage for designers to take accountability for their projects and feel confident in their contributions.

2. Cultivating a Customer-Centric Mindset

To align the team around a shared vision of customer obsession, we conducted a workshop to establish BIKE24's design principles:

• Our vision: Become the most user-centric retailer.
• Our principles: Always prioritize customer value and problem-solving.

We operationalized this mindset by:

• Scaling our research capabilities through regular user testing and interviews.
• Embedding customer feedback loops directly into the design process.
• Incorporating critical reflection questions in all feedback sessions and design critiques:
  • What customer problem are we solving?
  • How do we know this is a valid problem?
  • What customer value are we delivering?

This shift ensured that every design decision was guided by user needs rather than stakeholder assumptions.

3. Introducing Measurable Outcomes

One of the most critical aspects of our transformation was defining measurable outcomes that demonstrated the direct impact of design work. We categorized these into three key result areas:

1. Direct Customer Value – Measuring how design influences core user behaviors and business metrics, such as:
   • Bounce rate
   • Signups
   • Conversion rate
   • Average order value (AOV)
   • Add-to-cart rates
2. Enablement & Efficiency – Tracking how design work enables other departments, optimizes workflows, and improves internal satisfaction, including:
   • Time spent on completing tasks (e.g., marketing landing page creation, content updates)
   • Efficiency gains in internal tooling
   • Cross-functional satisfaction and collaboration impact
3. Risk Reduction (Value & Usability Risk) – Evaluating how confident we are that users will adopt and successfully use new features. This confidence is built through:
   • Concept testing with users before full-scale implementation
   • Iterative validation processes to mitigate usability risks
   • Metrics tied to feature adoption and customer feedback

To make these insights actionable, we implemented a design impact dashboard that tracked these key metrics for each designer on a weekly basis. By tying design work directly to business outcomes, we shifted the team's focus from deliverables to measurable impact, fostering a culture where success was defined by results, not just output.

4. Strengthening Cross-Functional Relationships and Stakeholder Influence

A key aspect of making this shift sustainable was ensuring design had a strong voice at the leadership level. I worked to expand our influence by:

• Building strategic partnerships with Product, Engineering, and Marketing leaders to align design goals with company objectives.
• Empowering designers as key members of the product triad to make crucial decisions alongside their engineering and product partners, ensuring design input is valued early and integrated into the core of product development.
• Creating storytelling opportunities to communicate the value of design through data-driven insights and real customer stories.
• Leading tough stakeholder discussions to advocate for user needs and push back when necessary, ensuring decisions were informed by customer insights rather than assumptions.

By elevating design's strategic influence, we shifted from being seen as a service function to an essential driver of business success.

Results: Measurable Business and User Impact

In 2024, our outcome-driven approach led to significant improvements in key business and user metrics:

• +10% increase in conversion rates
• +5% increase in account registrations
• +6% increase in average order value
• +1% increase in checkout completion rate
• +5% increase in newsletter subscriptions
• -10% reduction in bounce rates
• +1 star increase in average product ratings and +10% more new reviews per day
• 10x reduction in landing page creation time for marketing teams

Additionally, our structured approach to risk reduction helped us de-risk major redesign concepts before full-scale implementation.

Challenges and Lessons Learned

While the transition was successful, it wasn't without challenges:

What Didn't Go Well & Next Steps

• Visual Design Trade-offs: Optimizing for metrics sometimes led to designs that lacked aesthetic appeal or brand consistency.

  Next Step: One of our major goals for 2025 is to massively improve our visual design style by collaborating with marketing stakeholders to create a visual design vision and testing it.

• Overwhelming Data: With so many available metrics, some designers felt unsure about which data points were most relevant to their work.

  Next Step: We plan to refine our metrics framework and provide clearer guidance on which metrics designers should focus on, based on project goals.

• High Effort for Design Leadership: Maintaining this transformation required significant time and effort in coaching, communication, and alignment.

  Next Step: We are exploring ways to delegate certain coaching responsibilities and streamline alignment processes to sustain long-term impact. But honestly this type of work seems so rewarding that I love taking the time to do it.

Gratitude & Acknowledgments

Though I led this transformation, it wouldn't have been possible without the mentorship of our Head of Product, whose guidance helped navigate the complexities of this shift.

A huge thank you to our talented product designers, who embraced this challenge with enthusiasm and adaptability. Their willingness to change, experiment, and iterate was crucial to our success.

Together, we built a culture where design is no longer just about design assets—it's about delivering real customer value and measurable business results. This experience reinforced the power of teamwork and the importance of a shared vision in driving meaningful change.