The Economics of Design
Realising value accretive design operations
Design Ops
Business
Metrics, KPIs, Data
Commercial outcomes drive nearly every strategic decision in a business. Yet too often, design teams are left to argue their value in abstract terms—“delight,” “usability,” or “brand equity.” As a Design Leader and AI-Enabled Product Architect, I’ve made it my mission to change that dynamic. Today, I view every wireframe, prototype, and design review through one simple lens: “How will this move the needle on revenue, retention, or cost?” In this post, I’ll share the three-step framework I use to embed economic thinking into design, backed by real examples from my career.
Ask yourself…
Could you put a dollar figure to the impact each of your design decisions have made? If you can’t, then the economics of design aren’t taken seriously enough within your organisation. This is a problem, but one which can be solved.
It's time to start with data, not people
Despite being directed by design frameworks to start with people! The reality is that in day to day business contexts, expecly enterprise, this is often the exception, not the rule.
Design processes typically start with a business objective or series of assumptions. These serve as a frame of reference. Starting with the numbers doesn’t actually impact the process negatively and doesn’t result in less human centricity. What it does is provide a foundation from which we can understand the business value our design process helps create.
Once we have this foundation, we’re free to execute our human-centred design processes and build exceptional products or services.
Embedding the economic of design
Here are 4 practical steps you can take to embed the economics of design into your organisation.
1. Onboarding
Onboarding is the best time to begin embedding commercial focus across design functions. In fact, if you can factor economics throughout the hiring process, you’ll be even better off. When you’re onboarding new people across the design function, they need commercial context.
As an example, part of your onboarding may be pairing a new designer with an existing designer. Another part of the process may involve the new designer in some anthropological research. Perhaps you involve them in analysing real-time quant to show how inferences from key event triggers you’re tracking impact design decisions.
Each of these activities can have value.
Factor economics into your hiring process. If the new team member asks the question, “How might this design hypothesis impact the commercial objective?” then your onboarding activities have likely been very successful.
Commercial “awareness” is a great proxy in the early stages. The specific activities you design to help build commercial awareness are up to you. My advice is to add a commercial layer to each of your existing activities. This is the simplest and least disruptive tactic.
As an example, if your new recruit is paired with an existing team member, have the existing team member explain how the commercial objectives and unit economics impact her design hypotheses and process. This foundation will give all new recruits the commercial awareness they require to contribute to the sustainable operation of the design function.
2. Align on Commercial Outcomes, Day One
Designers usually kick off with user research—and that’s crucial for empathy. But when it’s just us in the room, the conversation often drifts away from the P&L. To avoid that, I run a 60-minute Business Impact Charter in sprint zero.
First, I convene Product, Engineering, Finance, and any key stakeholders––often including the CFO or VP of Sales. We map the highest-priority features against three core metrics: incremental revenue, churn reduction, and support-cost savings. For example, when I joined a SaaS team building an AI copilot, we projected that smarter, context-aware suggestions could reduce support tickets by 10%. That projection became our north star.
Next, I build a living dashboard—usually a simple shared spreadsheet or a Figma plugin—that lists each feature hypothesis alongside its estimated dollar impact. This charter lives on our wall (digital or physical), so every design review starts with a quick ROI check: “Is this still our best lever for boosting ARR?”
Real result: By aligning on outcomes from day one, our copilot project won immediate executive buy-in. The CFO green-lit headcount for extended R&D because we could demonstrate a clear $200K annual support saving right from kickoff.
3. Prototype with Profit in Mind
Traditional prototyping focuses on flows and interactions—great for usability, but difficult to tie back to commercial goals once user testing wraps. I flip the script by embedding value hypotheses directly into the prototypes.
Before sketching screens, I tag each user journey with its expected value delta: “High-value upsell path,” “renewal flow,” or “support-deflection scenario.” In practice, that means my low-fidelity mockups include call-outs like “Anticipate next purchase—+5% ARPU” or “Self-service diagnosis—–15% support volume.”
When we move to interactive prototypes, these tags guide our A/B tests. Rather than testing pure usability, we validate “Does this screen actually drive a 3% lift in in-app purchase?” That data then feeds directly into our feature backlog prioritization.
I also draft one-page Lean Business Cases for every significant feature. Each case compares estimated build cost (in engineering hours) against projected margin improvement. That one-pager sits next to the prototype file—so when stakeholders ask “Why this design?”, you can say, “Here’s the $250K lift we expect in upsells.”
Real result: During a dashboard modernization, our lean business case showed a potential $300K revenue bump in Q3 if we surfaced contextual upsell prompts. The product team shifted our timeline forward by six weeks, turning a Q4 release into a Q2 win.
4. Measure & Iterate on Dollars, Not Just Delight
After launch, most teams celebrate metrics like time-on-task or NPS. Those are valuable, but they still live in the world of “happy users,” not “profitable product.” I partner with Analytics to bake commercial KPIs directly into our event schema.
Every “completed flow” event carries dollar-value metadata: subscription level, average order value, or cost-per-support-interaction. In Tableau (or Looker), we report on “dollars per user” just as easily as “click-through rate.” That alignment means our quarterly design demos include both usability wins and P&L impact side by side.
To close the loop, I run a Quarterly ROI Retrospective with execs. I present a slide deck that pairs “Spend vs. Profit” for each major feature:
AI Copilot v1: $120K in development → $360K in annual support savings
New Onboarding Flow: 20% increase in activation → $500K incremental ARR
Dashboard Upsell Prompt: 4% ARPU lift → $250K in Q2 revenue
Those metrics aren’t just nice-to-haves—they become the basis for our next roadmap, staffing decisions, and budget allocations.
Real result: By framing design as an investment, not an expense, I’ve helped move design from a “cost center” budget line into a “growth driver” line item. In one case, this shift unlocked a 30% bump in our design headcount funding for the following year.
Conclusion - Effective Design Starts with Numbers
Design is far too important to be left unplugged from business reality. By aligning on outcomes up front, prototyping with profit hypotheses, and measuring success in dollars, design teams can claim a seat at the executive table—and drive transformative change.
If you’re ready to make your next project not only user-centric but also revenue-centric, start with these three steps:
Run a Business Impact Charter on Day One
Tag prototypes with value hypotheses
Embed commercial metrics into your analytics
Each step costs little time but yields high strategic return. That’s the economics of design—and it’s the approach I’ve used to guide cross-continental teams, build enterprise-grade AI interfaces, and deliver millions in measurable impact.
Mitch Mills is a Design Leader & AI-Enabled Product Architect. He helps enterprises untangle complexity, amplify human intelligence, and drive clarity at scale. Reach out: hello@mitchmills.com.
Explore more
Let’s Build Tomorrow’s Products
Foster strategic collaboration to design AI-native systems that amplify human capabilities and experience