The fundamentals of setting up your successful internal design team

Did you know that design-led companies have increased revenue at almost twice the rate of their industry counterparts in the last 5 years? In a McKinsey Quarterly report titled “The Business Value of Design,” it was found that 300 publicly listed companies have demonstrated a substantial increase in revenue due to their design-led initiatives. 

Now, this is not an easy journey, but it’s definitely worth it.

When setting up an internal design team there are 5 key areas that you need to take care of:

1. Defining the role of design within the business: Understanding why and how the design will play a role within the organisation is key. Think of where you want your design team to be in 5 years, and work towards that. Don’t expect this to happen overnight! Your organisation needs to buy-in, mature and adopt your vision. Some things that you may want to consider are:

• • How aligned is your vision to the ideas of design?
  • Does your organisation need a strategic area to kick off new projects and then be transferred into BAU?
  • Does your organisation need a team that works as an internal consulting team from beginning to end with key stakeholders from the different business areas?
  • Do you want business areas to come to your hub? 
  • Or do you want your designers embedded in the other business areas?

2. Understanding your customers’ (the business) needs from a design team: What value can your design team bring to the business? To do this, you need to step into the shoes of your customers. Understand and empathise with your customers-What do they need? What pains do they have that you can solve? 

3. Building a design culture: For a design team to be successful you need to build a culture that breathes design, trusts the process and is passionate about your customers. Once again this is not going to happen overnight, this takes time and commitment. 

I can’t stress enough how important it is to show results! Show your impact and your potential. If your company only sees sticky notes, they will think that you only play with colourful papers and draw nice pictures-they need to see how you will help grow the business and solve their pain points.

4. Design your own service design process: You need to think of your team as an internal consulting team. Like any successful consulting team, you need to be asking the right questions:

• How do you want your consulting team to work? 
• How do you onboard new projects? 
• How do your customers (the other business units) access your services?
• How do customers experience your services? 
• How do you communicate with them? 
• What resources do you need to deliver such services? 
• What are your back-end processes?

 There’s a lot of questions, I know, but you need these answers. You don’t need to get them right the first time, but you need to keep building your answers over time.

5. Build the right team that is aligned with your culture and can deliver the service that your customers deserve: The skills that your teams require changes depending on the industry and organisation that you are in, but here’s an essential list of skills that every team should have. 

• • Empathy
  • Collaboration
  • Design experience and knowledge (UX, UI, CX, Service Design)
  • Visual thinking and communication
  • Story-telling and presentation
  • Facilitation
  • Systems thinking
  • Strategic thinking

Here at Three6, we believe in building capabilities and creating change from within organisations, and that’s why we help businesses establish their own service design teams, we want them to grow and be able to design the services that customers deserve.

Save the infographic for a quick reference to these key concepts!

If it’s advice or some direction that you’re after say hello@three6.com.au