Learning to argue for design in the language of the business

I started the Level 7 Strategic Leadership programme because I was increasingly in rooms where the conversation was about business performance, organisational priorities and investment, and I was interpreting all of it through a design lens.

That lens is useful, but it's partial. I wanted to understand competitive environments, financial performance and organisational structure on their own terms rather than as background to the work I already cared about.

It was uncomfortable in places. Reading a set of numbers properly is a skill, and I'd been approximating it for years.

At Selfridges I established financial tracking and resource planning for the function. The point was fairly simple: if I couldn't describe what we spent and what it returned, the investment in people and tools would be vulnerable every time budgets tightened.

The research budget is a good illustration. Roughly sixty thousand pounds a year sounds like a lot in isolation and very little next to the cost of building the wrong thing. Framing it the second way is what made it defensible.

I have found that most commercial objections to design work are really objections to uncertainty. Reducing the uncertainty is usually more persuasive than arguing harder.

At JoyBuy the guest checkout work moved new customer conversion from 61.94% to 68.58%. That's roughly 383 extra orders a day, and an estimated 2.24 million euros over ninety days.

The Shop in Shop work was a different shape of value. It contributed to a fourteen times increase in GMV, a 35% lift in average revenue per user and 5.5 percentage points on repurchase.

I'm cautious about numbers like these. They're real, but they belong to a lot of people, and the honest version of the story usually includes several things that didn't work first.

My time at Thomas Cook was where I first saw commercial strategy expressed through a journey. Discovery to booking across multiple brands and international markets is a commercial model made visible, and small changes to it move real money.

What I take from that now is a habit of asking what the business is actually trying to earn from a change before deciding what the change should be.

It sounds obvious written down. In practice it's quite easy to spend a quarter improving something nobody was ever going to pay for.