Getting your company to pay for a design system using an efficiency-focused pitch
We don't even need to address design quality to make an effective argument for the benefits of a design system. The efficiency pitch is powerful even by itself, so long as it's defined and testable.
If design systems had zero impact on the quality of end user experience, they would still be worthwhile. We create systems so that we can do work, and replicate that work, more quickly and easily. The efficiency play for design systems is a powerful one to make. It’s directly quantifiable and measurable. And it’s often a more familiar narrative to the stakeholders who are making decisions about resourcing a design system, as well as the business owners who need to choose to integrate design system adoption into their product backlogs.
Today I’m going to talk about using the efficiency argument when making an initial pitch for design system investment. Perhaps you don’t have a design system team at all, or you’re looking to get buy-in to turn a “side gig” design system effort into something with clear resourcing. If you want to get investment, then you need to present a hypothesis for what the return on that investment will be. A hypothesis is something that’s testable.
We’re asking for money, so we need to create a clear demonstrate that we expect that money to be worth spending! Let’s take a couple of data points first.
The average salary of designers and front end developers at our company is $75,000/year.
The “load cost” of an employee at our company is 1.5 x their salary. Load cost is the cost to the company of employing someone. It includes salary, benefits, equipment, insurance, energy costs, etc.
ACME Corp employs 1,000 designers and front end developers.
And then let’s make certain assumptions that we’ll use to build our hypothesis.
In very broad terms, I would expect a product team adoption a good design system to see a 30-50% improvement in their efficiency.
We estimate that in the first year we’ll see 20% adoption of the design system across the company.
Now we can extrapolate an estimated return on investment.
1000 people * $75,000 salary * 1.5 (load cost) * .5 (50% efficiency gain) * 0.2 (20% year 1 adoption) == $11,250,000
We’ve just provided a clear argument that a design system investment will bring $11.25 million in efficiency gains in its first year.
Those figures will obviously be questioned. It will be important to detail the data points from your own company (the more accurate the better). And you’ll need to back up the assumptions you’ve made with research data (perhaps publicly available, perhaps from a consulting partner like IBM iX, or a combination). But you have provided a testable hypothesis.
We can balance this against the potential cost of a design system team. Say we’re asking for support to have 10 people working full time on the design system, and they’re earning that $75,000/year average salary. Our design system team cost is an easy calculation.
10 people * $75,000 salary * 2 (load cost) == $1,500,000
A testable hypothesis suggesting a 7.5-1 return on investment is a fairly powerful argument.
Of course, it’s not quite that simple. That $11.25 million return on investment isn’t an extra $11.25 million of income for the company. It’s $11.25 million of opportunity cost from resources that have been freed up by the design system. Efficiency gains that will allow teams to address more of their backlog. It might allow practitioners to be redeployed to under-resourced teams elsewhere in the business. Or, at its most blunt, it can allow a reduction in headcount because fewer people can deliver the same quantity and quality of work.
Make a strong argument for design system investment. Use figures specific to your company, publicly available data on design system efficiencies, and the resources of potential consulting partners. You can be ambitious or conservative in your estimates; you know your internal audience best. We’re create a hypothesis for the value your stakeholders will get back if they invest in the design system. We’re not saying merely “ a design system is more efficient”. It’s the far more confident statement that “a design system is THIS MUCH more efficient, and I’m prepared to be evaluated on that target moving forward.”
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