Great design only reaches its full potential when it moves a metric the business cares about: revenue, cost, retention, or speed-to-market. This section shows how to frame your work in business terms, select the right success metrics, and speak the language of stakeholders.
Stakeholder Alignment: Meet early with product, engineering, and finance partners to learn which KPIs matter most and how design can influence them. Highly recommend reading **Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever** to learn how to communicate your design choices to stakeholders.
KPI’s are the specific metrics that matter most to your business and team things like conversion rates, user engagement, sign-up rates, or task completion rates. These numbers help everyone understand whether the product is succeeding and guide decisions about what to focus on next. As a designer, knowing your product's KPIs helps you prioritize which user problems to solve first. When you can show how your design changes improve these key metrics, you demonstrate real business impact.
ROI measures whether the money and time spent on design changes actually pays off through increased revenue, cost savings, or other business benefits. For example, if a redesigned checkout flow costs $10,000 to implement but increases sales by $50,000, that's a strong ROI. Understanding ROI helps you make the business case for design improvements and prioritize projects that will have the biggest impact.
CLV tells you how much total revenue a customer brings over their entire relationship with the company, not just their first purchase. This helps you understand which user segments are most valuable and where to focus your design efforts for maximum business impact. For instance, if premium users have a much higher CLV, you might prioritize improving their experience over acquiring new free users. CLV helps justify spending more resources on retaining existing customers through better UX.