Chief Design Officer
While more and more companies have individuals with the title Chief Design Officer, it is not clear if all those organizations have really given that role the full scope of responsibilities necessary to ensure their CDO will be successful, let alone live up to the market’s expectations of what it means to have a Chief Design Officer.
While it is up to each CEO to define and evaluate the CDO role based on the needs of their organization, from my point of view a Chief Design Officer oversees all aspects of design (design and user research, product/UX/UI/service design and the design language, architectural design, graphic design, packaging, etc.) and has the necessary business knowledge and the authority to align relative policies with the organization's goals for delivering the greatest value for customers, clients, or business partners, thereby ensuring design is a core pillar of the company’s strategy and culture.
The three main contributions a CDO should make are:
Predicting the outcomes of strategically deploying design resources
Diagnosing design-related problems that are hurting the company’s performance
Prescribing policies for design to create value.
The CDO should be assessed by actions that deliver revenue, margin, brand recognition, or market share. Administrative tasks, such as managing design deliverables, design operations, or design languages, might be delegated to others within their team but the CDO must be responsible for establishing the policies and measuring design’s impact in their company. And like like their peers in technology, finance, human resources and marketing, the Chief Design Officer reports directly to the CEO.
To be sure some will find this definition controversial, not to mention its impact on reducing the potential talent pool. However, it is critical to have a CDO who is both a design leader and a business leader. Likewise, a CDO who sits multiple levels below the CEO will likely have their scope bounded by their boss’ area of responsibility, having at best a negotiated role concerning design from other areas of the company. Without being a direct report to the CEO’s staff, the CDO will not—by default— participate in policy decisions which will impact or at the very least influence design. For example, simply adding “CDO” to the title of a VP of Design who reports to either the Chief Product or Chief Technology Officer is at best a performative gesture, and frankly feels disingenuous. A CDO in this position will not participate as peer with the other “chiefs” in setting the corporate strategy, budgeting, prioritization, M&A planning, or any number of other business discussions that will impact design directly or indirectly. Ironically, this is not all that dissimilar to the performative way design was used in the past to apply surface treatments; a.k.a. putting lipstick on a pig, unfortunately, in this case design is the pig.
This all-too-common approach to the CDO role is a variation of Conway’s Law, fracturing design along organizational boundary lines rather than creating a well-orchestrated narrative that is inclusive of the company’s full design portfolio. The negative impact of this dissonance can be both internal (i.e. redundancy, loss of momentum, misalignment, turnover, etc.) it can also be mirrored in the market’s cool response to an offering who’s brand and product are disjointed or mismatched—all of which in turn can be amplified by competitors who have taken a more comprehensive approach to design oversight within their organizations.
It is also important to note that not all organizations need a Chief Design Officer, and like many “chief” titles in smaller companies— especially in start-ups, inflated titles can undermine credibility. But as companies grow, and as they seek to make serious investments in design holistically, being mindful of those commitments will likely require hiring an experienced executive leader who can provide the vision, leadership, and discipline required to deliver quality design at scale.
As always, please feel free to share your thoughts.
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