I often get questions about how to follow up or measure your design capability efforts. Here are some Objectives & Key Results (OKR) that I often use based on three areas, efficiency, quality or satisfaction.

Efficiency

• Lead time of delivery
• Cycle time
• Designers vs developers
• Number of designers per product/business area
• Monthly active work on specific product
• Time to deliver an activity
• % time spent design
• Number of design training sessions in the organization
• Roles documented
• Onboarding time (when I designer feels he/she is up and running)

Quality

• Number of one-and-ones coaching sessions
• Number of design feedback sessions
• Number of design bugs
• Documented processes, methods and…

This is the result of the survey, The State of Design — Swedish Edition 2019.

This year the survey was in English for the first time so more people could answer (lots of english speaking designers work in Sweden).

The responses were collected during May and September 2019 and 415 people answered this year (hey, we got a record 🚀).

The State of Design 2020

👉🏾 The State of Design 2020 report is now out 👈🏾

Summary 2019

• More companies are building their own design capability and starting to operationalize their design capability with more designers and design leaders. …

Att sälja design (spelar ingen roll om du kallar det Service Design, Design Thinking, produktdesign eller UX design) brukar vara svårt. Här är mina insikter från att ha gjort det ett tag.

✨Alla har ungefär samma utmaningar kring sälj, prata och intervjua andra som säljer

⭐️ Lyssna, empati & tillit är viktigast för att förstå vad kunden behöver och har problem med. Lyssna för att förstå.

🌟 Fokusera på att lösa kundens problem (bakomliggande behov) & inte sälja processer eller verktyg och annat tjafs

⭐️Det spelar ingen roll om du säljer design, agilt eller annat, det är samma för allt

🌟 Det är svårt att sälja en tjänst om man inte redan har en relation. …

This is the result of the survey, The State of UX — Swedish Edition 2018 (here are the result from 2017, 2016 & 2015 in Swedish). The survey was in Swedish (next year I’ll add English) but this report will be in mostly English.

The answers was collected during July and September 2018 and 355 people answered this year(hey, we got a record!).

Summary

• More strategic designers and design leaders answered this year. Are we seeing a trend of organizations finally start to see design as a strategic capability?
• More service designers answered, are more companies starting to understand that design is is not only about digital? …

This is a translation of the Swedish article I wrote a few weeks ago.

In my former life, sorry, employment, I worked at a large bank where I was in charge of an agile transformation for 1.5 years. Please note that my experience are not only about working with agile but more about change in general.

First some background, Handelsbanken was founded in 1871 and have branches in Scandinavia, Netherlands and UK. It is one of the most stable banks in the world and have had great financial and customer satisfaction metrics over the last twenty years. It has over 16 000 employees and I was part of the IT organization where there were approx. …

I mitt förra liv, förlåt, arbete, på en stor bank så drev jag en agil transformation under 1.5 år. Här är lite insikter och lärdomar som jag tar med från den resan.

Lite bakgrund, där jag arbetare var det en stor IT organisation med mellan 1000–1500 personer lite på hur man räknar. Företaget hade en egen projektmodell som är etablerad sedan flera år tillbaka, med process och roller. Det rullar ca 80–120 projekt parallellt. IT och affär var i två klassiska silos där affär inte tyckte IT levererade tillräckligt snabbt och IT upplevde att affär inte kunde bestämma sig eller hela tiden ändrade sig. När det ska göras ett projekt så plockas kompetenser och mänskor ihop från olika kompetensavdelningar som t.ex. utveckling, test och design. Det var en start och stopp där människor flyttades runt och ofta var inblandade i flera projekt samtidigt. Det var svårt att få en känsla för vart vi skulle då vision och strategi var abstrakt eller inte fanns. …

Why invest in design? I have heard this so many times, ”we do not need designers, we need developers/business analysts/testers”, ”how can design bring value to the bottom line?” or ”design is so fussy/vague/muzzy/add your word here”.

Here are some of the good arguments I use when I talk to the management and leaders.

• Design makes you deliver 2X faster time-to-market (1)
• Design reduce your development time with 33% (1)
• Design driven companies outperform S&P by 211% over 10 years (2)
• Design invested companies outperform competitors by two to one in growth. (6)
• Design invested companies bring 6% higher return to shareholders. …

So for a few days ago I asked my network and peers about the books they can recommend in the domain of change and leadership. This is what they told me, what an amazing list of great books. The list will be updated from time to time.

If you have any other good reads, just please let me know

Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design

The majority of companies, their employees and their leaders navigate a space where competitors appear overnight, customers demand innovations monthly, business plans rarely last a full year and career ladders have been replaced by trampolines. This environment of constant change will only accelerate in the future and traditional business leaders are ill equipped to deal with it. Just as we took our cues from MBAs and the military in casting the ideal CEO of the 20th century, we can look to design — in its broadest form — to model our future leader, the DEO. These leaders possess characteristics, behaviors and mindsets that allow them to excel in unpredictable, fast-moving and value-charged conditions. They are catalysts for transformation and agents of change. A hybrid of strategic business executive and creative problem-solver, the DEO is willing to take on anything as an object of design and looks at ALL problems as design challenges.Readers will learn not only why this form of leadership is essential to the success of modern organizations, but also what characteristics are best suited to this role. …