Great Strategy is Design(ed)
You’re a designer? Congratulations, you’re a strategist. You just don’t know it yet.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn on February 27, 2025.
Years ago, when I was running my firm Mod7, a tech startup approached me looking to get their music delivery service’s UI redesigned.
Pretty simple design request, right?
But during our first conversation, as they described their vision, I started asking questions about their business model, licensing arrangements, technology constraints, and what customer problems they were solving.
Their reaction: “You sure you’re just a designer?”
Yes, they were business questions. And yes, I was a “just” designer.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
It soon became clear they had jumped ahead to building the product experience without agreeing on the fundamental customer problem, understanding digital rights management limitations, or considering how platform and delivery choices would impact the user experience.
I brought in a trusted technology partner, and together we helped them navigate these strategic challenges. The final result was quite different than they initially imagined, both in business model and design. Had we jumped in with their initial vision, it would have been a disaster.
You’re a designer? Congratulations, you’re a strategist. You just don’t know it yet.
I imagine I’ve just made both designers and strategists quite annoyed with me. How dare I conflate the more intuitive, taste-driven practice of design with the structured, business-y work of strategy?
I’m a designer. Or so people have told me. (What kind of designer? Well, to be sure, there are all kinds. Doesn’t really matter right now. Most definitions will suffice here.)
But I’ve also been called the ‘s’ word.
That’s right. Folks have called me—gasp!—strategic.
Designers often say they want a “seat at the table.” Which means we want to be part of strategic decision-making, not just tasked with executing designs. We want involvement in discussions that shape business direction and strategy from the start.
The problem is, to do that, designers often face the perception from others that we don’t have the right toolkit. Strategy is viewed as something separate. We’re told—implicitly and sometimes explicitly—that strategic thinking belongs to MBAs and management consultants, not designers. And sometimes business strategy feels at odds with the design, moral, and spiritual standards we (think we) hold to as a profession.
This perceived divide makes designers uncomfortable stepping into strategic conversations.
So, at the risk of falling into that “when you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail” trap, let me share a hypothesis that I’ve been slowly coming to accept as a plausible working theory (how’s that for hedging?)…
Great Strategy is Design(ed).
While I wouldn’t say that the “is” in that statement represents a perfect equivalency, it’s a hypothesis I’ve tested throughout my career.
The false divide between design and strategy
I’ve never seen a difference between design and strategy (possibly to my detriment as a designer, though not as an entrepreneur). To me, they’re the same thing. You have a goal, and you craft a solution to reach that goal.
So it’s only natural that, as I’d become more involved in “problems of the higher order” in organizations, as the area of concern moved from tactical—rounded buttons or square corners? (Honestly, who cares*)—to the strategic—business, people, and society-level obstacles with complex, interconnected levers and causes—I began to view these strategic problems through the lens of design.
I’ve always embraced the idea that design is a process, not the end result. The end result is an artifact that (hopefully) realizes the full potential of the process to achieve that goal. Strategy is the same thing.
Strategy is problem definition and diagnosis, like design
If you can map a user journey, you can map the forces creating a business challenge. Same skill, different context.
Both designers and strategists know that before you can solve a problem, you need to understand it. Richard Rumelt and Roger Martin , two strategy giants, emphasize this: define the problem everyone agrees on, then diagnose why it exists.
Sound familiar? It’s exactly what we do in design research and discovery. Great designers don’t just ask, “What does the client want?” but rather, “What’s the actual problem we’re solving, and why does it exist?”
Great designers, like great strategists, know the quality of their solution is directly proportional to their understanding of the problem. They resist the urge to jump to solutions until they’ve thoroughly mapped out the challenge from multiple angles.
Strategy is hypothesis-driven, like design
The intuitive leaps you make as a designer aren’t magical—they’re the result of pattern recognition and synthesis. Those same skills apply to business strategy.
Design and strategy both operate under uncertainty. We gather what data we can, but eventually, we have to make an informed leap.
In strategy, we form a guiding principle—a hypothesis about what will create change. In design, we might call that creative direction. Both serve as North Stars when the path forward isn’t completely clear.
When facing a strategic challenge, trust the same instincts that guide your design decisions. That ability to synthesize research, constraints, and intuition into a coherent direction? It’s equally valuable whether you’re designing an interface or a competitive differentiation strategy.
Strategy is iterative action, like design
If you wouldn’t launch a product without user testing, why would you launch a strategy without testing its assumptions? The design thinking cycle of build-measure-learn applies equally to both.
No strategy survives first contact with reality—just like no design survives first contact with users.
Designers understand this instinctively. We prototype, test, learn, refine. Strategy should follow the same cycle: implement, sense outcomes, adapt. This is the “probe, sense, respond” model of executing strategy in complex environments.
The ability to launch small experiments, gather feedback, and quickly iterate is as essential to good strategy as it is to good design. Both reject the myth of the perfect solution emerging fully-formed from a single brilliant insight.
What does this mean for designers looking to make a strategic impact?
If you’re a designer looking to add value to a strategic decision-making process, don’t limit yourself by thinking you need to learn an entirely new discipline. Instead, recognize how your existing toolkit translates.
Your research skills are strategy skills. User interviews? Stakeholder interviews. Journey maps? Strategic system maps. Personas? Market segments. The methods and terminology differ slightly, but the underlying skills are the same.
Your synthesis abilities are strategy gold. Designers are great at finding patterns in chaos and turning complex information into clear direction. This is exactly what’s needed when tackling business challenges.
Your prototyping mindset is the future of strategy execution. The old “five-year plan” approach to strategy is dying (actually, that’s not true—it’s dead cold). Today’s business environment requires adaptive, iterative approaches—which is exactly how designers work.
Your visualization skills make abstract ideas concrete. Strategy often fails in execution because other people across the organization—particularly middle-management tasked with communicating the vision to their teams—can’t clearly see, fully understand, or easily articulate the vision. Designers know how to make the invisible visible.
Design doesn’t exist in isolation; it needs to address business problems. Every design decision must have a “why,” and in a commercial context, the “why” is always a business goal or constraint. Sometimes it’s tactical growth, sometimes it’s brand positioning, sometimes it’s market differentiation. Great designers know this, and can tell compelling stories that connect their decisions to solving the hard problems that stand in the way of achieving goals. And guess what? That’s a critical ability for a strategist, too.
So next time you’re in a meeting where business direction, market challenges, or organizational structure come up, don’t shy away thinking “that’s not me, I’m a designer.” Instead, recognize that the design process you use every day can solve these larger problems too.
Listen, synthesize, visualize, and be prepared to offer value like only you can.
* Okay, about that button comment—yes, details matter. But they matter in service of solving the larger problem, not as ends in themselves. More on that in a future piece.