Tip #5: Narrate and illustrate your story.

Showing how you got there and where to go next helps build internal capacity.

Metrics shouldn’t be opaque figures – they should show how your actions link to the outcomes you’ve achieved. By documenting assumptions and clearly stating the methodology behind your results, you’ll make the numbers more meaningful, win credibility along the way, and help your organization learn.

Help the organization learn by documenting and sharing results both qualitatively and quantitatively.

The ultimate goal of any measurement system is to gather enough data to start identifying patterns which can inform better decision-making. With this in mind, it is important to document and share the results of your work both during the project and after its end. This will prove valuable to the company when making future design investment decisions.

However, numbers rarely tell the whole story. In order to fully understand and communicate the value of the design process, the team should also develop case studies or reports that pair quantitative results with anecdotes and context about the process and situation. A strong case study demonstrates the bread crumb trail linking innovation investments, design activities, new insights, breakthrough products, and market results.

Consistently tracking design over time will  uncover valuable insight around what works      and what doesn’t.

At HP, we’ve been building a rich business cases history of design successes to help institutionalize knowledge and inform future decisions by adding qualitative details, sharing best practices, and highlighting successes. This mixture of sharable qualitative and quantitative data, documented so that anyone from design to finance can analyze and access it, helps to assess the specific impacts being delivered and to continually build our knowledge and experience base. Over time, design teams and managers will be able to mine this resource to learn which metrics to start paying attention to, create an accurate picture of what a great product development process looks like and, even, how certain fuzzy design activities can lead to tangible market success.

But don’t try to claim all of the credit for success.

As mentioned above, forging and maintaining a constructive relationships with other groups is incredibly important for helping to track and follow-up on design results over months or years. Their collaborative involvement is crucial to the success of any new product development or innovation. The business’s eventual success will be driven by multiple factors, and projecting and reporting outcome metrics for your project shouldn’t be about isolating the role of the product development team to the exclusion of these other groups. By tracking these measures as part of the process, however, a product development team can better understand how their work and investments can translate to business success, and the business, in turn, understands the value of design.

Innovation and design have an unpredictable creative element, but that doesn’t mean their impacts are impossible to measure. In order for these practices to thrive and become an integral part of a business, they need to operate within a process that’s structured enough to drive towards larger strategic business goals while remaining flexible enough to enable exploration, creativity and discovery. Measurement tools can’t replace good design judgment. Instead, they should add structure to discussions about the value of design.

A well-designed measurement system can serve as a both a catalyst for stronger collaboration between all the stakeholders in an organization’s product development process and a compass for creative teams to make sure they’re heading in the right direction.

Related posts:

1. Five Key Strategies for Making Metrics
2. Design Council’s Lessons from America
3. Five Key Strategies for Managing Change
4. Design Strategies for Technology Adoption
5. Sustaining vs. Disruptive Innovations