Pietro Consavari, VP for Product Design and Product-Led Growth at Birdeye, gave this talk at the Product-Led Festival. In his presentation, he covered topics such as:

You can check out the highlights below, or watch the full presentation on demand.

Hi, My name is Pietro Consavari, and today I’m going to talk about how good design can affect your bottom line.

Firstly, a couple of things about me. I was born in Venice, Italy, and have always been a curious person. I’ve always loved observing human beings and understanding what makes them happy and why people perceive something as beautiful or simple.

That curiosity eventually led me into design.

I started my career at various Milan agencies, working for some large brands. I relocated at one point to the United States in the Bay Area, where I worked in the tech space for several software companies including Amazon.

Eventually, I joined BirdEye on day zero as a Founding Designer. What really drove me to join BirdEye was to be a builder in a fast-moving startup business environment.

Today, BirdEye is a very successful company. it has 90,000 customers all these years later.

Now, I'd like to share some of my learnings with you today. I always believe that the most relevant work happens at the confluence of user needs and business objectives, so I've always been aware and curious about the business impact of my design work. So today, I want to share some of my learnings on how design can affect business outcomes.

Seeking action in every digital product

I’d like to start at the very core of what drives business outcomes when we build digital products for users. And that’s actions. Actions in our products, actions in our workflows, actions in a website, and actions in our mobile apps. The more actions, the more successful those products will be.

We have processes in place. We measure those actions, we analyze them, we learn from them, and we iterate on them. So how can we make all of these better with good design?

Good design can help us by answering the main question behind it all: what leads us to action? It's a question that I asked myself for a very long time in everything I designed. And I found a very interesting answer a long time ago, and from an unexpected source.

It's a statement from Donald Calne, a Canadian neurologist, and this statement is found in his research on Parkinson's disease of all things. It says:

“Reason leads to conclusion. Emotion leads to action.”

I always find Donald Calne’s statement very interesting, and I’ve applied it often in my career as a designer. And I’d like to tell you a short story about one time this worked really well for me.

Improving YoY growth through design-driven experimentation

This is a story of a SaaS company, and a successful SaaS company at that, with 65% year-over-year (YoY) growth. This company had a so-so looking website, and everyone in the company agreed. Good design in the product and brand wasn’t exactly what they were famous for. But again, they were an incredibly successful company.

I remember asking myself very quickly when I was there, Why is it like this and not like that? I was fairly new to this data-driven tech space, and I was coming from Italy. All of my work was centered around beautiful and emotional design, so to speak.

So when I immediately asked myself that question, the explanation came fairly quickly, and I went down this rabbit hole of iterative experiments where every action in every funnel is measured and analyzed.

I remember loving it. It felt very scientific. We were working through the wonderful experimentation of incremental improvements and we were constantly iterating on these designs.

Through I remember asking myself, How can all of these be improved? How can I make all these even better?

And sitting down with my PM at the time, I remember having this conversation with him. And in a somewhat irrational, maybe unplanned way, I remember convincing him to introduce design to the mix.

We then introduced a variable completely driven by what in my perspective was good design. So we didn't change any of the content, we just introduced those elements, such as freshness and modernity, and so on and so forth, that were somewhat forgotten or put on the back burner in favor of these small incremental improvements that were being iterated on for many years by this company.

So we did what you could call a design-driven, boulder test versus Babel test, and we ended up with a very interesting result. We ended up measuring something incredibly unexpected, which was a 120% increase in our overall performance. That's what we ended up with, compared to the 1,2,3,4% incremental improvements we were measuring before.

So as you can imagine, that sparked a lot of internal conversation that eventually led to the rebranding of the company. The company moved from 65% YoY growth to 110%. I'm not saying that it was all driven by this, but that's what eventually happened, and they had a great website.

So, consciously or maybe partially unconsciously, we were able to frame that Donald Calne concept, in which good design was able to infuse that emotional field that drove these users to action.

The 10 principles of good design

So, apparently, good design can drive action. But how do you identify with design? It’s an interesting question for me.

To narrow down the possibilities of what can be an incredibly complicated and complex answer to what good design is, my recommendation is to reference Dieter Rams, who many years ago codified what good design is in 10 principles.

Good design:

  • is innovative
  • Makes a product useful
  • Is aesthetic,
  • Makes a product understandable
  • Is unobtrusive
  • Is honest
  • Is long-lasting
  • Is thorough down to the last detail
  • Is environmentally friendly
  • Involves as little design as possible

And according to Dieter Rams (and I agree with him), for good design, you put a checkmark on all of these principles.

The benefits of bringing good design into your processes

So how can that help us every day? How can good design be put to work for us in building our products? There are several ways, in my opinion.

Think scale. Scale is a topic that we talk about very often in SaaS and when building our products. Good design is inherently at scale.

Think of an example of good design, such as the Thonet chair, which revolutionized how chairs were made in the 1800s. Six pieces of wood, 10 screws, two nuts. And it caused the furniture manufacturing revolution to scale, just through its design.

You can do the same by bringing design into your processes and into the processes of your organization, using all the things that I just talked about. You can easily bring it into your processes by giving design a seat at the table.

And that design thinking can contribute to effectively scaling your processes and your way of ideating and creating.

Think about emotions. Those emotions that we just talked about lead to action. And how about making those systemic in everything we do and build?

We all identify the iPhone as one of the greatest examples of good and successful design. And if we look under the hood, one of the main drivers of the incredible success of this product is that beautiful and cohesive design-driven ecosystem that’s used every day, and that’s driven the success of the iPhone from day one.

You can do the same. Good design can do that for you. Good design can help you build that incredibly cohesive and beautiful design system and leverage systemically all this goodness, and drive efficiency and collaboration around pretty much everything you do.

One of the last things that I’d like to talk about is people and humanity. Good designers see people behind clicks. Designers love data, and are fierce advocates for the people that use our products. So design can help you bring that human perspective to both data collection and data interpretation.

So, embedding design in your processes can truly help you leverage that design thinking around everything you do, and help you iterate, ship, and scale processes that you use every day.

Redesigning the design department

My final recommendation, if you want to deep dive into some of these topics, is a wonderful study from McKinsey that just came out called, ‘Redesigning the design department.’ There's a lot of great learning around this topic that can be incredibly complex.

So my final recommendation is McKinsey’s study, which is about transforming your design departments from fortified castles into vibrant town squares, and how to reap the incredible benefits that can come with it.