Knowing your impact as a designer
Ways of measuring your influence on your team and beyond
Over the last few years, DesignOps has been a hot topic. It’s a way for design teams to improve their efficiency and give themselves guidelines. Design leaders use metrics like OKRs and KPIs to track their impact as a department. They build playbooks, a set of standards that help designers work better together.
But how do you show your impact at an individual level? At school we had grades and attendance, but we don’t track metrics like that at work because there’s more nuance. So how do designers show that they’re being effective?
In my experience, your actions can have impact on four levels; other designers, the people you work with daily, your company, and yourself. You’ll impact each person in different ways, depending on their goals and their relationship to you.
In this article I want to cover some questions to ask yourself, so you can understand how you’re influencing the people you work with.
