Business Thinking for Designers

Create a design scorecard
Mature design teams don’t just experiment before going to 
market, they measure the effects of the designs in the market 
over time. 
Design scorecards are effective reports for showing the 
impact and results of overall design work. They are also an 
incredibly effective way to help cross-functional partners 
prioritize key factors like credibility or usability, because they 
connect project or product level deficiencies to the portfolio 
level. 

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I first learned about scorecards while I was at Apple. My 
colleagues in Program Management were using Balanced 
Scorecard reports to communicate their progress to executive 
leadership. Fascinated, I did some research on the origins 
of the approach and began to prototype different types of 
reports for design activities using the same approach. 
Figure 6-4: The Desirability Scorecard by Ryan Rumsey
By establishing a rating system for design efficacy across 
products, design teams can communicate the impact of 
their work at both a product and organizational level, even 
while using different rubrics or metrics. A standard rating 

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communicates both a point-of-view for trade-off decisions and 
helps to audit the design team’s ability to expose priority areas 
of need.
Over the last 10 years, I’ve refined my own scorecard approach 
to track and monitor design OKRs, KPIs, etc. to communicate 
the impact of design. This approach has been the core of 
my work with companies and design leaders since launching 
Second Wave Dive in 2019. 
Kim Williams from Minted on understanding and implementing OKRs 
(Watch online)

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