Hey Reader,
Ngl, I'm questioning if it's a good idea to send this email. But I've committed to sharing something I'm learning or thinking about in my role as Creative Director each week, and what's been on my mind this week is accountability and ownership โ or rather, a lack of it.
Sometimes when a designer is asked about how their work performed, they'll give a response like:
"I wasn't given the results."
or
"Nobody shared the metrics with me, so I don't know how it performed."
This pattern has come up recently during our motion designer hiring process when we've been evaluating candidates on their ability to understand the business impact of their work, but I've been noticing it for years โ in mentorship calls, at conferences, and in countless conversations with marketing designers.
Here's my ๐ถ๏ธ hot take ๐ถ๏ธ on the matter:
If you're waiting for data to be handed to you, you're holding yourself back from progressing in your career.
The more you understand how your work performs, the better your design decisions become. Your gut instincts get sharper because they're informed by real outcomes, not just aesthetic preferences.
And you cannot just wait for those insights to come to you. You have to seek them out. There is no one to blame but yourself.
Since I'm not about sharing hot takes without some actual advice to go alongside it:
A few quick tips to start taking ownership of the impact of your work
Ask for a data walkthrough. Speak to the project owner and ask them to show you how they're looking at the results of the projects you're collaborating on. Get a tour of their dashboard and look at the results together.
Get specific with your questions. If you know an ad campaign just ran with 3 different variations of an asset, ask which led to the most click-throughs, which got the most views, which had the biggest impact on the project goals... Don't just accept "it did well"; ask follow ups!
Form hypotheses. Once you have the data, think about what might have caused those results. Was it the color choice? The headline treatment? The overall composition? Now you have something to test next time.
Connect with your data team. Ask them how you can access these results yourself going forward. Most companies have dashboards that designers can learn to read - you just have to ask.
The key mindset shift is this:
Your responsibility doesn't end when you hand over the file.
Follow your work through to the results. Take ownership of learning from the impact your work is having on the business.
It's okay to not know off the top of your head exactly how an asset performed. But you're holding yourself back if you shift the responsibility to your collaborators and blame them when you haven't taken the time to find out.
This is what separates designers who just make things look good from those who drive real business outcomes. And guess which ones tend to get promoted (and hired)?
Talk soon,
PS: Genuinely curious to hear what you think about this topic! Is it too much to expect designers to stay close to the data? What's your relationship with data like?
A reminder that all replies to this newsletter reach my inbox directly, and I'm always interested in hearing your thoughts โค๏ธ
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