The intersection of design and data

The essential rule of good decision-making is to know two things: what is going on and how to react to it.

Depending on their data maturity, many customer-centric and data-driven organizations are working on both, yet often acting as though they were separable.
As a result, their full potential and competitiveness are lost.
Could we see things differently if we stopped following patterns, started looking forward instead of backward, and let data embrace design?

In 1973, IBM's Watson Jr. famously said, "Good design is a good business". Many years later, it became clear that design-centric companies are outperforming their competitors*. On top of that, organizations are now enhancing their capabilities by integrating design with data.

I believe that data & design will be at the core of future-proof companies. It will improve both employee experience and customer experience. To succeed in this in the future, organizations must improve data maturity and capabilities.
As part of my role, I help companies on building data capabilities, improving existing operations as well as creating business models through new products and services.

How to combine design and data

The process is firstly a cultural transition into an agile company with operations based on a data strategy and making the data visible and accessible for everyone in it. Secondly, both your internal teams and external partners need clear data guidelines for future data quality & compatibility. Thirdly, form multi-disciplinary and data-inspired teams for growth and give them enough support.
After the business objective is clear to everyone, a good starting point is to explore what kind of data is currently available (owned/bought or open data) and proceed from there. Meanwhile, the team enriches the data with qualitative insights from end-user behavior.

Both data scientists and designers should work in harmony. One case could be simply improving an existing service through data.


Designers must also learn to think in new ways, such as imagining the product if a particular data would be available and then create a service to collect the data, which would bring a competitive edge in the future market. Meanwhile, Data scientists should expand their skills with design methodologies, and for example, work together with designers to create more predictive and prescriptive features for services.

First, the team must identify the most urgent problem that needs to be solved and then apply agile design practices to it.

The data scientists, designers and business representatives have to work as a team, be focused on the goal, and help each other. It is all about synergy. After that, the development process continues in a continuous loop of creating hypotheses, designing and running tests, and improving, analyzing the results and iterating the solutions. You can support the development process with growth hacking techniques, such as conversion optimization, marketing automation, and omnichannel.

Begin small and grow according to the results. Take the time to explore, discover, innovate, and, most importantly, enjoy the experience, and the results will speak for themselves. You'll see how much easier, inspiring, and fulfilling your job becomes. A company in which design meets data flourishes not only in research and development, but also in production, sales, marketing and our entire business model.

I hope this note inspired you to assist your team in becoming more knowledgeable about data and design.