6 Tips To Increase Product Design ROI

About this article: This article summarizes Monterail's live event Driving Innovative Product Development with Design (Digital Product Journey #3), recorded on May 22, 2023. All quotes, job titles, and team details reflect that date. Watch the full recording on YouTube.

Product design generates project ROI when it's a strategic role in the team, not a last coat of UI polish. It decides what gets built, keeps teams aligned on the problems worth solving, and stops products from piling on features nobody uses.

To show how that works in practice, we brought together Gregor Young, CEO of Guild, a platform for building professional communities, and two of Monterail's product designers who worked on the product.

Who Spoke at Monterail's "Driving Innovative Product Development with Design" Event?

The panel brought together the client side and the design side of the same product. Roles below are as of May 2023:

• Gregor Young, CEO of Guild, a platform for building professional communities where participants can connect, communicate, and collaborate.

• Agnieszka Kozłowska, Senior Product Designer at Monterail, who had worked with Guild for over a year. She had more than seven years of experience in IT, a background in psychology, and an ongoing PhD in the field.

• Krzysztof Kaiser, Head of Product Design at Monterail, and a mentor and educator who teaches the principles of design and UX.

How Can Product Design Generate Project ROI? 6 Lessons from Guild

1. How Does Cross-Team Alignment Improve Product Design ROI?

Cross-team alignment makes sure design and development effort goes to the problems that matter most to the business. That sounds obvious, but it rarely comes easily. Guild struggled with team communication for several reasons, from working remotely to unclear task ownership.

Together with Monterail, Guild introduced Deep Dives. These are regular sessions that bring together the development team, the project manager, the designer, and the CEO. They typically happen every one or two months. Each one focuses on two or three major problems taken from the business roadmap, using workshop activities that fit the problem's scope. Deep Dives don't replace daily stand-ups or retrospectives, which carry on as usual.

"The best part about the Deep Dives is that the whole team is present, so we are able to explore and analyze all of these problems from just different angles, taking into account the different perspectives because we are all experts in different fields of product development."

— Agnieszka Kozłowska, Senior Product Designer at Monterail

Alignment needs structure, though. Give every session clear, actionable goals and leave with an up-to-date task list, or the time together won't pay for itself.

2. Why Should Founders Trust Product Designers with Problems, Not Solutions?

Founders get better design outcomes when they describe the problem and let designers find the solution. Many don't, and Gregor offers a likely reason: it means giving up control, which is hard for any business owner.

"As anyone matures and becomes more senior in their career, they learn that you can't do everything. The best thing you can do is surround yourself with brilliant, talented people and find ways to get the best out of them. A big part of that is relinquishing control, trusting in the skills and abilities of the people around you, stopping yourself from trying to go too far down the solution path."

— Gregor Young, CEO of Guild

Telling a designer exactly what to build and how it should look may be faster at first. But you get your own idea back, not the best one the team could have found. As Gregor put it, "There's a discipline in articulating problems, not articulating solutions, and appreciating and valuing the quality that you'll get."

Hiring strong designers is only half the job. The return comes when you let them work as experts in their field.

3. Is Product Design More Than UX/UI Design?

Yes. Product design covers the whole path from the first product concept to launch, while UX and UI design are parts of that path. Treating product design as just layouts and visuals throws away most of its value.

"Some people might think that Product Design is mostly about the visual part, and that's not the case. Product Design basically focuses on the entire path, from the first concept of the product to launch. So, it requires identifying user needs, balancing them with the business needs, of course, and checking for technical feasibility."

— Agnieszka Kozłowska, Senior Product Designer at Monterail

In practice, product designers work closely with the client and the development team. They weigh user needs, business goals, and technical constraints, so they shape the product's direction, not just its look. Does that mean product designers shouldn't touch UI? Not at all. Whether one person does both depends on team size and how complex the problem is. What matters is to treat the two as related but distinct.

Product design affects product strategy, how the market receives the product, and ultimately the bottom line. Fitting it into a small "UI" or "UX" box wastes that.

4. How Can Product Teams Avoid Feature Creep?

Teams avoid feature creep by checking every new request against the product as a whole and against what users actually need, before building anything. Feature creep means features pile up without a clear plan behind them. It snowballs quickly, so it's worth catching early.

Guild faced a demanding new user request and took a step back. Instead of building a new feature, which risked bloating the app, the team repurposed an older, underused one.

"Now, instead of having two features, with one of them not really being used, and generally greater complexity, we've got one feature that's used a lot."

— Gregor Young, CEO of Guild

Adding a feature for every new need works in the moment, but it costs you later in complexity, maintenance, and a muddier user experience. A long-term product plan makes immediate requests easier to handle, and it keeps the product leaner and cheaper to run.

5. Why Does a Product Team Need a Dedicated Product Designer?

Product design happens on every project whether or not anyone owns it. Without a dedicated designer, it gets done piecemeal by people whose main job is something else. Someone always has to translate user needs into interfaces, run UX interviews, and balance business needs with usability.

"When you don't have a product designer in your team, everyone's doing it. Say you have a product manager and some software developers. The product is going to be designed between those people. But none of them are really responsible for the design."

— Gregor Young, CEO of Guild

Guild learned this firsthand when design work fell to a frontend developer. Switching between design tasks and writing code cost focus and productivity.

A dedicated product designer, or a combined role in smaller teams, puts design expertise in one place. Everyone else can then stick to their own specialty. Without that owner, you end up with an improvised roadmap and visuals that don't scale. You also lose sight of how users actually interact with the product and what they're missing.

6. How Does Product Design Affect User Retention?

Users may not know what product design is, but they feel it every time they use an app. If the experience is frustrating, they leave, however strong the features or the value proposition. That makes design a direct driver of engagement and retention.

"It doesn't matter how cool the functionality is in the background, it doesn't matter how good the proposition is - if the users don't like clicking and swiping on the app, they're just going to stop using it, right? So it's so important that you have somebody who is competent, who is actually thinking about these aspects and taking them seriously and asking questions and making sure that all the product management and software development that we do, that we're actually looking after what the user wants."

— Gregor Young, CEO of Guild

A skilled product designer works on ease of use, intuitive navigation, and pleasant visuals, and balances what the user needs with what the business needs. Having someone who owns these questions full-time is the most reliable way to keep users coming back.

How Can You Apply These Product Design Lessons to Your Project?

Getting ROI from product design comes down to ownership and discipline. Someone has to own design end to end. The whole team needs a regular, structured way to agree on the problems worth solving. And every new feature request needs a hard look before anyone builds it. None of this requires a big team. It requires treating design as part of how you make product decisions, not a step at the end.

The panel covered much more than we could fit here, so watch the full recording for the complete conversation. To see what Monterail and Guild built together, read the Guild case study. For another example from the same series, read how Cooleaf grew from a startup into a profitable HR tech product. If you're weighing where product design fits in your own roadmap, take a look at Monterail's product design services and get in touch to talk it through.