Designers: The Cost-Effective Consultants Hiding in Plain Sight

In organizations with mid-level design maturity, design is often viewed as a tactical function—focused on crafting polished visuals, improving usability, or refining interfaces. While those are significant contributions, they barely scratch what a designer can bring. A skilled designer on your team offers something much more powerful: the ability to drive strategy in the same way a consulting firm might—only at a fraction of the cost and with deeper organizational understanding.

Here’s why having a designer on your team is like having your consulting partner and is a game-changer for your business.

Designers Uncover Root Causes, Not Just Symptoms

Consulting firms are often brought in to analyze inefficiencies and recommend solutions. However, designers bring a human-centered lens that uncovers the root causes of problems rather than just addressing surface symptoms—a capability vital for impactful strategy.

Take the challenge of rising call center costs. The default approach might involve tweaking agent tools or increasing training. But a designer digs deeper. Using frameworks like journey mapping and service blueprints, they analyze the broader ecosystem—customer interactions, internal workflows, and upstream touchpoints. Often, the real drivers of inefficiency are systemic issues, such as unclear billing statements or poorly designed self-service tools.

This approach aligns with principles like the Double Diamond framework, which emphasizes discovering the right problem before pursuing solutions. Designers reframe challenges holistically, creating solutions that address immediate pain points and deliver sustainable business impact.

Research supports this. McKinsey’s The Business Value of Design report shows that companies integrating design into strategic problem-solving outperform peers in revenue and shareholder returns. By uncovering root causes, designers act as strategic partners, driving clarity, innovation, and measurable outcomes.

This is why design isn’t just execution—it’s a strategic advantage.

Designers Bring a Holistic View of Systems and People

While consultants excel at creating frameworks to address complex systems, designers add a critical dimension to these efforts: empathy for the people who navigate those systems daily. This human-centered approach ensures that strategies are operationally efficient and aligned with real user needs and experiences.

Designers use service blueprints, experience maps, and systems diagrams to uncover how user touchpoints, internal workflows, and backend processes interact. Identifying friction points and opportunities across the entire ecosystem provides actionable insights that drive impactful change.

This perspective aligns with contemporary thought leaders such as Marc Stickdorn, author of This is Service Design Doing, who emphasizes that systems thinking and service design are critical for aligning internal processes with customer experiences. Similarly, Jeanne Liedtka, a leading advocate for design thinking in business, argues in Designing for Growth that human-centered design enables organizations to explore the complex interplay of desirability, feasibility, and viability, ultimately delivering solutions that balance user satisfaction with business objectives.

Consider a scenario where an organization is undergoing digital transformation. A designer might create a service blueprint that maps the customer’s experience across a mobile app, call center, and physical store while overlaying the internal processes and technology that support these touchpoints. By revealing where breakdowns occur—such as siloed teams or redundant workflows—designers pinpoint the problems and the systemic changes needed to improve the customer journey and operational efficiency.

TThe impact of this holistic view is backed by advocates like Kate Tarling, whose work in service design shows how a systems-first, human-centered approach transforms large-scale organizations. Designers don’t just fix individual issues; they uncover and resolve systemic challenges that affect the entire ecosystem.

This unique blend of empathy and systems thinking ensures that strategies are operationally sound and resonate with the people they’re designed to serve. It’s a perspective that leads to more thoughtful, impactful decisions—something every organization should prioritize in its strategic efforts.

Designers Test Ideas Before You Invest Big

One of the most significant costs in strategy is the risk of implementing ideas that fail to deliver the intended results. Consultants often mitigate this risk through simulations, financial models, or high-level analyses. Designers approach the challenge differently by creating prototypes and conducting user testing to validate ideas early. This hands-on approach reduces the likelihood of costly missteps and ensures that solutions are grounded in real-world needs and behaviors.

Consider a scenario where an organization is evaluating a new digital tool to streamline customer service interactions. Instead of investing heavily in development based on assumptions, a designer might create a low-fidelity prototype—a simple, interactive model that captures the tool’s core functionalities. Using this prototype, the designer conducts usability testing with users, observing their interactions and collecting feedback on ease of use, clarity, and relevance.

During testing, the designer may uncover unexpected insights, such as users struggling to navigate the tool due to unclear labeling or redundant steps in the workflow. These insights allow the organization to refine the solution before committing significant resources, ensuring the final implementation effectively addresses pain points.

This approach is grounded in design practices championed by advocates like Bill Buxton, author of Sketching User Experiences, who emphasizes the power of iterative exploration in uncovering and resolving potential failures early. Similarly, Erika Hall, in Just Enough Research, highlights the value of lightweight, rapid testing to validate assumptions before scaling. Both thought leaders advocate for embedding experimentation into a strategy to reduce risk and improve outcomes.

The benefits of this approach go beyond just avoiding financial waste. It also fosters cross-functional alignment as teams rally around shared insights from fundamental user interactions. Prototyping becomes a collaborative tool, bridging gaps between business, design, and technical teams while ensuring that solutions are feasible and user-centered.

In a business environment where speed and agility are essential, the ability to test and refine ideas before making significant investments is a strategic advantage. Designers excel at this process, bringing rigor, creativity, and user insights to ensure your strategy is built on a solid foundation.

Designers Turn Strategy into Stories

Storytelling is not just about selling an idea but building a shared vision. Designers create narratives that transcend data and strategy, offering a clear, emotionally resonant path forward. In a world where competing priorities often cloud decision-making, this ability to align and inspire is invaluable. By focusing on user impact and illustrating the human side of decisions, designers bring strategies to life in a way no other function can. As Nancy Duarte says, “People adopt ideas when connected to an emotional experience.”

A real-life case study was when Airbnb redesigned its host onboarding process. The team didn’t just present wireframes or workflows. They created a story centered around “Jane,” a first-time host overwhelmed by the process. The design team illustrated her struggles and how the new onboarding flow simplified her experience. By putting Jane at the center of the narrative, they convinced executives and cross-functional teams to rally around the redesign. The result? A measurable increase in host retention and satisfaction.

No other function in your organization is as equipped as design to blend creativity, data, and human insight into compelling stories. By turning strategy into a story, designers ensure that it doesn’t just sit in a slide deck—it comes to life, driving real action and impact.

Designers Are Already Embedded in Your Organization

What makes designers invaluable is their deep immersion in your organization’s culture, processes, and goals. Unlike external consultants, designers on your team already understand the nuances of your internal dynamics—your team’s strengths, bottlenecks, and unspoken norms that influence decisions. They know your customers intimately, often through direct research, and have a historical perspective on past initiatives, enabling them to propose immediately credible and achievable solutions.

This insider knowledge allows designers to deliver recommendations tailored to the organization’s long-term vision and day-to-day realities. For example, when implementing a new self-service platform, a designer doesn’t just prototype a solution; they account for how it integrates seamlessly with existing workflows, technology, and customer touchpoints. Their insights aren’t just theoretical—they’re grounded in the practicalities of your team’s capabilities and constraints, making their solutions actionable and sustainable.

Designers also play a critical role as facilitators, leveraging their proximity to teams across functions—product, engineering, marketing, and leadership—to drive alignment. They’ve built relationships within the organization and use their unique position to bridge silos, lead collaborative workshops, and create artifacts that keep everyone aligned from concept to execution. Unlike consultants who often deliver strategies at a high level and leave the execution to others, designers stay involved throughout the process, ensuring that the vision translates into impactful outcomes.

Ultimately, designers are more than contributors to individual projects—they’re strategic partners who view challenges as opportunities to strengthen the organization’s systems and deliver lasting impact. Their familiarity with your internal landscape and ability to craft solutions that resonate at every level make them indispensable in shaping strategy and driving meaningful change.

Why This Matters

Having a designer on your team is like having a consultant who’s always on call, deeply invested in your success, and far more cost-effective. They bring the skills, frameworks, and strategic thinking needed to tackle big challenges—reducing call center costs, launching a new product, or aligning cross-functional teams.

In today’s fast-paced, competitive landscape, strategic design thinking isn’t just an asset—it’s a necessity.

So, the next time you’re considering hiring a consulting firm, ask yourself: Do I already have a designer who can help solve this? Chances are, the answer is yes.

Would you like to explore how I could help your team unlock this value? Let’s talk.