If design is critical to your business, but you treat it like production — you have a risk problem.
If graphic and digital designers are critical to your business, you’re not just running a creative function, you’re protecting revenue, brand equity and customer experience. Yet many companies underestimate the operational and strategic challenges that come with relying heavily on design talent that drive brand, sales, customer engagement and market positioning.
While Leaders say design is important, from a structural perspective, design is often treated as something to be executed, implemented or even as an after thought and can be completely unaware of some of the key pressure points experienced by their design teams.
Here are some of the issues we see across many of the businesses and companies we partner with.
1. Creativity vs commercial tension
Designers want to create great work, businesses want results and when those two viewpoints aren’t aligned, friction appears.
High-performing companies don’t just ask designers to “make it look good.” They connect design to:
Conversion rates
Shelf impact
Brand perception
Campaign performance
The strongest design hires are not just about aesthetics, they understand business outcomes, applying strategy to achieve positive results for a business.
2. Speed is increasing yet capacity is not
Content cycles are relentless:
Social assets
eDMs
Packaging refreshes
Video snippets
Campaign rollouts
Design teams are often expected to operate at agency speed inside in-house studios running the risk of burnout, declining quality and reactive design that chips away at brand integrity.
If your design team constantly feels “under the pump,” it’s not just a workload issue, it’s a structural one.
3. Design by Committee kills momentum
Everyone has an opinion about design and without clear ownership, feedback becomes:
Contradictory
Subjective
Endless
Your best designers will tolerate a lot but they won’t stay for the long term in a business where strategy is overridden by personal taste.
Clear decision-making frameworks aren’t just good governance, they’re key tools in the retention of your best talent.
4. Talent is harder to replace than you may think
The market is tight for designers who combine:
Technical capability
Brand thinking
Digital understanding
Commercial awareness
Many businesses learn this the hard way when a key designer leaves and if your brand lives in that person’s head, it creates a risk exposure, not just a vacancy.
Strong design functions build:
Systems
Documentation
Shared knowledge
Leadership depth
5. The ROI Question
One of the biggest challenges leaders face is how to measure the return on design.
You won’t always draw a straight line between a brand refresh and revenue growth, but you will see impact in:
Engagement
Conversion
Customer trust
Market positioning
The companies who treat design as a strategic investment as opposed to a production cost consistently outperform competitors who view it as an expense line on the balance sheet.
6. Skill Sets Are Evolving
In todays workplace, a designer isn’t just producing artwork, they are expected to have a much wider range of knowledge and skills:
Motion Graphics
UX/UI
Data insights
AI tools
Multi-channel storytelling
If you’re hiring based on yesterday’s job description, you’re already behind.
The Real Question for Leaders
If design is critical to your business, ask yourself:
Is it embedded in strategy — or brought in at the end?
Is feedback structured — or political?
Are we hiring implementers — or thinkers?
Do we have succession depth — or single-point dependency?
When design functions well, it accelerates growth, when it doesn’t, it quietly erodes brand value. For companies engaged in competitive markets, brand erosion can transform into an expensive problem.