How to sell design and show the impact of design outcomes to business and finance leaders.
Many years ago a business unit CFO told me: “I don’t need another presentation explaining why design is important. I need to know whether investing another million dollars in design will outperform investing it in engineering or marketing.”
That conversation changed how I talk about design. Showing the value of design with quantitative data is one of the greatest challenges for a design leader. Our field has been a C-suite priority for years, but it’s still treated as a secondary contributor to business performance.
And part of that is on us. Many of us think of ourselves as artists of digital businesses, creative outsiders in conversations where everyone else talks numbers.
That may be true, but it sounds too convenient. We design products, so we have to lead with business outcomes: know our numbers, sell our ideas, and quantify the real-world impact of what we do.
If your CFO asked why design matters and what the value of your work is, what would you say?
Here are the five answers I gave mine.
#1. “Hold design to the same standard as any other investment: payback period and rate of return”
Every request that crosses a CFO’s desk gets the same two questions: how fast does the money come back, and how much value will it create beyond that? Finance calls them the payback period and the rate of return, and it applies them to every investment (machinery, software, headcount…).
My answer to that CFO was to judge design with those same two questions. Before giving him that answer, I had done my research and looked at real-world cases. In 2025, Forrester studied six global companies for the research platform UserTesting and tallied how much they spent on user research versus what they got in return.
The design work is right there in the findings: validating designs with users before launching shortened iteration cycles by 25% and avoided $2.5 million in developer rework. The overall ROI was 415% over three years, and the spending paid for itself in less than six months. Most investments a CFO approves take years to do that.
That study confirmed something I now repeat to every design leader I meet: finance already has the tools to evaluate design fairly, because it evaluates everything as an investment. We just have to hand over our numbers in that format.
When designers can clearly show the value of their work, it’s hard to question the budget, and that’s when you get the opportunity to try more ambitious work. Measured wins buy credibility.
#2. “Conversion is revenue we’ve already paid to acquire”
Companies know to the cent what they pay to bring a visitor in: marketing audits every campaign, every channel and every cost-per-click (CPC, CPA, cost per lead…). All of that money is spent by the time someone loads a shopping cart.
What happens after the click is, in most cases, considered the designer’s job and treated as a cosmetic layer. It’s hard to connect it to money. However, there’s data that proves it’s more tied to revenue than it seems.
The numbers I sometimes use to make this case come from Baymard Institute, which has calculated that seven out of ten shopping carts die at checkout (an average of 70.22%).
In many cases, this issue can be solved through design changes. According to their research, large e-commerce sites can lift conversion by 35.26% if they fix known checkout design issues. They estimate $260 billion in lost orders is recoverable in the US and EU through those fixes alone!
Every time I’ve presented these numbers to a non-design audience, the reaction has been the same: nobody had ever counted checkout friction as lost revenue. The money was always there, but it had no owner.
That’s why conversion is where I tell design leaders to start if they’ve never connected design to revenue. The attribution is clean, the results show fast, and finance tracks the metric for you.
#3. “User research is capital protection”
Every product idea can be tested before it’s built by making a prototype. You put it in front of a certain number of users, and within a few weeks you know whether the idea works. Total cost: one designer’s time.
Or you can skip the test, spend months building the product with several teams, and find out at launch that the idea didn’t work.
That’s what validation is for. When a test kills a bad idea early, the company saves everything it would have spent building it. Those savings never appear in reports, because nobody documents the disasters that didn’t happen. That’s why research always looks like the easiest thing to cut when budgets get tight, which is precisely why cutting research often proves expensive later.
If you need external proof, I recommend you read McKinsey’s Business Value of Design study. In this report, McKinsey tracked 300 companies over five years. The top performers grew revenue 32 percentage points faster and returned 56 percentage points more to shareholders (share price gains plus dividends) than their industry peers. One of the practices those companies shared was continually testing and iterating with users during development.
Validating pays twice: less money wasted on bad ideas, better products when the idea is good. These days I pitch it as ‘capital protection’ instead of research. Same work, faster approval.
#4. “A design system compounds like capital: build once, deploy everywhere”
Every quarter, I have a sense of the hours my teams saved by reusing components and UX patterns, translated into cost savings. It’s the design number finance verifies fastest, because it’s included in the timesheets and payroll data they trust.
That habit exists thanks to our design system: the library of components (buttons, forms, menus…), patterns and reusable experiences, that teams design and code once and then reuse everywhere. Those pieces are one of design’s few compounding assets. You pay for them once, and they keep paying back every time someone reuses them.
If you don’t have your own numbers yet, Sparkbox has public ones. In a small, controlled experiment, eight developers built the same page twice: first from scratch, then using an open-source design system. The scratch version took a median of 4.2 hours; with the design system, they built it in 2 hours.
Scale those hours across everything a product team ships in a year and the savings add up to weeks of work. With consistent components, there’s less quality assurance. and fewer support tickets. New designers can ship sooner because the pieces they use are there from day one.
Any team running a design system can pull the same numbers from its own tools.
#5. “When features become commodities, design is the pricing power”
Today, any feature we ship can be copied by a competitor within weeks. AI accelerated this for everyone. The AI in Design Report 2026 (a survey of 906 designers in 60+ countries) found that 91% of designers now use AI at least weekly, up from 54% the year before.
When every team builds with the same tools, products end up with similar features. And when two products do the same thing, people choose the one that’s easier and nicer to use. Customers are often willing to pay more for that experience and remain loyal longer. Finance has a name for being able to charge more without losing customers: pricing power.
Experience has become the differentiator and one of the main reasons a customer would choose your product over competitors’. It’s what protects the price. The responsibility of building an outstanding user experience is, of course, on designers.
There’s measurable financial impact behind our craft
None of the five answers I’ve shared in this article required inventing new math. Payback, conversion, validation, reuse and pricing power are terms your CFO uses daily.
If you lead a design team, your job is to translate what you do into terms and numbers your finance team can understand and validate.
Two habits have helped me. The first is to talk to finance before you need something from them. Ask what they report every month and which numbers they argue over, because that’s the fastest crash course in how your company measures itself. The second is to report design metrics on a schedule. You’ll build more trust with your C Suite if you present your team’s performance, in business terms, periodically. It shows you understand that design, like every other function, answers for its results.
One thing I always clarify in these conversations is that money is only half of the design’s value. Besides the monetary value (productivity, fewer user errors, lower training and support costs), there is also human value (user satisfaction, inclusion, customer loyalty, adoption).
I’ve never had a CFO reject the human half when it came with the monetary one.
As for being ‘the artists of digital businesses’: We can keep the craft and speak numbers at the same time. In my experience, that combination is what gets design taken seriously.
Arin Bhowmick (@arinbhowmick) is Chief Design Officer at SAP, based in San Francisco, California. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent SAP’s positions, strategies or opinions.
What I told the CFO when he asked why design matters was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
