Should Designers carry a quota?

I’m a new UX Designer pivoting from an 8-year career in software sales. I left a 6-figure base salary as an enterprise account executive in June 2021.

Sometimes I feel like a Product Growth Design Generalist that tackles market research like a Product Manager, cold calls like a Sales Development Rep, and sells like an Enterprise Account Executive.

So far, customer discovery has been the most substantial overlap between Software Sales and UX Design. The first job to be done in each role is to uncover a core customer problem. This is a hot take but I don’t think UX Designers are very good at customer discovery.

1. UX Research covers the bulk of customer discovery. UX Research is important but follows a lot of protocols seen in Academic Research. Academic Research follows a lot of strict guidelines and my take is that this isn’t an efficient way to understand user problems if we believe time, is money. This form of discovery often works in public university settings, or non-profit type work but is it appropriate for most companies? It’s a costly unnatural approach to uncover a customer problem.
2. UX Teams have no immediate incentives to improve, their writing, speaking, or communication skills because their job security is not tied to these skills. Nor are they incentivized to work on the highest-impact problem. Sales Reps are incentivized to go to great lengths to find the core problem. I’ve never seen a UX Designer partner with sales to contribute to cold outreach, go through recycled leads, or regularly join sales calls. I have seen UX Teams pay for scheduled discovery meetings, but now we are talking sunk cost.

In sales, your job security and quarterly paycheck depend on problem comprehension, communication, and the ability to lead discovery. They are sensitive to time spent on tasks and are always calculating the outcomes relative to the business. Sales reps start from the end and work backward every time before spending resources on anything.

If I solve X problem what will that mean for Y customer’s business?

What does solving this problem mean for you?

How much are you willing to pay if we solve it?

If I spend time learning more about X customer problems what does that mean for my quota?

Hitting a quota is the most efficient way for anyone to quickly assess your ability. Assuming the best intentions around quota structuring it’s the easiest way to create a scorecard that universally translates everyone's progress toward a shared company goal. Teams that depend on academic jargon to signal importance typically have no universal way to translate their contribution to the only metric our capitalist system cares about. Revenue, Profit, ROI, Cost, Cheddar, Cream. Cash does indeed rule everything around us.

For the UX community, I haven’t seen any common metric to prioritize a customer problem or judge how good you are at your job for that matter. So far it feels like vanity metrics, years of experience, and opinion.

“Designing for the overlap between the customer and business” has been a common theme, but that will require creating a measured approach to the design process that ends with revenue generated. Of course, there are plenty of organizations where this language would be counterintuitive and rightfully offensive.

If you’re a UX Designer working for a venture-backed company or publicly traded company you need to communicate the business impact of your work. Most teams missing a seat at the table only think in terms of operational efficiency, reduced risk, or customer experience, and are not successful at directly linking to business revenue.

By not taking on a quota tied to revenue you give others the power to question your value and creative process. Instead, you can explain the value of your work by creating measurable metrics that link to customer experiences and revenue

Here’s a mixed bag of standard metrics we measure today.

1. User engagement: This is a broad metric that can include various measures of how users interact with a product, such as the number of likes, comments, and shares on social media, or the number of messages sent in a chat app.
2. Retention rate: This metric measures the percentage of users who return to the product over time. A high retention rate is a good indicator of customer satisfaction and a low churn rate.
3. Conversion rate: This measures the percentage of users who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase, downloading an app, or signing up for a service.
4. Bounce rate: This is the percentage of users who leave a website or app after only visiting one page. A high bounce rate may indicate poor user experience or a lack of relevant content.
5. Lifetime value (LTV): This is the estimated total amount of revenue that a customer will generate for a business over the entire time they use a product or service.
6. Funnel analysis: This is the process of tracking how users move through a series of steps in a product, such as signing up for an account, adding items to a cart, and completing a purchase.
7. Net Promoter Score (NPS): This is a measure of customer satisfaction that asks users how likely they are to recommend a product or service to others.

Yes, these metrics can be used separately or together. They’re important. We can measure impact, and they are signals of revenue.

Designers think about these metrics a lot but can they talk about them like their job depends on it? Sales teams do. I’ve yet to hear designers talk about any one metric and job safety in the same sentence.

The design team also has an ambiguous status in a lot of organizations. Some companies acknowledge design leaders at the C-level and quota-performing design teams are how Ux Design teams can evolve. When analysts or reporters talk about Airbnb they refer to Brian Chesky’s design background as an anomaly. How could he have a design background and run a profitable company?

Looking at over 300 UX Design-related job listings in the last 4 months I’ve yet to see one mention of “exceeding quota.” There are no design quotas. It’s not a thing. Talent is still assessed on your fluency in a set of tools i.e. Figma, Sketch, Adobe (a fine metric), how many people you manage, or a recognized logo to signal an arbitrary qualitative trait.

Sales and Design are fundamentally different, but I believe that both fields can benefit from a better understanding of each other.