Design as a revenue lever.

I decided to see the bigger picture.

A change in leadership at the top of the company had everyone bracing for a reorganization. I could have kept my head down and waited it out. Instead — and I still can’t entirely explain the impulse — I decided to zoom out. A new executive was arriving from an operations background, and a planning cycle was opening up. I offered to help tell the story of the product I’d spent the last stretch designing: the internal tooling that quietly moves the core of the business.

Part of why I committed was honest self-interest. The visuals I’d build for that story would be good for my own portfolio one day, so I mapped the whole system end to end — how a request comes in, how it gets routed, where the time and money actually go. I thought I was making a nice deck. It turned out to be the first thread of something much larger.

I got a number wrong, and it cracked everything open.

On one slide, I’d estimated the annual value of a small time savings the tool created — a handful of seconds shaved off each interaction, at high volume. I’d lowballed it, badly. When I went back to check the math, the real figure was several times larger than what I’d written down.

That correction is where it started. If a few seconds per interaction was worth that, what was a full minute worth? And if we were saving that much time, we weren’t just cutting cost — we were creating capacity, the ability to absorb far more volume without hiring a single additional person. What was that worth?

Every question I pulled on unspooled into a bigger one. Seconds became minutes became reclaimed labor became unlocked capacity became revenue. At the scale this company operated, “small” operational improvements weren’t small at all. A single one was worth more than my entire team cost — many times over. I remember sitting there thinking: wait, is this real?

I built it on the ledger, not the mood board.

The instinct most designers reach for when asked to prove their value is a deck of before-and-after screenshots and a few generous quotes from product partners. I wanted something a finance team could actually argue with — a model, not a vibe.

So I started from the operational metrics I already had — handle time, volume, conversion — and went hunting for the ones I didn’t. What is a completed visit actually worth? I wondered if it was buried somewhere in the company’s public earnings call. It was. How many people actually reach the site each year? I pulled the annual report the company files with the SEC. There it was.

Working from public filings meant the model wasn’t a designer’s wishful thinking — it was grounded in numbers anyone could check. For every claim, I wrote down the directly attributable savings, the reasonable inferred upside, and the assumptions behind both, so a skeptic could redline my assumptions instead of arguing with me. The point wasn’t to be unimpeachable. It was to be inspectable.

The backbone of the business, and what it cost.

Then I turned the lens on my own team. I generously assumed we each earned well above what I knew to be true, added it up, and set it against the value the model showed we supported. Even with the numbers stacked against us, the return was a large multiple — and with a couple of strategic hires, dramatically larger than that.

One finding stuck with me more than any dollar figure. The systems supporting the overwhelming majority of the company’s revenue were held together by a couple of tools and a long tail of spreadsheets. Precariously. A small, underfunded group of designers and engineers was quietly load-bearing for the entire business. The model didn’t just say design was valuable. It said design was underfunded — and it said it in a language leadership couldn’t wave away.

Understanding the business is the job.

I sent the model up the chain, not knowing what to expect. It landed — enthusiastically — and got folded into how leadership was planning the year. I’d done the whole thing over a weekend, with no financial training, no one handing me data, and no one to check my work. Curiosity was the only tool I’d needed to find every number.

I want to be careful about causation here, because the honest version matters more than the flattering one: I can’t claim the model caused what came next. But in the months that followed, the company hired its first design leader at the VP level, leaned harder into automation, and the business ticked upward. Maybe the argument moved something. Maybe it just read the moment correctly. I’ll probably never know which — and I’d rather tell it that way than pretend I do.

It’s hard to argue with imposter syndrome using feelings. It’s very easy to argue with it using arithmetic.

Here’s what I took from it. Understanding the business isn’t adjacent to design — it is design. The moment you can put a number on the work, it stops being a feel-good, nice-to-have profession and becomes what it actually is: a lever on outcomes. Good design shows up in the numbers; so does bad design. Almost everything we do is quantifiable if you’re willing to ask “what is this worth?” and follow the question, five-whys style, until you hit a dollar sign.

And at scale, the math gets staggering. A three-minute improvement at a small company is a rounding error. The same improvement at a company serving millions of people is worth an amount with a lot of zeros. Small change, enormous volume — that’s the whole game, and it’s the thing I’ll be looking for in every room I walk into next. Design is strategy. Now I can show my work.