Design as a strategic value discipline.

Human-centered design is not simply how teams execute product strategy. Properly used, it helps determine what the strategy should be—by uncovering where meaningful customer value can be created.

My approach starts from human value. I work to understand what would create real value for the people a product serves—what’s making their work harder than it needs to be, where the product conflicts with how they actually operate, and what they’re working around rather than working with. That understanding informs product improvement strategies before solution design begins.

Translation is part of that work—turning observations about how people work into product direction that a team can act on. But translation serves a larger strategic purpose: making the expected connection between customer improvement and business outcome visible and testable as product decisions develop.

Most products start with assumptions: about how people work, what they need, and what an improvement is worth. Those assumptions become requirements. Requirements become architecture. Eventually, what began as a reasonable guess is expensive to question.

Human-centered design, used early enough, is one of the most reliable ways to surface those assumptions before they harden—and to replace them with evidence about where genuine value for customers can be created.

The problem I’ve seen most consistently isn’t that teams execute poorly. It’s that they invest significantly without a clear shared understanding of what needs to improve for customers—or how that improvement is expected to help the business. Design is often brought in after those questions have been answered, which means it can improve execution but rarely influences what gets built or why.

In practice, this means helping teams decide what is worth building, revising, or stopping—not only how to build it better. In a scientific-software modernization, that meant challenging an instrument-centered platform model and organizing the product direction around researchers’ workflows before individual interactions were redesigned.

It often means working at the seam between research, product, and engineering, where the most consequential assumptions tend to live and the least questioning tends to happen.

I’ve developed this perspective over more than two decades of designing and launching 100+ digital products and web properties, including work in scientific software, life-safety systems, healthcare workflows, and AI-assisted tools—usually bridging disciplines rather than working inside any one of them.

From approach to system

I’ve formalized this way of working as DesigningROI: an approach that connects the customer value uncovered through human-centered design to the business value product investments are expected to create—and makes that relationship visible and testable.

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