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August 5, 2025
August 5, 2025
With uncertain economic headwinds and increased pressure on design and research teams, it’s more important than ever as a leader to prove your team’s value. But knowing where to start? That might feel murky and overwhelming.
In this interview, Ashton Snook and Colleen Pate discuss how Vodafone has approached design in a more business-oriented way, creating metrics that speak to the business side, including helpful tips for where to steer your team’s direction in the future.
Ashton Snook is Head of Design and Research at Vodafone.
Colleen Pate is the Senior Customer and Community Marketing Manager at Dscout.
Ashton: Vodafone is a large company, with about 93,000 employees. We’re supporting 300 million customers, so we're quite a big beast. My team is a very small subset of Vodafone Group.
We are around 50 people collectively, supporting around 20 product lines. The core team that I support is around 15-16 people right now, and we get to work on both horizontal and vertical initiatives. I spend a good portion of time working with my folks on building out consumer products for anything from buying phone insurance to home connectivity.
As part of that community, we also run horizontal programs on things like…
We're working as one small part of a very large machine to build something exciting, in a category that is very much of this day and age.
The product team is very much our partners in crime. We work as a group to figure out the right strategies alongside markets in a full step kind of way. We're a federated business, so between design, research, and products, we work with those markets, wider suppliers, and stakeholders to understand what we should build.
We ask ourselves questions like:
The latter part is very much where design partnership with product comes in.
I started out in the consumer IoT space for a couple of years, then transitioned into a group-level role where I partnered with other senior leaders to build a new, cross-functional design team focused on challenges across our consumer product portfolios.
At the time, the teams were producing work, but they weren’t playing a truly strategic role or having the level of positive influence they were capable of.
Like many organizations, design was somewhat there to do as instructed by product. Some colleagues and I felt that we were missing a key opportunity to have a deeper discussion.
Thankfully, we had great sponsors who also observed the trend that design could do a lot more than just make things look good and put together wireframes or build prototypes. We had the ability to push back and challenge assumptions. This allowed our research team to ask tough questions, test prototypes, and iterate on the proposition early on.
For us, that was all risk mitigation against the investment. That cash could be utilized to build the right thing that customers actually wanted to play with. There was a semi-mature establishment of design and research, but it was quite fragmented.
It didn't really have the foothold that we hoped it could, so we set about over the first year or two, starting to make some big waves and change that role.
A lot of it comes down to relationships and communication style. It's a lightbulb moment to go from just making things look and feel better, to challenging and being a devil's advocate in discussions to drive strategy.
I think a large portion of great design leaders recognize that you also have to be able to speak business lingo. Designers are great visual communicators. Researchers are great storytellers. Together, we're a powerhouse. But there's often this friction. I found in many different teams that there's always an us and them. “Oh, the business guys, they don't get what we do.”
“Designers are great visual communicators. Researchers are great storytellers. Together, we're a powerhouse.”
Ashton Snook
Head of Design and Research, Vodafone
That's true to a degree, but you have to put the effort in. It's a key difference from being someone who makes things look nice for a product manager to being a partner with a product manager. You have to be able to test their ideas and bring them into your process, so you can start to build a shared vocabulary.
One example is our clarity framework. The challenge was, how do we…
We needed to measure design’s impact in a way that’s simple, so it could be understood by anyone in the company—accessible so everyone can speak the same language. We also wanted to make it replicable across multiple studies.
We've got these three metrics included:
Read more in-depth about the clarity framework metrics in this article.
The other side is what most people get turned off by—dollars and cents. People want to see fiscal responsibility. I spend possibly more time than I'd like to on spreadsheets, figuring out things like…
Essentially, run the design team as if it's your own business. It’s the best way to prove you’re providing the company with service at a good cost.
UX research is often an area where it's hard to get long-term investment. Teams hire really aggressively, and then in a year or two, there's a fiscal challenge in a company, and that's really hard for the research community to weather.
It becomes more apparent that you need to move upstream if you're in research to the higher, more complex-value offerings—challenges that a designer can’t always easily deliver on.
It's a great opportunity for researchers to start playing a critically strategic role and become a super product manager.
Research is a craft, particularly making sure the customer's voice is heard. I think researchers would make phenomenally good product managers. They just need to learn the commercial side of things and maybe better communication skills. But I think that's a good trajectory.
For the design side of the discussion, it's somewhat similar. For example, this year we’re getting all of our product design team trained up on Dscout to conduct lower-level research (like usability testing). Some people would refer to that as democratizing research, but I don't think it is. I think it's about providing the designers with the right skills to tackle problems that they feel more comfortable adapting to.
Engineering can also bleed into design and product. Product that can bleed into design or research. I think we’ll see in the next couple of years—particularly with teams that are new or ambitious—design, engineering, product and research blurring into new roles.
We are at that point now in technology where we are going for an evolution, so we're trying to figure out the gaps.
For your team to have continued success in the arena of design and research, consider focusing on the following:
Learn to speak the language of business and build a shared vocabulary so that designers can communicate their value and impact to the organization at large.
Vodafone’s clarity framework may provide a helpful blueprint for you, combining customer proposition scores, customer effort scores, and usability expert scores.
Make sure you’re retaining the best talent, negotiating contracts, and making conscious decisions about where to invest.
The future will likely look more blended. That doesn’t mean forcing team members to take on work that isn’t in their wheelhouse; rather, it’s focusing on specific team members’ strengths and enabling them to do their best work.
