This topic tends to get groans from managers and directors who have been in the industry for a long time, and there’s good reason for that... most orgs never make it very far on the journey towards “design maturity.” In fact, according to most reports well over half of design orgs never make it halfway towards the “goal” of being top-tier or visionaries.
Data from InVisions Fall 2018 Survey
Self-reporting from these orgs described design very differently...
Level 1 (Producers) → Design is what happens on screens
Level 2 (Connectors) → Design is what happens in workshops
Level 3 (Architects) → Design is a standardized scalable process
Level 4 (Scientists) → Design is a hypothesis and experiment
Level 5 (Visionaries) → Design is business strategy
The way that an orgs maturity can be measured over time comes down to a couple factors that are pretty easy to benchmark, check-up on, and improve over time if there’s an appetite...
People → your team, stakeholders, key partners, executives
Org. Maturity
