Writing
Unlocking the Business Value of Design
Creativity in product design isn’t about self-expression—it’s about solving real customer problems in ways that drive business growth. Learn how I combine leadership, craft, and strategy to unlock meaningful impact.
Tags
AI
Digital Craft
Design Strategy
Read Time
4–5 mins
In Q4 of 2017, Etsy surpassed $1 billion in Gross Merchandise Sales (GMS) for the first time—a milestone we celebrated company-wide. At the time, I was a founding member of the UX Research team. The following year, I was recruited by the executive team to launch the Strategy & Operations team, where I helped define Etsy’s long-term strategy and led the transformation of the Product organization to become Agile. After demonstrating the ability to lead at the organizational level, the executive team presented my next challenge: stepping in as Interim Head of Product Design to help turn around an ailing design organization. During my leadership from 2019–2020, Etsy generated an additional $1 billion in GMS—representing a +26% year-over-year increase.
Creativity Is a Business Function
In my experience, designers thrive when organizations foster creativity, and in turn, organizations thrive when designers are at their creative best. In the arts, creativity is an act of self-expression—an artist channels personal vision, experience, and imagination into work that resonates emotionally with an audience. In business, creativity is about solving customer problems in unexpected ways that drive value. Unlike the arts, business creativity isn’t about personal expression; it’s about the customer and practical impact:
Will customers choose this?
Can they use it easily?
Can we build it efficiently?
Will they exchange value for it—whether time, attention, or money?
This focus on customers, innovation, and value creation makes creativity fundamental to a successful business.
Whether leading a team of two or an organization of forty, cultivating business creativity is one of the most vital aspects of design leadership. I’ve found it comes down to three key areas:
Fostering a culture of learning
Linking design impact directly to business outcomes
Applying craft with purpose
Fostering a Culture of Learning
In design, the ability to learn from mistakes is one of the greatest drivers of creativity. Mistakes can occur at the micro level—a button’s corner radius deviating from design system specs—or at the platform level, disrupting network effects. Whether big or small, challenges reveal unexpected problems, requiring creative solutions and opening doors to what Steven Johnson, in Where Good Ideas Come From, calls the «adjacent possible.» Johnson argues that errors aren’t just setbacks—they uncover new pathways and ideas that might not have emerged otherwise. This iterative nature of design is why embracing mistakes is crucial: creativity thrives on adaptability.
«The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.»
—Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From
As a design leader, I cultivate creativity by reducing the risks of failure. By making design decisions quickly reversible through research and experimentation, teams can move forward with confidence:
Low-cost usability testing with paper prototypes helps designers validate ideas inexpensively through real customer interactions.
A/B testing in production, paired with rollback capabilities, allows teams to test hypotheses in real time—learning from data without jeopardizing business metrics.
The ability to experiment, test, and pivot quickly provides the agility to innovate without fear of irreversible failure.
Linking Design Impact to Business Outcomes
Product design, while inherently satisfying, serves a larger purpose: creating desirable, usable, and feasible solutions that drive business value. Too often, I’ve seen designers propose dazzling solutions that fail to deliver meaningful impact—not because they lacked creativity, but because they weren’t linked to clear business goals.
At Etsy, product development is the process of discovering and delivering value. It’s built on what Marty Cagan defines as «the fundamental principle of all modern product development:» Does this solve a customer problem?
The logic is simple: if we identify a real customer problem and deliver a solution that customers find valuable, they will exchange value in return—whether money, time, or attention.
At Etsy, I helped bridge the gap between design and business strategy, ensuring design decisions aligned with the company’s top-level metric: GMS (Gross Merchandise Sales)—the total value of transactions on the platform. Successful sellers meant more inventory, better selection, and ultimately, a stronger marketplace. However, for designers new to Etsy, GMS felt abstract.
To make it tangible, I broke it down into three components:
Visits—bringing more buyers to the marketplace
Conversion rate—turning visits into purchases
Average converting visit value (ACVV)—increasing the value of each purchase
By translating business metrics into actionable design challenges, teams could better align their work:
How might we attract more buyers to Etsy?
How might we make it easier for returning buyers to complete a purchase?
When designers see their impact on business goals, they design with greater intent—leading to stronger products and measurable outcomes.
Applying Craft with Purpose
If creativity is about solving customer problems, craft is the skill and attention to detail we bring to ensure solutions meet the right level of quality. This doesn’t always mean perfection—it means tailoring quality to the product’s stage of evolution.
For example, early-stage MVPs prioritize testing a market fit over perfect execution. But once a product gains traction, design can shift toward refining the experience, removing adoption barriers, and enhancing usability.
Craft isn’t just about functionality—it’s also about perception and trust. A well-crafted product signals reliability—users naturally trust interfaces that look and feel polished. This is why perceived performance matters as much as actual performance.
Real-World Example: Driving Conversion with Craft
At Etsy, a product designer refined the typographic hierarchy on the listing and cart pages to give greater visual prominence to sale prices and savings. The goal was to help buyers quickly understand how much they were saving—reducing friction in decision-making and increasing purchase confidence.
The result? A +0.88% increase in conversion rate—a seemingly small improvement, but at Etsy’s scale, this translated to millions in additional GMS.
This illustrates a core truth about craft: small details can drive significant business impact.
Where Creativity, Strategy, and Execution Converge
Creativity and craft in product design aren’t about self-expression—they are business functions that drive measurable impact.
As a design leader, I focus on:
Fostering a culture of learning—where mistakes fuel creativity and progress
Linking design work to business outcomes—ensuring teams solve the right problems
Applying craft with purpose—delivering products that inspire trust, engagement, and conversion
By bringing strategy, creativity, and execution together, I empower teams to build better products, make smarter decisions, and drive meaningful business impact.
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