What They’re Not Teaching in Design Class—and What You Can Do About It | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Design education often teaches craft and user experience but not how design affects revenue, costs, growth, or product strategy. The authors argue that business fluency and product sense make designers more effective collaborators and decision-makers. Early-career designers should build these skills beyond the classroom through business courses, conversations with professionals, industry media, and hands-on product work.

Why Business Matters in Design

• Design choices influence user engagement, retention, growth, and profitability.
• Poor experiences can frustrate users and cause them to abandon a product.
• Designers need to balance user needs with business goals and stakeholder priorities.
• Business knowledge helps designers:
  • Understand how decisions affect revenue and costs
  • Prioritize features in response to market competition
  • Contribute to product roadmaps
  • Communicate more effectively with product, research, marketing, and business teams
• Leaders from Figma, Microsoft, and Netflix describe business acumen as a major distinction between good and exceptional design organizations.

The Gap in Design Education

• Many design programs focus heavily on design fundamentals and craft.
• Early-career designers often receive little instruction on connecting their work to measurable business outcomes.
• The authors discovered this gap through their experiences as Figma Campus Leaders and early-career product designers.
• They argue that creative quality and business impact should not be treated as opposing priorities; combining them can be a designer’s “superpower.”

Take Business and Marketing Courses

• Students should supplement design coursework with classes in fields such as marketing and business.
• Case-study-based courses can show how companies approach market, customer, and product problems.
• Even courses without a direct UX focus can help designers understand how products are positioned, launched, and evaluated.

Learn from Industry Professionals

• Coffee chats provide practical insight into how products are actually developed and how companies succeed.
• Designers should speak with more than product designers, including:
  • Content designers
  • UX researchers
  • Business researchers
  • Product and marketing professionals
• These conversations reveal how different stakeholders contribute to product decisions and understand industry economics.

Follow Product and Business Discussions

• Newsletters and podcasts can help designers connect design decisions with broader business trends.
• Recommended resources include:
  • Lenny’s Newsletter, focused on product building, growth, and careers
  • Masters of Scale, featuring advice from business leaders
  • Dive Club, which interviews design executives about product experience and organizational strategy

Build and Ship Real Products

• Hands-on work is presented as one of the most effective ways to develop product sense.
• Student startups, industry roles, and other practical projects expose designers to constraints that classroom exercises often miss.
• Building and shipping products teaches designers how ideas perform in the real world and how design interacts with product and business decisions.

Designers should treat business understanding as a core part of their professional education, even when their formal programs do not. Combining design craft with product sense enables them to create work that is both valuable to users and meaningful to the organizations building it.