Counting what can’t be counted.
Every design leader eventually gets asked the same question: How do you measure design?
It usually comes from a good place. Executives want to understand the return on their investment. Teams want to prove their value. The question feels practical, responsible, even mature. But it also exposes something deeper about how we think about design and how uncomfortable business still is with anything that cannot be reduced to numbers.
We live in a time where measurement equals legitimacy. If something can be tracked, it feels real. If it cannot, it is treated as uncertain or secondary. But design does not live neatly inside that world. It is not a fixed system of inputs and outputs. It is a living practice, shaped by judgment, emotion, and countless invisible choices that happen between brief and delivery.
I am not dismissing data. I have spent much of my career building design systems where measurement plays a vital role, tracking adoption, efficiency, and user satisfaction. Metrics give us a way to see patterns and to ground decisions in reality. They help us identify friction, validate direction, and communicate progress. But data only describes what is. Design exists to imagine what could be. That space between the two is where intuition, taste, and leadership live.
Design sometimes begins with data, and sometimes it does not. It often starts with a question: What if? or How might we? Those small phrases open the space where imagination lives. They let us step outside what we already know and explore what could be true instead.
That curiosity is the beginning of every meaningful design decision. It is less about certainty and more about possibility. When something feels off, when a pattern doesn’t quite make sense, when a product experience leaves a small trace of friction we can’t yet name - those are the moments that push design forward.
We call it intuition, but it is really the accumulation of experience. It is pattern recognition shaped by years of listening, observing, and caring enough to notice what others overlook. It is data of a different kind, one that lives in emotion rather than numbers.
Emotion is often treated as noise in the system, but it is one of design’s most reliable signals. A user’s hesitation, a smile during testing, the subtle shift in energy when a prototype lands - these are forms of feedback as real as any survey result. They tell us what words cannot, and they point us toward what people actually value, not just what they say they do. Ignoring those cues in favor of “hard data” is like trying to understand music by studying only its waveform. You can chart the frequency, but you will miss the feeling.
This is where leadership becomes essential. There are moments when no amount of data can make the decision for you. The path is not clear, the variables do not add up, and waiting for proof means missing the moment entirely. That is when you have to say, I feel we should go this direction, and I am asking for your support. It is not arrogance. It is responsibility. Leading design means having the courage to act on things that cannot yet be measured, guided by judgment shaped through experience.
Creativity and certainty rarely coexist. You can have control, or you can have discovery, but rarely both. Data is essential for steering, but it cannot tell you where to go next. The role of a design leader is to balance both, to use data as a compass rather than a leash. To welcome it, but also to know when to look beyond it.
Some of the most valuable outcomes of design are the hardest to quantify: the sense of trust that builds between a company and its customers, the clarity that emerges when teams rally around a shared language, the momentum that comes from confidence in the work. These are the things that quietly shape culture and, over time, move the numbers in ways that cannot be reverse engineered.
Not everything that counts can be counted. The irony is that when you stop designing for metrics and start designing for meaning, the numbers tend to improve anyway. Alignment strengthens. Friction drops. Retention grows. But those are byproducts, not the point.
Design is at its best when it reminds organizations to care about what cannot be easily measured: the feeling of trust, the moment of clarity, the spark of an idea that changes the direction of a product or even a company. Those are the real returns, and they are worth more than any metric we will ever invent.