I had no idea what CLV meant when I got into my first design role. Or ARPU. Or CAC.

In my presentation, I'm not going to discuss every acronym I've learnt recently. Instead I'll cover how I came to learn what all those terms mean and why knowing what they mean, makes me better at what I do.

If you're working in an environment where you'd like to convince 'the boss' to hire more designers, to have a dedicated design systems team or maybe even hire your first UI writer, then I hear you. In fact, maybe you just want to convince a product manager that the thing you want to work on really is the most important thing for your team right now.

I'm going to talk about how to embrace your inner businessperson (it's in there!) and put your design skills to use where they are needed the most. It all starts with being able to understand and communicate with the decision makers in your business.

Event Details

This talk was delivered at UX Australia 2020 as part of the Design Research conference. The session focused on helping designers understand business metrics and communicate effectively with decision makers.

Key Themes

The presentation explored how learning business terminology and metrics like CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), and CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) can make designers more effective in their roles. It provided practical strategies for:

• Understanding business metrics and their relevance to design work
• Communicating design value to stakeholders and decision makers
• Building business cases for design initiatives
• Embracing the businessperson within every designer