Is it worth hiring a product designer in 2024?

Or can your business afford not to hire a product designer?

When it comes to product design, today’s consumers have high expectations. It’s not enough anymore to only have a functional product. Customers want it to be reliable, usable, proficient, and creatively crafted¹.

As designers, we love reframing problems and questions. So let’s reframe the question from “Is it worth hiring a product designer in 2024?” to “Can your business afford not to hire a product designer?”.

The role of the product designer

Product designers play a key role in the product development process². Which means investing in hiring a product designer can lead to business growth and significant cost savings in the long run.

One of the most significant benefits of hiring a product designer is that they can help ensure that the product development process is centered on the needs of the users from the start. At the same time keeping the business needs in mind.

Companies can boost customer satisfaction and reduce revenue loss by focusing on user’s needs and investing in designing products that are intuitive and simple to use. This also impacts customer retention and loyalty, which leads to higher revenue and profitability.

Why hire a product designer

There are numerous benefits to hiring a product designer for your company. No matter which stage of growth you are at, a designer can help you iterate, test, and, eventually, grow faster.

This is what a reliable product designer can bring to the table.

They enhance the user experience of the product

A product designer changes the way a product feels to users. But design work takes up only around 40% of the entire effort, which may surprise you.

What interests product designers is figuring out the overlap between what users want and what business needs are. They study the users by carefully analyzing them and then applying that research to align with business needs and improve the product on each level.

They help reduce development costs

If you’re not aware, detecting and fixing a software problem after a product launch is 100 times more expensive and 30 times slower than finding and fixing it during the design process.

Even minor changes to design, components, or interactions during development might result in significant expenses. This happens because developers must perform extensive coding to accomplish this.

Designers can help reduce these costs by creating realistic prototypes and testing with customers before the product is built.