The Dysfunctional Design Process

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing & Design Teams

The design process can be painful for both marketers and designers alike. Marketing overloads designers with requests. Overloaded designers create bottlenecks. Bottlenecks delay projects. Delays lead to frustrated marketers. It's a vicious cycle. The only way to break it is to rebuild it.

featuring experts from

Design shouldn’t be frustrating

To improve the design process and truly bridge the gap between departments, marketers and designers need to understand one another.

But how can you create understanding if you don’t know the source of the problem?

We conducted 100+ hours of research and interviews with marketers and designers to get to the root of this dysfunction and uncovered patterns, problems and solutions that we’ve distilled into this in-depth resource.

Peek inside the design processes of fast-growing companies

In this guide, we dive into the most common issues that arise between marketing and design teams. We outline the core dysfunctions that lead to missed deadlines, designer burnout and unnecessary revisions.

We also uncover how marketing and design teams at some of the world’s most ambitious companies are working better together, including Intercom, Shopify, Meltwater and more.

Download our guide to get an inside look at how the design process works (and sometimes doesn’t work) at different companies, with dozens of takeaways to help you improve your own design workflows.

Get the guide

Impactful Insights

Insights from 17 design & marketing experts

Actionable Solutions

15 actionable solutions you can implement today

Featured Stories

4 featured stories about creative leadership

"One of the things that we've done to mitigate this build-up is a self-service model for assets that we know are ongoing. With our templates and styles, we can step out and it becomes a production task. You're not inventing stuff from scratch each time."

Nathan SharpePrincipal Visual Designer, Twilio

"I think one way to bridge the gap is to bring the creatives as close as possible to the marketing metrics to show that the decisions they make in the design can actually make a difference in the outcome."

Amir JaffariGrowth Workshop Lead, Shopify

"Non-designers notoriously make unrealistic requests of designers because they don’t understand what goes into the design process. I want to help protect a designer’s workload. I want to be the gatekeeper for creative requests so I can ask follow up questions and make sure briefs include the right information to set designers (and ultimately the project owner) up for success."

Melanie BrookBrand Producer, Intercom

The Dysfunctional Design Process

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing & Design Teams

The design process no longer needs to be painful for both marketers and designers alike. Breaking the vicious cycle of lost time, burnout and misunderstanding is possible.
The only way to break it is to rebuild it.
Sign up to get your guide on how to bridge the gap between Marketing & Design teams.