What are they?

Design moats are things that reinforce the design teams position and competitive advantage. They are things that create value for the business and drive its competitive advantage. These may be larger or smaller in size and impact, they may be internal production processes or external value adds for customers and users. Inevitably they act as barriers and protection for the team.

Conceptually speaking, the idea of a design moat which is purely about protecting the design team could create a negative impact on the business, but this is where I go a step further, and rightly so, and say the design moat should have a direct or indirect overall positive impact on the businesses competitive advantage and, ideally, should not detract from other initiatives which are adding to this competitive advantage. I say ideally because some initiatives are at odds with one another and have to be traded off. So it’s the overall utility and the business intention which decide which initiative to pursue in this scenario.

Some Design Moats:

• Design system: this speeds up and automate large portions of systematic design and development work. Its a cross discipline win. Hard to replicate by other companies if done well. It helps reduce the size of the, keep it lean and easier to manage. It speeds up GTM time. And there are many other benefits, including a standard level of quality.
• Production cost reduction: This is associated with the above point, which could be considered a sub point to this. Other forms of production cost reduction is the use of integrated tooling. In design this is usually a tool like figma which is not starting to integrate in things like confluence, jira, notion, and more importantly dev environments. All in one tools are useful, but sometimes looking at other one off tools is beneficial in speeding up production, cutting the costs and retaining quality.
• Attractive and aesthetically appealing UI: this can be huge. A strong competitive advantage in B2B particularly as its largely punted as a nice to have. I would argue, if you have a design team, this is very cheap. When demoing or showing off product, this has the single most unquantifiable impact. The first thing to build trust and customers judge is the UI. Whether they say it or not.
• Strong workflows based on user needs (efficient and useful): this is the main thing a UX team should be doing. Efficient gains for the user and keeping them happy, keeping the price point competitive too, will drive the advantage. The price and quality go hand in hand though. It cant take years to GTM for the sake of quality.
• Well organised product: IA is often overlook, but it relates to the previous point. People will unconsciously be put off by poorly organised software. They need to intuitively get around the product. This is hard to do. And takes time. It is a opportunity, as not many design teams, let alone non design teams, get it right.
• Good onboarding: getting a user onboarded and using the product makes or breaks it success. Easy and intuitive user flows and set up will help push the advantage. Again, something that particularly B2B struggles with and a great opportunity.
• Constant value release: shorter periods between releases, that is not to say I am advocating for shit being shipped, can create a freshness to the product. For this to work, minor changes and improvements constantly shipped has a great impact, but newer, bigger features I think need more thought. Often business release shit and point to lean theory as a way of saying its ok. After a certain level of maturity and depending on the client, this wont wash.

There are many moats because there is competitive advantage to be found everywhere. These are just a few. Process and planning areas two other places to explore for example