When Design Does the Marketing
The Descript Lesson in Leading Change
I logged into Descript last week - the transcription and podcast editing tool I’ve been using for months - and a notification popped up. Descript has partnered with LinkedIn to validate my proficiency with their platform. A couple of clicks later, a verified badge appeared on my LinkedIn profile. Barely three minutes of my day. Yet it sparked a conversation that’s stuck with me all week, because it reveals something profound about how we should be leading change in our organisations.
But here’s what’s interesting: I never saw the official announcement.
LinkedIn and Descript released a formal press release. They held a coordinated launch. Yet most people I’ve spoken to about this didn’t see that announcement either. We found out through conversations. A colleague mentioned they’d received the badge. I saw it on someone’s profile. That person told someone else. The word-of-mouth spread naturally, organically, because the feature itself was so elegantly designed that it didn’t need marketing. The product sold itself.
This is where the bigger lesson lives. And it has everything to do with how we approach change in our teams and organisations.
The Bolted-On Trap
In Enhanced Leadership, I write about something I call the bolted-on trap. It’s what happens when organisations introduce change without designing it properly from the ground up. You announce a new system, then immediately have to spend weeks training people on it. You send lengthy emails explaining the change. You create thick user guides. You host webinars. You answer questions from confused staff who simply don’t understand why they should care.
All of that effort - the training, the documentation, the marketing - signals something important: the change itself isn’t intuitive enough to stand on its own. It needs help. It needs someone standing behind it, insisting that people pay attention.
But the Descript integration skipped that entire playbook. There was no lengthy onboarding process. No training materials. No “here’s why you need this” campaign. The notification appeared, you read it in the time it takes to drink a sip of coffee, and you understood exactly what it offered and why you might want it. That clarity, that obvious value, made explanation unnecessary.
Think about the difference this represents. When you have to do extensive training, when you have to answer a dozen questions about implementation, when you’re creating documentation that nobody reads, that tells you something crucial: the design could have been better.
This isn’t about people being resistant to change. It’s not about them being change-averse or stuck in old ways. It’s about friction. You’ve created friction where there didn’t need to be any.
Friction as Evidence
I experienced this first-hand years ago when I was part of a retail transformation team. We spent weeks preparing staff for a new operational system. I genuinely believed at the time that the training was necessary. We had presentations, posters, emails, all the usual apparatus of change management. The implication was that people needed to be sold on this, needed to understand why it mattered.
What I didn’t realise then was that we should have spent those weeks on design, not marketing. If the system had been intuitive enough, the training would have been almost unnecessary. People would have figured it out because using it would have been the path of least resistance.
The moment you need to explain a change extensively, you’re usually looking at a design failure, not a communication failure. And we routinely confuse the two.
This is a costly mistake. Because every hour you spend explaining a system is an hour of lost productivity. Every page of documentation you write is evidence that your design could have been clearer. Every question someone asks about how to use something is a sign that the path forward wasn’t obvious.
The Architecture of Trust
What the Descript integration actually reveals is something deeper about autonomy and trust. When you design something to be intuitive, you’re making a statement. You’re saying: “I trust you to figure this out, because I’ve designed it to be obvious.”
Contrast that with the opposite message. Extensive training and hand-holding signal: “I don’t trust you to make sense of this on your own, so I’m going to tell you what to do step by step.”
That matters psychologically. It shapes how people approach the change, and it shapes their sense of autonomy within your organisation. When people feel trusted to navigate something independently, they engage differently. They feel respected. They don’t become dependent on external explanation; they become confident in their own ability to reason through what’s happening.
The Descript example works because it respects user intelligence. It doesn’t presume confusion. It offers value clearly, and then gets out of the way.
When Word-of-Mouth Is the Only Marketing You Need
Here’s what happened next: people started sharing the badge on LinkedIn. Colleagues mentioned it in conversation. It appeared organically across newsfeeds because people wanted to tell others about it. The information spread not because of a sustained marketing campaign, but because the feature was genuinely useful and obviously easy to use.
That’s powerful. Most organisations spend thousands on launch marketing. Paid advertising, influencer partnerships, carefully orchestrated campaigns designed to create buzz. And those can work. But they’re expensive, they’re effortful, and ultimately they’re vulnerable - if people try the thing and it’s actually rubbish, no amount of marketing survives that collision with reality.
Good design survives that collision. It thrives in it.
There’s a principle worth extracting here: when something is designed elegantly, it becomes self-marketing. It doesn’t need you standing behind it, insisting people care. It sells itself because using it is better than not using it, and that truth is immediately obvious.
I think about this in my own work as a coach and content creator. When I produce podcast episodes or write articles, I don’t rely primarily on promotional campaigns. I rely on the quality of the thinking being good enough that people want to share it. The best marketing I have is a listener telling a friend: “You should listen to this episode.” That’s more valuable than any advertisement I could buy.
What This Teaches Leaders About Change
So if you’re leading change in your organisation - and at some point, most leaders are - here’s what the Descript story teaches us:
First, invest in design before you invest in marketing. Spend your energy on making the change itself so obviously valuable and so clearly easy to navigate that explanation becomes almost unnecessary.
Second, recognise that friction is information. If you’re creating extensive training materials, that’s feedback that your design needs work. If people are confused, that’s not a deficiency in them. That’s a deficiency in the system.
Third, remember that good design respects autonomy. It trusts people to be intelligent enough to figure things out. And that trust, once signalled through clear design, builds the kind of psychological safety where change actually sticks.
Fourth, understand that word-of-mouth is a much better measure of adoption than compliance metrics. If people are choosing to tell others about your change, that’s real adoption. If they’re only participating because you’ve required it and trained them to do so, that’s something else entirely.
The Harder Question
But there’s a harder question underneath all of this, and I want to sit with it honestly.
Not every change can be as simple as a two-click badge integration. Some changes are genuinely complex. Some require coordination across systems, some demand new ways of thinking, some involve real behavioural shifts.
If you’re moving from a command-and-control leadership model to one based on autonomy and trust, that’s complex. If you’re genuinely transforming how people work -not just the tools they use, but the way they collaborate and make decisions - that’s complex. You can’t make that obvious through design alone.
So the insight isn’t that all change should be simple. It’s that as much change as possible should be. And where it must be complex, we need to be honest about that complexity rather than pretending we can market it away.
I’ve seen organisations that tried to dress up genuinely difficult change in positive language and bright posters and town-hall presentations. The underlying change was still hard, and people sensed that disconnect. It undermined trust more than transparency would have.
Better to say: “This is complex. Here’s why it matters. Here’s what I don’t yet know. Let’s figure some of it out together.” That’s honest. That builds trust.
The Design Mindset
What I’m really arguing for is a design mindset in how we approach change. Before you plan the communication, before you think about training programmes, ask yourself: what does this change actually look like from the user’s perspective? Is it obvious why they should care? Is it clear what they need to do? Is the path of least resistance the right path?
In my coaching practice, I use AI tools to help me track themes across conversations, and I’m transparent about doing so. But I designed that use to be nearly invisible. A client doesn’t need to know I’m using AI to help me remember their progress. They just experience me being better prepared, more attuned to their journey. The tool is designed to support the human relationship, not to announce itself.
That’s the model: design the change so well that the tool or the system or the new process just becomes how we work. The announcement takes care of itself through the elegance of the design.
A Question for This Week
Here’s what I want you to sit with: what change are you leading right now where you’re relying on marketing and explanation to drive adoption, when you could be investing that energy into better design instead?
Look at your current projects. Is there an initiative that’s struggling because people don’t understand it? Is there a system that people are resisting? Before you assume you need more training or better communication, pause. Ask whether the real issue is design.
Because the Descript story shows us that good design is the most powerful marketing tool you have. It’s free. It’s authentic. And it works.
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