Stop pitching infrastructure investment as revenue acceleration. Start pitching its absence as churn. The math is more honest, and the conversation moves from speed to durability, where design leaders tend to do better.
Every six months or so, I find myself in a room making the same losing argument. Someone needs design system work to be funded, and the way they pitch it is by trying to attach it to a revenue line. They do this because they have learned, correctly, that the way to get money from a finance organization is to name a revenue line. The trouble is that design system work has approximately the same relationship to revenue that water pressure has to a steakhouse. Important, structural, easy to take for granted, hard to attribute to any specific dinner.
The pitch goes like this. Engineering will move faster. New features will ship sooner. Designers will spend less time recreating buttons. The math is real. The math is also unprovable, in a way that finance people can smell from a long distance, because every other team in the building is making a similar promise about a similar acceleration, and the things that actually shipped last quarter shipped because someone forced them to ship on a deadline, not because the buttons were ready.
I had to give up on the time-to-revenue argument, this past year, after watching it fail in three consecutive funding cycles. What worked in the end was an inversion that I want to recommend to you, and that I am going to call the Reverse Tie, because I am still in my “names everything after the first metaphor that arrives” phase, and you might as well get used to it.
The Reverse Tie goes like this. Stop trying to claim that infrastructure investment produces revenue. Start claiming, more honestly, that the absence of infrastructure investment produces churn. The chain is short and easy to defend. Complexity grows faster than feature shipping. Complexity reduces ease of use. Reduced ease of use slows time to value. Slower time to value increases churn. Increased churn shrinks the customer base, which shrinks revenue, which is a thing finance people understand the way I understand the vocal range of Mariah Carey, which is to say with religious clarity.
The advantage of this frame is that it is true. It is also defensible against the standard counter-arguments. When someone says “but we shipped twenty features last quarter and revenue grew,” you can say “yes, and our churn cohort report shows the customers we lost cited complexity as their primary reason.” The conversation moves from a debate about the speed of feature delivery to a debate about the durability of the customer relationship. Design leaders, in my experience, do better in that second debate. Finance leaders also do better in that second debate, because retention is closer to math than acceleration is.
I have to admit, in the interest of honesty, that I figured this out about two years later than I should have. At a recent open forum with my organization, I told them as much. The hardest sentence I had to say, and the one that landed the loudest, was that I had not pushed hard enough on the design system over the previous twenty-four months, because I had been losing the wrong argument. The dedicated platform PM hire is probably 2027, not 2026. I am not happy about that. I am, however, finally pitching it correctly, which means I might actually get the hire.
The portable form of all this, for any design or platform leader reading: when your foundational work fails to get funded, audit the metric you attached it to. If the metric is acceleration, you are probably losing the funding fight, and if the metric is churn, you have a chance. The work itself looks identical from the outside. What has changed is the frame around it, which turns out to be most of what leadership is, on the days when it works.