Five tips on how to persuade senior managers
I’ve always struggled to articulate my design decisions to convince upper management and to get their buy-in.
As a UX designer, I spend days polishing designs and focusing on improving user experience. And yet the success of a project does not always correlate with the quality of my work. The reality is that at some point, I’ll need to convince the senior management that the work I’m doing is going to bring revenue or save the cost to the business. At the end of the day, I solve problems for the business through the design.
Once the managing director said that I have just two minutes to explain my work. Another time I had to present two separate complex projects to a group of senior managers only in ten minutes. And to convince these people, one needs to make an effort.
To improve my communication and public speaking skills, I’ve asked help from my friend and mentor Christoph Spiessens.
He taught me that the key to achieving a positive outcome from the meeting is through the ability to engage a listener by telling them a meaningful story. Christoph said that I have to find what makes me feel happy and enjoy the moment while presenting. He also gave me the advice to look at how successful leaders in the industry communicate and learn from them. I’ve collected a list of things that I learned during my research and experience. So without further ado, here is my list of tips that you can apply to capture your upper managers’ attention better while presenting.
“Senior Manager’ research
First and the most crucial tip is don’t go to the meeting unprepared. Do your homework, learn more about people who are you talking to, understand what motivates them and their objectives. Treat your managers as your users, do the ‘senior manager’ research upfront.
Housekeeping
At the beginning of the meeting, set the stage. Christoph calls this stage ‘Housekeeping’. You need to explain why you’ve booked the meeting, what should they expect, and what are you trying to achieve.
Story first
Successful leaders know how to convey story differently, they reverse the order of information. While presenting, instead of explaining to senior managers what you’ve done, describe to them why you’ve done it.
Designers focus on details. When they show their work, they tend to describe the aspects of the design and how it might help their users. However, these talks are not inspiring an action because there is no room for imagination, the designer just gave the solution. These presentations are not motivating. The best way to engage the listener is through the story. Start a story by describing a problem through the perspective of the user. You can use Personas, As-is scenarios, Empathy maps and other UX deliverables that you collected during the understanding phase to empathise your story. To learn how to do storytelling right, check this list of 8 storytelling techniques.
Outcome
The goal is not to convince the business that your idea is good, but the goal is to inspire action. You should finish with a conclusion. Tell about the lessons you’ve learned while working on the project. The tip here is to speak in the language of your listeners. Most likely, they will be businessy minded people. So it’s a good practice to give some numbers and statistics on how your solution could improve KPIs. Describe what the benefits are, what period and percentage ROI would be. If you don’t know how to evaluate the ROI of UX, please watch this short video. My advice is to involve your Product Owner or Product Manager and ask for help to calculate ROI. And if you need to convince your manager to help you, here is a short video that can help you with that.
Mistakes are stepping stones to success
Don’t forget to ask for the feedback from a senior manager. It could be done through follow up email or in-person. Encourage them to tell what can you do better next time. It’ll help you to learn when you were wrong and also understand senior managers better. You’ll see that managers are usually open to give an open and constructive criticism.
It still feels daunting for me to go to the meeting room and present my vision to seniors. It’s always the day one, and I keep learning and applying new techniques. So, if you have any recommendations on how to better engage senior managers during the meeting, please let me know in the comments section below. As you know, practice makes perfect.