3 steps for the undervalued designer to expand their influence
Sick of being a “pixel pusher”? Tired of not being included in any planning or strategic discussions about next steps for your product? Here is a guide to get your foot in the door and add value beyond just the visuals.
I think every designer, at some point in their career, finds themself in a position where no one around them understands the value they can bring. I’ve been there. And if you’re currently there, this article is for you.
This article will be a very practical guide on how to approach showcasing the real value a designer can bring. Everything you’re about to read are things I’ve tried myself and found to be useful in getting stakeholders to understand that designers can do a lot more than make pretty pictures.
First… some empathy….
Does your PM come to you with wireframes already mocked up in PowerPoint and ask you to “make it pretty”? Mine did. Does your director come to you with a laundry list of graphics, emails, and web pages they need by the end of the week? Mine did.
If you’ve found yourself paired up with stakeholders who seemingly have no idea that designers can do more than just….. design. I feel you.
But it might not be their fault… hear me out.
The same way you empathise with your user’s needs is the same way you need to empathise with your stakeholders needs.
In my experience, if you take time to understand why people don’t seem to trust in what you can do it’s because they’ve never worked with a designer who can bring more to the table beyond the pixels. Or it’s because they’ve, straight up, worked with real crappy designers in the past.
It often has absolutely nothing to do with you or your skillset and lies completely in their lack of experience and understanding.
But the good news is… you can change that.
Step 1: Consume
You can’t start to provide any value if you don’t have the right information. But to get the right information you have to be in the right place at the right time. That’s why you’re going to go to your primary stakeholder or manager and ask to sit in on the key strategy/planning meetings. It might go a little something like this:
“I’d like to try and evaluate how I can have more of an impact but I need to better understand the goals of the company/department/team to do so. Would it be possible to be included in some of those key sessions?”
Then, you say absolutely nothing. Probably for months. Just consume. consume. consume. Focus on figuring out your stakeholder's key goals, frustrations, and concerns.
Don’t get too overwhelmed if when you first join you have little to no idea what the h*ll they're talking about. Take lots of notes, do some nighttime research, and be patient with yourself.
Step 2: Tie UX to the short-term goals
So now you’ve got a grasp of what your stakeholders are trying to achieve… so now you can orientate your work to help them.
Remember you’re trying to prove the value of UX so we gotta focus on the little wins to start in order to win them over… the more strategic stuff comes later….
So how do you begin to tie your work to their goals? Here are some examples:
Example 1:
You learned that this quarter they want to increase the customer contact rate by 7%.
But YOU know that the contact form on the website is breaking all kinds of best practices and have a hypothesis that there is a large bounce rate because of it.
So you design a better solution and present it to your stakeholders with an emphasis on how it will help increase the contact rates for X, Y, and Z reasons.
Example 2:
You learn your stakeholders are baffled as to why people are immediately uninstalling their app after downloading it
Now YOU’RE pretty sure it’s because of the way-to-verbose onboarding experience but you can’t quite pinpoint what could be causing the uninstalls.
So you go away and conduct some impression testing or user interviews and come back to your stakeholders with recommendations from your findings.
Woah… give UX a little freedom and they can actually help us with our goals? Crazy.
So hopefully by now, a little lightbulb has gone off in your stakeholders. You’ll have evidence of this when they start to come to you for input on more topics and your requests become more open-ended.
Step 3: Strategy time
You’ve shown them what’s possible with a little bit of time and freedom. Let’s show them what you can do with a lot more. At this point, you should have a very clear understanding of the long and short-term goals. Your UX strategy should align with your regular planning whether it falls annually, bi-annually, or quarterly (or maybe all of the above).
The biggest value design can bring for longer-term strategic topics are:
- Design exploration that brings to life the potential future of an experience which helps stakeholders determine if it’s a direction they want to go.
- Provide insights into product decisions via prototyping, testing, and research that stakeholders are less certain about in order to provide them with the information they need to make a decision that is far less costly than implementation.
- Discovery of product improvements that should be considered for priorities. For example, you conduct a competitive analysis and see that your product isn’t meeting the market benchmark so you bring your findings to your stakeholders.
Time to make a plan.
With each planning cycle as soon as you have a clear idea of the overarching priorities it’s time to create your UX/Design strategy and roadmap which not only includes the agreed delivery work items but it also includes more explorative discovery pieces as well.
This potentially looks something like this…
Once you have the results of those discovery pieces you can then present them, very timely, ahead of the next planning cycle to influence the direction of the planning discussions.
In conclusion…
- Place yourself where the right information is
- Understand your stakeholder's goals and frustrations
- Tie your design work to those to prove the value of deeper design thinking
- Build a design strategy that influences the direction instead of only taking direction
Also… start small. This is not a change that happens overnight. Upping the UX maturity of an org is a long game. In my case, it easily took almost a year to start seeing results for each of these steps, and depending on your org and stakeholders it can take much longer than that.
Also also… you cannot win them all. You might give this a try and your stakeholders want nothing to do with it. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. Making this kind of impact can be a killer case study but you also need to know when to pull the plug if you’re not in a situation where anyone is willing to hear you out. There are better teams and better companies out there, I suggest you start looking.
Templates anyone?
While writing this I was considering creating some templates out of the objective & roadmap documents I’ve used before but I wasn’t sure if anyone would find that helpful. So if you would please let me know in the comments and I’ll whip something up to share.
Please like and share this article if you found it useful ❤️
Want to level up your product strategy skills before you jump into those planning discussions? Here are a few ways to get started:
But wait, there’s more…
- Like videos about UX & Product Design? Follow me on Tiktok or Insta
- I’ve created quite a few resources that you can snag
- Of course, don’t forget to follow me here on Medium for more design-related content
- Join UX Survival-list if you want regular resources & tips to help you grow in your design career straight in your inbox