7 tips to take you from design resource to product partner
I have spent years working on explaining what I do, but when someone asks I still feel like a deer in headlights scrambling for the right words. Five minutes later I’m stressed out, a little pinker in the face with the poor person who asked the question looking at me bewildered searching for any other topic in the world to make the conversation go forward.
Describing design is hard. The word itself is pretty loaded. Design is a process, but it is also an artifact. Then you add the word experience in front. Is experience design an outcome or an activity? With how hard it is for us design professionals to give clear answers, it’s no wonder that it takes a while for our colleagues to get exactly “what it is we say we do here.” As a result, I’ve found that people fill in the blanks with what they know, which is often what they can see. Design is the thing that designers make, so therefore designers make the thing. Not wrong! However, that puts you, the designer in a spot that minimizes the impact of your work.
If you’re in a position where you are doing a lot of asset creation and drawing up mocks of other people’s ideas, you’re acting as a design resource. If you had grand dreams of using design to change the world, in this position you might feel little hope that you will ever get to sink your teeth into a juicy problem, conduct informative user research, or simply have your opinion heard. You might be frustrated from backing people up from the solution they’ve asked you to draw, the solution scope you get to work in, or not having adequate information from users or the business.
Don’t give up! Over the years, working with a wide variety of teams, I’ve found that a few small changes to how you approach your team can have a huge impact on how you‘re able to contribute. These changes start with you, the easiest place to start I might add. If you apply these consistently, you will soon find yourself helping the team determine the right thing to make as well as how to make it right. In other words, a true product partner.
1. Change your language
Take a minute to think about these questions. Do you use the word stakeholder? Whom do you apply it to?
If you’re using it to refer to the team members you work with everyday like Product Managers or Engineering leads, STOP. While it seems innocent enough, you’re sending a signal to the people around you and, more importantly to yourself about your role on the team. You’re saying, “I make stuff and other people decide if it’s good.” With all the study, practice, perspective, and talent you’ve honed making a design career for yourself, I seriously doubt that’s how you think about the role of design.
So instead of stakeholder, refer to those in the mud with you — working on solutions, iterating, giving feedback — as your partners. Do this both mentally and out loud. First you must believe it within yourself, then you must talk about it with your team. Not only does this reframing reposition you as someone with valuable and unique perspective on the team, but it also says you’re there to share the pressures, the wins, and the losses. In other words, an ally and great teammate.
If you’re using the word stakeholder, you’re also likely seeking approval before considering design ready for implementation. Reframe here too, after all, what kind of design would it be if the designer didn’t approve. Your work needs your buy-in as well. Instead of seeking approval, work to gain alignment. This simple change of language repositions your work from an artifact to be judged by others to a representation of the solution you and your team have worked toward together. The shift to gaining alignment may even encourage some healthy debate on the right solution or scope. A phrase I love, and can’t remember where I first heard now, is “you don’t have to agree with me, but I do need your alignment.”
2. Introduce ideation
No matter their role, those around you want to contribute ideas to design. Can you blame them? Design is fun! One simple way to really engage the group and demonstrate how design processes can unlock better and stronger ideas is by setting up some short ideation workshops. Use these to:
- Get the team comfortable and practiced defining the problem space before diving into the solution space
- Externalize the knowns and unknowns about the problem space or user that will impact which solution is best
- Engage the team in generating a lot of ideas that you can evaluate together to get early alignment
Ideation exercises are not only fun and engaging, but they are also a great way to educate people on design process and what designers need to be successful without the stuffy “this is what design is” presentation that still leave people confused.
If you’re not sure where to start, there are a lot of great resources; check out the templates built into Miro or Figjam, or grab a book like Gamestorming to get some basics on how to structure a successful ideation session.
3. Use business terms
I had the great pleasure of having some in-person workshop time with Jared Spool. One of the things I’ve carried with me since that experience and has totally changed how I present and talk about design in an organization is you have to learn to talk about design decisions as business decisions.
Think about what you’re working on right now. How can you reframe the design impact on the business? Perhaps you’re improving an internal tool that will make the people at your organization more efficient decreasing your operational cost. Maybe adding really humanized content about your in-house doctors that from research you know will make people more likely to schedule their first appointment increasing your revenue with new customers. The size of the impact will vary by what you’re working on. Knowing that yourself can help you prioritize, but it can also help you make the case for a design project not on the radar OR to keep an important feature that’s on the chopping block.
4. Demystify what you need
It is rare these days to find a designer who is just working with designers. In a lot of cases, working with another designer is a beautiful luxury (though IMO it really shouldn’t be, but that’s not the point of this discussion). We are most often working with a wide variety of job roles. Maybe that’s Product Managers, Engineers, Marketing, Sales, etc. The point is, ya’ll have different areas of expertise and different things you’re prioritizing for good reason; however, that makes it really difficult to know what success looks like for each person on the team in both process and outcome. You’re no exception.
Take a little time to think about what is it that you need to be successful that you are and are not getting today. Create a 1-pager for yourself. It might include things like:
- Time or space you need to do your best thinking — ex. a 4 hour block of heads down time each week, 2 days notice for projects like “x”, more space to let design be formative of the solution
- Information or context — ex. a description of the problem we are trying to solve, why this is a priority for the organization, clarity on timelines or constraints, user research insights to inform the project, more details requirements for rush projects
- Resources or tools — ex. icon libraries, money for research, digital white boarding software
- Involvement in decision-making points or discussions that give you information or context — ex. supporting estimation with design estimate, direct contact with decision-maker, hearing the business plan presentation
After you’ve done that you don’t need to share it with those you work with, unless you think that might be helpful. Rather, set up some conversations, maybe over coffee to talk about what you’re not getting or simply have your 1-pager ready at hand so you can bring up the relevant thing you’re missing at the relevant time. And, don’t forget to ask your partners what they need to be successful, too!
5. Create a project plan
“…every design process is unique and has to be designed in relation to intention and desiderata.” — Erik Stolterman Bergqvist, Four aspects of successful design leadership
Just like a 1-pager on what you need to be successful, it is equally helpful to articulate to your partners what it will take from a design perspective for the design outcome to be successful. As Stolterman so cleanly points out, the appropriate process changes project to project, which certainly makes the process you desire a mystery unless you articulate it each time.
You honestly don’t even need to do anything fancy here. Outline what design activities set up the project for success, how long you think is appropriate for each, and talk to your team about how those activities support the outcome. I usually frame it in terms of uncovering current unknowns to reduce risk of making the wrong thing (discovery / research activities), and gaining alignment on early direction to reduce the risk of making the right thing wrong (definition / concepting activities).
6. Present the why
On my team, we’ve been putting emphasis on this of late by doing an exercise in our Design Studios as well as some writing in our Figma files to articulate the “why” behind our designs. The “why” has 2 components: 1) why does this specific design support the user best, 2) why will this specific solution support the business best. At times we literally go down the design and do this exercise for each component on the screen.
When presenting work, it is so easy to focus on the functional aspects of how it will work— “when the user clicks this button they go here; if they choose this option, it changes the screen like this.” The folly in that approach is that feedback will be directed at what people see, of which there will be many opinions largely based on preference. I’m not saying you should be closed to feedback, rather I want to emphasize that it is part of your job to enable those around you, who have spent a fraction of the time thinking about the solution, to give grounded feedback that incorporates the valuable informed thinking you’ve already done.
As designers it is essential that we articulate the impact potential of what we produce as well as demonstrate how much thought went into the solution being presented. Just like sharing a project plan and what you need to succeed, the practice also helps to demystify what’s happening when we say “design.” I find myself saying this often — about 95% of a designers time is taken up figuring out the solution, only 5% is making the assets.
7. Find your advocates
I remember sitting in a conference room having a one-on-one discussion with our iOS Lead in which he gave a long impassion speech about how we as a team absolutely had to go back and do user research on the next feature because we didn’t know x, y, and z. He said “if we don’t find out how they are handling it now we were at a huge risk spending a lot of time building the wrong thing. If we do that, we will be past the point of no return without a huge time investment in reworking the app architecture.” My eyes were big and my little designer heart was full. I listened as patiently as I could manage, and when he was done I said, “can you please say all of that again to our product manager” with whom I had just had this conversation, meeting a lot of resistance because of the need for speed of delivery. The iOS Lead followed through. He talked about the importance of the design activities and the design solution, grounding it in our engineering decisions. With 2 people on this side of the argument it was much easier to get what we needed!
I cannot say strongly enough, find your design advocates in the organization anywhere and ask them to advocate out loud to other people. The experience is everyone’s responsibility and it is much easier to succeed when a lot of people are discussing design’s impact from many lenses.
You’ve chosen the awesome, fun, and challenging career path of being a designer. I think one of the main reasons it is challenging is that design as we practice it today is still a relatively new field. Not only are we creating and evolving best practices quickly, but we also have the sometimes fun and sometimes frustrating responsibility to share and educate others on how we can contribute to the greater picture of product development.
The great news is that your contribution has tangible value to the organization you work for. It’s the thing that takes product companies from zero to hero. Just look at the staggering 2018 study by McKinsey. Companies with the top 25% design index score had “32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher TRS [total returns to shareholders] growth” over a 5-year period. Further, User Experience Designer makes Indeed’s list of the 15 Entry-Level Jobs That Pay Well. This is proof that companies know they need you, even if they don’t know the details on how to leverage your skills quite yet.
Remember, if you find yourself acting like a resource, the change starts with you.
