How designers can influence team decisions
Design practitioners often start out in their careers thinking about and working on the details of design. As we progress professionally, we find ourselves paying more attention to the context and big picture in which those design details are applied. This wider perspective helps us understand, define, and prioritise the work we should be doing.
Through our careers we build up a toolkit of methods and techniques, and we learn how to apply them to address whatever challenges we face. But there’s little training on how to zoom in and out of a particular problem.
Here are some ways designers can meaningfully contribute to these conversations.
Aim at the broad view, not the specifics
When our teams discuss what to work on, designers often focus on the details of how to implement the plan, or get distracted criticising specific design details, or start to generate new ideas unrelated to the topic at hand.
To increase your influence and contribute more strategically to decision-making, use your research and design insights to help change and direct what’s being built. Use your facilitation skills to find a common objective everyone can agree on — which balances both customer needs and business goals — and continuously draw your team’s attention back to it.
Useful questions to ask:
- what customer outcomes are we trying to achieve?
- how does this address any of our user’s goals?
- where is this new work coming from? why is it important now?
- how far in the future are we looking? first half of the year, end of the year, next 3 years…?
- how do we prioritise this new piece of work, against everything else?
- this work sounds familiar, why wasn’t it addressed before?
- is our team definitely responsible for doing this?
Dig deeper
Every new piece of work your team takes on can be a big commitment. A team has finite capacity and needs objective ways to prioritise how much time and effort to invest.
You can use your design perspective to interrogate what’s involved. Keep asking questions to uncover the underlying motivations for doing something — it will help clarify the size of the problem or desired outcome you’re dealing with.
Useful questions to ask:
- what are the goals of this work? and do we need to build features to achieve them?
- what’s in and out of scope?
- what constraints are there?
- how much time and effort are we willing to spend on this?
- do we need to do research or analysis, or do we just have to do what’s been asked?
- will anything hold us back? do we need to resolve that before tackling the work?
- how will it impact our customers?
It’s all about teamwork
When discussing upcoming work, you need to support decision-making with research and analysis. These activities often need cross-discipline collaboration, and as a designer you have valuable tools which can help with this process. Show initiative and plan ahead to include the time it takes to gather and illustrate insights.
Useful questions to ask:
- who should we involve in research and analysis?
- are we able to address these activities ourselves?
- do we have existing data or knowledge we can learn from?
- do we need to set expectations with people outside the team?
- who else should we involve?
It’s difficult to be strategic, or to have influence,
when you’re focused on execution and you’re not in the conversation.
— D. Keith Robinson, Product Designer at Atlassian
If you’re at the stage of your career where you spend much of your time figuring out design details, it can be hard to step back and take a more holistic view. Learning to look up from the granular takes time and effort. You can build confidence by running through the questions above before meeting with your team.
Participating more in these conversations helps you better define ambiguous requests, anticipate future team needs, be more proactive in roadmap planning and connect your work to the team’s vision. Increase your influence as a designer by practising these skills and pushing yourself to actively contribute to big picture discussions.
