How to influence strategy as a product designer
Stop thinking about the seat on the table, start thinking about driving strategy forward
Everyone likes to talk about having a seat at the table.
But rather than obsessing about that seat, a much more impactful way you can think about it is — how much am I influencing strategic decisions and why?
There is no seat at the table that magically starts influencing the whole company.
Influence takes time, determination, and a bit of tactical work.
To drive strategic decisions through design, you need to:
Be part of the conversation
Speak stakeholder language
Involve stakeholders early and often
Champion the customer at all times
Move others through storytelling
Let’s break it down.
Be part of the conversation
First things first, you can’t easily influence any key strategic decisions unless you are part of the conversation.
And you won’t become part of the conversation unless you are adding clear value to it.
So the first thing you need to think about is why you want to influence strategy and what are the areas where you can add value. This is ultimately up to you to decide as it will depend on the context and your organization.
Some of the common areas of leverage I’ve encountered time and time again are the following:
Your organization doesn’t have a clear product vision.
Your organization only focuses on small, tactical work.
Your organization often focuses on the wrong problems.
Your organization often dictates the solution, and you are simply executing.
Your organization doesn’t understand the customer enough.
Your organization doesn’t produce work that everyone is proud of.
These are areas where you, as a product designer, can add tremendous value.
In helping your team shape the product vision.
In helping your team balance tactical vs. strategic work.
In helping your team understand what’s a real problem.
In helping your team give you the opportunity to explore solutions rather than simply execute on them.
In empowering everyone to understand your customer pain points and how they can be linked to business objectives.
In moving your team to produce better quality work that makes everyone proud.
Once you have figured out your reasoning you’ll be at a much stronger place to become part of the wider strategic conversation.
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Now, onto joining the so called conversation…
Being part of the conversation takes different shapes depending on the team and organization structure, but at its foundation, you simply need to ask yourself:
“What are the channels and discussions in which decisions are being made, and how can I start being included?”
Whether you are working in a small or large organization, the first thing you can do here is ask:
Ask to be involved in strategic conversations.
Ask to be involved in your quarterly planning.
Ask to share your findings with key stakeholders.
And the “so what” behind all of these asks, is the answer you gave yourself earlier on where you can add value and what is the problem you are trying to solve.
Let’s look at some practical examples:
🔴 No: “Design needs a seat at the table.”
🟢 Yes: “I’d love to start being more involved in our strategy and planning conversations. It would be a great opportunity for me to bring in all the useful findings we have on the customer and the key problems, so that every decision we make considers both the customer and the business need.”
🔴 No: “I’m better at doing strategy that X person.”
🟢 Yes: “Sometimes we feel like we are focusing on the wrong problems, or on problems that aren’t that well defined. We can easily solve this if we start these conversations together rather than separately.”
🔴 No: “I don’t agree with our roadmap.”
🟢 Yes: “We seem to be focusing too much on short-term, tactical work, without really considering our product vision. By bringing design into this conversation we can align on a clear product vision and start thinking of the big bets we can make to take us there.”
Speak stakeholder language
One of the most common mistakes we see in the design field is that people focus on output rather than outcome.
Stakeholders don’t really care about:
Research methodologies
Workshops
Customer journey maps
Design thinking
Prototyping
What they care about instead is:
Confidence to pursue a solution
Identifying product-market-fit
Knowing who the customer is
Moving a business metric
In order to influence, it’s imperative that you practice the following:
When speaking to stakeholders, senior leaders and pretty much everyone outside of your product org, you need to shift your every conversation from output-based to outcome based.
When presenting your methodology, share it only at a high level and focus on the insight and leverage you produced.
Learn how your design decisions affect key business metrics and outcomes, and always remind people of that connection. Use that connection to argue for or against specific decisions.
Here are some examples:
🔴 No: “We need to use design thinking because it’s the right thing to do.”
🟢 Yes: “Several of our recent bets haven’t succeeded, and it’s because we often think of the business side of the equation rather than solving a customer need. I strongly believe that if we bring the customer at the forefront and considering what they need, we’ll be much better able to meet our retention/engagement goals for Q1.”
🔴 No: “We have spoken to 20 customers and produced a wonderful report.”
🟢 Yes: “We have identified three key insights that we believe can be actioned almost immediately and move us closer to our goal.”
🔴 No: “This solution uses modern design trends, and we prototyped it using cutting-edge prototyping software. We are also using microinteractions to delight.”
🟢 Yes: “We believe that this solution could significantly reduce Month 1 churn, as it really focuses on solving the big burning problems that users face as they onboard.”
Involve stakeholders early and often
Rather than only trying to influence decisions at the point at which they are made, you should try involve stakeholders in the process as early as possible and as often as works for you and your team.
💡 Big caveat here: This works only with specific types of stakeholders and people. You need to find stakeholders that are product-minded and have the required openness to learn and adapt.
What often happens is we work as part of a product squad, in silo, and then present our ideas and solutions to a broader range of stakeholders who see our thinking for the first time…
And that makes it especially hard to get our points across and influence decisions.
Instead, the best way to influence decisions is to involve stakeholders in our processes from earlier on:
Involve them in our research.
Involve them in our ideation sessions.
Involve them in our design sprints.
Involve them in our design iterations.
A huge mindset shift occurs when stakeholders are involved in the process of building a product.
In psychology and behavioral science we often talk about “The IKEA effect”, which simply explains the phenomenon where we often attribute a a lot more importance an value to an object or a process if we have been involved in creating it.
There is no better way to make a stakeholder more customer-focused product-minded than involving them in the design process from earlier on.
Here are some examples:
🔴 No: “You need to think of the customer more.”
🟢 Yes: “We are scheduling a few interviews in the following weeks to identify the biggest reasons for churn. It would be great if you observed at least a few of them to really see the context behind what they are saying.”
🔴 No: “You shouldn’t suggest solutions, that’s our job.”
🟢 Yes: “There are many great ideas on the table here, and everyone should have their voice heard. I’ll be facilitating a group ideation session this coming Wednesday and we’ll use some sketching exercises to come up with a great solution to move our acquisition targets for Q2.”
Champion the customer
One of our biggest levers as designers is our closeness to the customer.
By actioning this closeness you have an incredible opportunity to influence decisions and be seen as a thought leader in your organization.
Begin every conversation by bringing it back to the customer
Play back important insight as you are uncovering it (more on this below)
Be very strategic about where you focus your discovery efforts.
In an ideation session or design sprint:
🔴 No: “We could rethink our plan selection flow?”
🟢 Yes: “If we think about our customer, we know one of their biggest obstacles is understanding which plan is right for them. One of the ways we could solve for this is updating our plan selection flow so that we recommend what’s best for them depending on their needs.”
In a stakeholder review:
🔴 No: “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
🟢 Yes: “We know from our ongoing research that our customers are very much against complicated dashboards and widgets. They value simplicity, easy-to-understand graphs and important insight.”
Move others with storytelling
Notice that with all of the points we have already covered, a big emphasis is on communication.
If you want to influence, the way you use words and creative a narrative around what you are presenting is crucial.
At its foundation, I like to use a very simple formula for storytelling:
Context
Problem
Evidence
Solution
Belief
Here is how this works in a few different scenarios.
A. In a stakeholder alignment session or kickoff meeting:
Set the context — Why are we here?
Outline the problem and goal — What are we trying to solve?
Put the customer in the center — Why is this a burning problem?
Make it real by using quotes and video reels — Why should I care?
Connect the problem to the solution — How will we solve it?
Make everyone believe — Why will it work?
B. In a research playback session:
Outline the problem and goal — What did we want to uncover?
Give a high-level summary of your process — How did we do it?
Focus on the key insight — What did we find out?
Make it real by using quotes and video reels — Why should I care?
Connect it to action — How do we suggest to action it?
Follow-up — What are the next steps?
Let’s look at a more realistic example of a full narrative:
🔴 No: “Let’s think of some ideas to improve our onboarding funnel.”
🟢 Yes: “To set the context, we have identified a big dropoff in our new onboarding funnel; we lose almost 25% of our customers in only two steps, which results in an onboarding completion rate of only 35%, compared to 52% previously.
This is a huge problem for the business, as we are acquiring customers at great cost only to lose them before they even use the product.
To understand why this is happening, we tested our new onboarding flow with 8 customers over the last week, and here is what we uncovered.
(Show insights, including real quotes or video reels)
Based on this, we strongly believe that the biggest reason people drop off is privacy concerns. We have some suggested solutions on how to solve this, but we would also like everyone’s input on anything else we can try.”
In summary
Driving strategic influence is a gradual process that takes time, and there is no magic formula that will get you there as it heavily depends on your organization’s structure.
However, there are a few simple steps you can take to drive that strategic impact.
Figure out what the gaps are in your strategy and therefore the areas where design can add the most value.
Understand which channels and conversations are used to make strategic decisions. Ask to join the ones where you can have the biggest impact.
Involve key stakeholders in different steps of your product design process. There is no better way to get their support and shift their mindset.
Champion your customer closeness in every conversation. It’s your superpower and you should leverage it.
Focus on your narrative and storytelling in order to move others. It’s what will bring everything together.
Thanks for making it to the end 🙌. What did you think of this post? How have you managed to influence strategy in your organization? I would love to know in the comments.