A product designer’s guide to influence

Yes, designer: you, too, can become a majestic lion. Photo by Mika Brandt on Unsplash

You’re one or two years into your product design career, and you’ve been wondering what the next level looks like. You might be asking yourself: how do I play a larger, more influential role on my team? How do I spend more time thinking strategically, and less time executing on tasks?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this as I’ve grown into a senior product designer at CommonBond, and I would sum up the key to influence in one word: outcomes.

Wait, so what do you mean by outcomes? I’m always designing for outcomes! It’s not like I’m sitting here working without purpose.

In the best case scenario, you’re absolutely correct. But this isn’t always the case.

Chances are, you’ve found yourself in one of the following scenarios:

• You designed something without knowing what the metric of success for the design would be. When it was released to production, you didn’t have time or make time to check whether it was reaching its objectives.
• You “redesigned” something to create a “2.0” version without clearly articulating what the “redesign” was supposed to solve.
• You’ve struggled to articulate your accomplishments and impact during a performance review.

If any of these feel familiar to you, read on.

Alright, fair enough. So how should product designers avoid these situations?

The most important thing you can do is to be able to clearly articulate and communicate the outcomes of your work — not just the outputs. Focusing on designing for outcomes makes both you and your work as a product designer significantly more valuable.

What’s the difference? For designers:

• Outputs are the artifacts you create, including wireframes, mockups, and high-fidelity digital experiences.
• Outcomes are the results and impact those artifacts drive.

For me, “outcomes” fall into 3 categories:

📈 Business outcomes

This is any design work that delivers positive outcomes for your business. Examples include funnel conversion, retention, engagement, etc.

💡User outcomes

This represents any design work that drives positive outcomes for a user. It includes anything that results in customer delight and effective user experiences. You can measure user outcomes through both quantitative (e.g. NPS scores) and qualitative indicators (e.g. feedback you hear from users during a usability test).

📖 Learning outcomes

This represents design work that helps your team learn something new or test a hypothesis. It can take the form of an A/B test or an early prototype. This type of work usually isn’t pixel perfect, since you’re simply trying to gain early signals that your design is resonant (or isn’t).

Sometimes these can be related (ie. driving user outcomes can often lead to business outcomes), but don’t worry too much about the categorizations. What’s important is that your work, your team, and your intended outcome are clearly aligned.

After all, while your team may not know all the ins and outs of the design process, they will surely speak the language of these 3 types of impact.

So what can I change in my day-to-day work to focus on outcomes?

Here are 3 tactics I’ve used and found effective.

1. Get clear on the outcome

It is extremely important that you as a designer are always clear on the intended outcome of your work. If it’s not clear to you, ask your team and make sure you have the clarity you need. Some questions to get you started:

• What is the desired impact of this work?
• What problem does this address?
• Are we aiming to drive business outcomes, user outcomes, or learning outcomes?
• What are the metrics or indicators we’ll use to measure the success of this work?

Once you have the answers to these questions, make sure they’re written down. It’ll be a good idea to work with your PM on this.

Some strategies I’ve used:

Shared documentation — both online and physical

A written document can go a long way in creating alignment, especially if multiple people are contributing to it. Use Confluence, Google Docs, a white board, or any other collaborative medium to make sure everyone knows the “why” behind any project.

An example of how we set up Confluence pages and get designers, PMs, engineers, and other stakeholders on the same page

Rigorous evaluation of design ideas

If you come up with hundreds of ideas during a brainstorm, how do you know where to start? It’s an important exercise to whittle down ideas to the ones you believe will truly make a dent in the outcomes you’re trying to drive. Here’s an example of an evaluation framework we used to determine what kinds of design changes we should invest in.

Here’s the beginning of a table we used to evaluate design ideas for increasing conversion

2. Get others clear on the outcome

Now that you’re clear on the outcome of your design work, make sure everyone else is, too. Try to avoid designing in a bubble.

A couple tips to get you started:

Design your communication strategy.

How do you plan to keep others involved and informed in your design process? Perhaps it’s a weekly update email or meeting, or maybe a poster board where you’re charting your progress. Whatever it is, make sure that others are aware of your work, and be open to feedback along the way. This helps others keep you accountable to the intended outcome.

An outline of an email I send regularly to keep teammates updated

Open up your design critiques.

If there are people on other functions who may be impacted by your work, let them participate in the design process by giving feedback, so that your work can have more visibility and impact. For instance, we run a monthly cross-company design critique to make sure other stakeholders have input into our work.

Some feedback we received on our last cross-company design critique

3. Follow through on your design work

As you grow in seniority, your design work isn’t done when it’s released into production. Your design work is done when it achieves the outcome you intended for it.

A couple tips to help you follow through on your work:

Check the metrics.

We generally look at funnel data to check conversion by source, UTMs, device, and more.

Work with your team to pull the metrics on your work. Did it increase conversion? What hypotheses can you make about user behavior by looking at the metrics? What kinds of adjustments can you make to better solve the problem?

Find out how your users are using your designs in production.

Our team has hosted “FullStory watching happy hours” during our monthly User Awareness Days to make sure we’re aware of how our work is doing in the wild. You can also ask your customer service team if they’ve received any comments about the work you’ve released.

Alright, so let me ask a meta question. What is the impact of all this? It sounds like a lot of extra work.

True, it is. Once I began thinking in this way, I began to spend more time outside of Sketch than inside it. But I would argue that this has made the time I do spend in Sketch all the more valuable.

Why’s that?

This is what happens when product designers focus on impact.

First, it’s given me the opportunity to influence without authority. My work and perspective has become valuable not only as a design resource who can mock things up, but also as a strategic resource. I’ve created an environment where my teammates can trust me, recognize the value in my ideas, and help me execute on them.

Second, it has helped me figure out how I need to sell the work I really want to do. Let’s face it: making small, reactive design tweaks to address short-term business needs isn’t always the most compelling work. It’s necessary, but not helpful for morale if I’m working on that 24/7. Using the impact lens has helped me realize that if I can speak to my non-design peers in an impact and outcome-focused way, I may be able to pitch projects that may not otherwise be prioritized by the business. I can translate the meaty and challenging design work I want to do into something others can buy into as well.

I don’t know about you, but all of that is pretty rewarding to me.

I’d love to hear from you!

Are there any effective ways you and your product /design team are focusing on impact? Please share :)

Want to learn more?

Here are a few pieces of reading that have informed this blog post, as well as my day-to-day work.

• When building new products goes wrong from Dropbox Design
• Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri
• Intercom’s Josh Seiden on why product teams should focus on outcomes over outputs