The making of a strategic designer
My four-year journey from reading an article about design thinking to landing a job in strategic design.
There are a million ways to tell someone’s story, but most of the time we only get a tiny slice of what really happened. I recently shared news of my new job on LinkedIn, but I also want to let you in on my journey behind the scenes.
I have wanted to be a Strategic Designer since I read an article on design thinking back in 2017, and after four years, I finally reached that goal. I am in my second year of the Master’s in Strategic Design and Management at Parsons AND I landed a job as a Design Advisor with the Government of Canada’s Treasury Board Secretariat. It’s happening!
Strategic design is an emerging field and if this your first time hearing about it, “What is Startegic Design?” by the Helsinki Design Lab, is a must-watch. The thing about emerging fields is that when you realize that you want to enter them, there often isn’t a clear path. It took a lot of trial and error to get here but I did manage to create a path for myself. I decided to write this article as a blueprint for other aspiring designers. To offer an unfiltered view into what it really takes to make a career pivot — in my case to strategic design.
Before we start, we need to clarify what strategic design means. For most people, design has become synonymous with visual arts and aesthetics. While design can be beautiful, the act of designing is all about solving problems and creating solutions. Within design, strategic design focuses on solving “big picture problems” like organizational and societal challenges. Things like making services more accessible to citizens or developing a new business that meets a customer’s needs. I like to describe what we do as “decision-making facilitators’’. We work collaboratively with diverse stakeholders, ask lots of questions to make sure we are solving the right problem, and launch proven solutions that put people first.
You might have heard of terms like design thinking, human-centred design, service design, UX design, and innovation design to describe similar approaches. In my opinion, all of these disciplines are under a big strategic design umbrella and can be deployed in different contexts. In this article, I will use a few of these terms but most often simply “design” to refer to the practice.
Designers have a love-hate relationship with the term “design thinking”. We appreciate that the term popularized by design firms like IDEO has brought our work to the masses in an easy-to-understand and appealing way, but on the other hand, it is frustrating that it has over-simplified the work that we do into one-day corporate training and step-by-step instructions. This opposition will be explored in another article, but for now, let’s keep it under the umbrella.
Fun fact: agreeing on the definitions and lines in the sand for each of these disciplines is an entertaining topic for debate amongst designers and you can find countless articles exploring the differences and overlaps in the field like “HCD vs Design Thinking vs Service Design vs UX …. What do they all mean?” by Charan Singh.
Let’s get back to the journey.
One of my favorite design tools is called a Journey Map. Journey Maps are a visual depiction of the process that a person goes through to accomplish a goal. Unlike process maps which are all about how the system operates, journey maps focus on the human experience and capture thoughts and emotions that lead to empathy. I mapped my journey to becoming a Strategic Designer into the following 5 stages:
1. Discover
2. Self-Learn
3. Reflect
4. Integrate
5. Professionalize
1) Discover
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when I learned about strategic design, but I know that my first foray into the field was in 2017 after reading an article on design thinking similar to this “Guide to Design Thinking” by AJ&Smart.
My friends have always described me as someone that is equally adventurous and cautious, creative and analytical, enthusiastic and serious. Oxymorons that perfectly describe me, but that for a long time I didn’t think could coexist in my professional life. That is until I read that article. When I learned about the design thinking process I thought, “Wow this sounds like my brain and the things I care about”. With that wow, the fire to learn more about the field was lit.
2) Self-learn
I have been intellectually curious for as long as I can remember. When I discover something new I have to read up on it and understand how it works. I honestly do not understand how my brain has not run out of storage space yet. After the “discovery”, I hit the books and I also followed an experiential learning approach that is a key piece of strategic design. I signed up for design jams and startup weekends in Ottawa where I spent 3 days with complete strangers taking a project from a prompt to building something and pitching it. I had no idea what I was doing, but I facilitated workshops, designed websites, and became a project manager. I learned more in those weekends than from months of reading because I applied the concepts in real life. This real-world experience also shone a light on how sophisticated design thinking really was. I had quite a bit to learn.
However, the most significant self-learning moment came in 2018 when I was approached by a team looking for a creative member to help them develop an updated strategy for consular services. Consular work is all about providing assistance to Canadians abroad and is inherently human-centric. While this opportunity was not officially a design role, I knew it had the potential for us to apply a human-centered design process. I took a leap of faith and I joined the team for a one-year secondment.
Having worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for most of their careers, my colleagues knew policy and diplomacy well, but when it came to human-centered design, we learned by doing and relied on open-source content like the Helsinki Design Lab guides. We reached out to others in government doing similar work and tested our initial ideas with a small group of supporters. We created personas, leveraged journey maps like the one in this article to build empathy, facilitated workshops worldwide, and pinpointed areas for service improvements. After a year of this work, we had collected input from consular officers across our embassies and launched a new strategy based on a powerful motto: At the heart of every consular case is a Canadian. This work remains a highlight of my career and it was a checkmark in my journey that I was on the right path.
3) Reflect
After my secondment, I knew that I wanted to keep doing strategic design as my full-time job, but I wasn’t 100% sure how to get there. Strategic design is a gestalt discipline drawing from business, psychology, sociology, organizational design, systems thinking, continuous improvement, communications, and more. There is no one solid path or skillsets for this profession. One of my favorite visualizations for this is this Innovation Designer Capability Map by The Moment.
As I searched for my next steps, I began contacting people. I reached out to strategic designers from all over the world either via messages on LinkedIn or through introductions through friends of friends. They all told me the same thing: I was ready to do this type of work. I already had the medley of skills required, and I had spent a year working on a service design project.
Looking back at my interdisciplinary background, I noticed that I had indeed developed storytelling skills working as a social media manager, UX skills evaluating the visitor experience at a national park in Panama, a human-centered mindset advocating for customers in my business development and customer support roles, an ability to ideate through a fitness-focused business, and I learned how to facilitate workshops as a Girl Guide leader amongst other experiences. I won’t keep listing my CV, but with this reflection, I started to feel hopeful and told myself, “you know, I do think I have what it takes to do this work. Let’s get to it!”
4) Integrate
At this stage, I should mention that in parallel to the strategic design journey, I was also working full-time in international trade finance. I enjoy that field too, and at that point, I had both feet firmly planted in that world. To start opening the door towards strategic design I decided to marry the two.
I spent the past 3 years integrating design work into my corporate roles by putting my hand up to facilitate ideation sessions, strategy workshops, and team-building activities. I put our customers first by launching a newsletter to tell their success stories, and I was deployed to the front lines to support businesses during the pandemic. In my most recent role, I led the development of our first-ever partner experience (PX) strategy and a process improvement initiative on how we actioned and captured partner feedback. This integration was a period of practice, interweaving interests, and design evangelization which I am happy to have contributed to.
However, this was also a time where my own experience took a bit of a dip and I experienced pain points in my journey. Being a lone designer is hard, and it felt even more challenging since it technically wasn’t in my job description to be one. Projects required convincing, there was initial skepticism, some people did not see the value of sticky notes and workshops in a professional context. Don’t get me wrong, I was able to try a lot of things with support from the right colleagues and leaders, but it was slow work that took a lot of my energy since it was done on top of my other duties. To add to this, I was periodically applying for design jobs both internally and externally and not even getting calls for an interview. I started to doubt if I could do design work and continue my pursuit, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet.
5) Professionalize
Through this article, you probably learned that I am someone that LOVES learning. After hitting a wall in my development at the integration stage, and knowing that I always wanted to pursue higher education, I decided to apply to a Master’s program in the field. I found quite a few options in Europe, Canada, and the USA, but eventually, I decided to attend Parsons — my dream school. If you are reading this as a guide for your own journey, I will say that you do not need formal training to become a strategic designer, but enrolling in a Master’s program accelerated my learning tremendously.
When I was learning on my own, the skills I picked up were mostly technical step-by-step instructions for processes and frameworks that I would try to deliver in a cookie-cutter manner. This was what I knew from my traditional academic and work background. I did not have many peers or mentors to help me build the design mindset that is the most important aspect of this work.
After my first semester in graduate school, I truly started to understand the “thinking” in design thinking. Attending a design school stretched my mind in ways that I didn’t think were possible both as an individual and as a professional. The studio and leadership classes at Parson’s helped me learn to navigate uncertainty and approach problems in new ways. Faculty with years of experience showed me that a career in this field is possible and gave me the space to develop additional skills that helped me FINALLY land a design-startegy focused role.
Conclusion
That concludes my strategic design journey for now. I am excited to see what the next stage will look like. I can see myself leading a strategic design team or starting my own strategic design studio in the future. However, I once heard a thought that stuck with me and is fitting for a concluding note: “if you already know what the outcome of a project will be from the start, you are not really doing design thinking work.” Design is about unexpected discoveries, and I embrace these in my personal journey as well.
I hope that this article gave you some breadcrumbs to follow in your own journey towards strategic design, or perhaps a different career pivot. Give it a try, and create your own journey map using the free template I created here.
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