Grow Your Influence as a Designer

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Welcome to the Daily Sprint, which is all about how will you use today to turn your design skills into design leadership.

Today we'll talk about what kind of influence you have as a product designer, and we'll analyze your homework.

I'm Darrell Estabrook 30 years into UX product design. Yes, that's 4 lifetimes in internet years, but we're still just getting started.

The daily sprint is sponsored by designing improve every part of your design work from smoother conversations with stakeholders to knowing where to place the next button, all when you learn to design with a why.

Find out more and get on board with a free newsletter at designy.com. That's “design” with a ”y” dot com.

Welcome! Glad you're here.

It's episode two. And the burning question is, am I going to count every episode? I don't know yet. I've only got two, so we'll see.

Other than that, how's it going in your corner of product design world? Pretty good day? I don't know. Some days I feel like I'm making great progress. And then there are others when I wonder if anybody knows what design is.

But that's okay.

If you know the value of design, then you've got what it takes to demonstrate that to others. But that's a skill that you've got to build into excellence, and that's what we're doing here. So you were made to design and create. So we look forward to that.

So the question of the day, how much influence do you have as a designer?

I used to think that I needed to be a manager or a director or someone at the top in order to have influence over products and all of that. A lot of times you're just saying, I'm just a designer. And that's where most people are.

There's more designers than there are managers.

Your position doesn't make you a leader necessarily. Obviously, if you're a director, you're going to move mountains with just a little finger, you know, one comment here and there. And managers have influence over teens or a team.

Designers kind of feel like they have a pivotal role and yet it seems like all the feedback is about color choice and other little things—“Make it pretty.”

The reality is you actually have quite a lot of influence. One designer, that's you, and can shape the course of a product. Now, that doesn't mean it's going to be perfect button placement or some earth shattering feature, it very well could be.

It's something that you can do to change the team's process even just by showing up.

One of my first projects was with an engineering team. This was an engineer driven product, and that's not unusual. It wasn't unusual back way back, but it's also still not unusual. This was definitely pre-Agile. Engineers were writing up these requirements in a Word document. I'm sure that never happens today.

They were using the word document tables and cells and kind of like the, the, the word art inside the document to indicate placements for UI and columns and buttons and everything like that. I came in, and I just trying to make sense of what I was looking at, it started to create wire frames. And I did it in a vector program.

So conversations, had it, you know, I could update it quickly. The fascinating thing was the relief from the engineers was very visible.

It was something that I took off their plate that that wasn't something they were interested in doing, but they had more important things to do. Their skill set was much more valuable in producing than documenting. I loved it because this was shaping the product and having those conversations. And by me taking that on, not just as a artifact, but as a working part of the process, it sped everything up.

What it did, which was the underlying value, is it clarified the vision because I had to ask questions and I had to poke. But that was eons ago.

But even today, there's AI prototyping and other things that we've got new tools that are emerging. It's the same situation, the same approach, we're just using different technology. And this idea, this situation is injecting strategy, right?

That's what we can do as designers. We're removing tasks from perhaps other roles, but ultimately we're clarifying the vision.

And I think we're in a great position to do that, given we're not in strategy, we're not in engineering. We're right in the middle. We can be the nexus. And you can use AI to do this. Those are tools that are still in development. It's questionable as to the varying levels of success and all that, but the concept is more of the designer being in a strong position to lead the way. And all of this depends on how confident you are in the design decisions you make.

So it's not just producing documentation, whether it's wire framing or AI prototyping. Those are just the means.

The real value and the real skill is in defining the purpose of the design. Once you define that, then design decisions become clearer, as well as communication.

So what makes you a leader is really in defining the purpose.

And I'm talking to the designers who are in the front lines of product design.

If you're embedded on a product team or maybe you're a solo designer wearing all the hats, the research hat and the embedded team hat design system hat, and even if you're a new manager, right, you're on the front lines, you got this team now, you got to bring them together and bring them up to speed.

How can you do that?

You can define that purpose with whatever you're working on. So you kind of ask the question, if this feature works perfectly, what will the outcome be. We don't have the feature yet, but we're intending to build something that's going to do something.

If it does the thing we want it to do, what will the outcome be? That's your purpose. That becomes the goal. Not necessarily the means.

Search is a feature. But if you want people to find things faster, that's an outcome, and the way you end up designing to the outcome, it's going to be very different than if you're just producing a feature.

So maybe, for example, this, you have a reporting app that needs a dashboard. You can go to mob in, you know, get some inspiration, do an image search or even use AI to generate a dashboard, right, as a prompt, with a lot of background prompt in it. And you can get a dashboard in seconds. You get those references, however you want. And there you go. You've got a dashboard.

But you can't create a solved problem without defining what the outcome will be. You can have an image, but are we really having a solution? And you want to know the questions the user has in their mind before they view this dashboard, because they're coming to it to get some answers. And then what data will answer those questions, what format that data should take.

So it's glanceably easy to understand. I love glanceable, just a quick registration on, oh, I know what that is now. And then what actions the user wants to take because of that data. So they were influenced, you know, they came here, and now they're going to go do something, like all of those factors.

Now, if that's your position going into this design, you're going to start asking stakeholders, users and engineers, some clarifying questions around all those things. Then that way you're going to make informed design decisions to produce a solved problem. Even if you're generating that with AI, you're still going to need to understand those things to write a prompt. I think the jury is still out on that one just as far as how you continue to edit that. But that's for another episode.

But still, you'll have to you'll have to know that. And so by doing these sorts of things, by taking that step asking those clarifying questions and really digging deeper into the problem and the outcome, you'll be presenting design in a very productive light, a very valuable light, and that's going to garner influence.

And that influence is going to take time. You're going to find ways to understand the purpose.

So wherever you are, it may not be, please tell me what the purpose is, but you'll have to keep asking clarifying questions. Keep showing up and this will come in time. And you can start doing that today with whatever you're working on, whatever feature.

Start asking what the outcome will be and then design towards that. And we'll get it into a little bit of that in upcoming shows.

So let's talk about the homework from last episode. Did you do it?

Now, I would want to know who has homework with a podcast. Like, this is unprecedented. There's no precedent, I'm sure. Well, maybe there is. I don't know. I've never had homework for a podcast, but where nothing if not different around here.

So you can go back to episode one, listen to the challenge, but here it is in short. Two lists, two minutes for each list, and respond to these prompts. So you're writing these things down. And this is about, you, your position, as a product designer, and how can we, you know, what's your situation?

So list one, the prompt was things that slow me down in product design, and list two where things I wish I could break through and do in product design.

So if you haven't done that, you can pause and do it now, of course. Otherwise, let's dive into kind of looking at these lists and break it down a bit.

So list one, things that slow me down in product design. There are a lot. You could probably throw in nickel and hit a problem. But that's okay.

I think some of these are as simple as I can't deliver a design in the time available. That's, that's what you said, all the way to, we're building features, which aren't strategically valuable. That's the very high end of it.

But here's some other things that I've heard, that slow people down in product design, unclear requirements. No access or limited access to end users. Stakeholders changing their minds. Not enough time to design or not enough time for user testing, even limited design tools. And there's more and more.

Do you get any of those on your list? Maybe? That'd be that'd be interesting to see. Did you have something else that wasn't on there? I'm sure there's other things. There's really no wrong answer, but there is a theme, right, with all of these.

These are all things that are happening to you. And the good news is you can start doing things differently and changing it. Some of these might be easier to influence, which might bring a change sooner, which is great. Others may be a real challenge because there's a company policy or there's some company protocol that really puts a blocker. But you can, we can adapt in ways. We can we can control our sphere in ways that demonstrate value. And we'll have more topics on these in the daily sprints in the future.

But if you have one of those that you're burning to understand deeper, send it to me in the question section, and I can talk about it here. designy.com/ask, and you can post those,

List two where things I wish I could break through and do in product design. So this may be similar to your other list. Sometimes there's like a one-to-one opposite of, you know, this is blocking me, but I want to do the thing that unblocks me, and that's fine. That's great. And some of these could be just general goals that you have as well.

Here's some examples that I've heard design has a handoff to engineering. I wish I could break through that. It's like a silo. I wish I could try new design tools. I wish I could stop being a pixel pusher and instead be a problem solver. Make sure the end software is visually consistent. Or actually works as designed. That's a big one. I wish I could use or test all my designs.

And this is great because it gets to two things. It shows where your gaps are. So you know what you need to work on. There's things that you could specifically put as goals. And then it demonstrates what your vision is. So like the design has a handoff, like if it didn't have a handoff, if you could work collaboratively with engineering, you know, that's a vision. It's not happening now, but that's something that you can actually work towards.

And in one sense, it's an outcome. It's like, this is a personal example of defining purpose. So we're just talking about purpose for features. Well, this is purpose for you. And if you've defined those outcomes, that's what you'd like to achieve. And the question is, what would it take to get there? What's the smallest change you could make towards that?

And I have a lot of conversations with designers, and that's where it gets very real because it's one-on-one, and we can get into the actual discussion of the item and set some goals and articulate those actual small changes that you can do week over week, you know, day over day. But it's possible.

And those small changes could really result in achieving that outcome in some form. And we'll talk about those. Those are, in some cases, as iceberg sized gold. But that's what you want to break down, even if your annual professional development goals are out there. We're going to break them down into more of a daily sprint kind of a thing.

And if you have questions, you can always send them to me and ask about them: designy.com/ask.

So I'll leave you with this. The question of what is your bread and butter? I always call it bread and butter? That's a funny phrase. We need to look that up. I love bread and butter as food anyway, but it's just that thing. It's comfortable. It's comforting.

So when we're talking to UX product design, why are you doing this job? Like, what what's, what do you love about it? What's very easy to come by? You don't have to struggle in some ways than others. It's very natural, right?

So how about this? New list for next time.

In two minutes, write down all the things that you absolutely love about your product design work. And then as a bonus of that list, like, go back after the 2 minutes, like, write, take two minutes, one item per line or per sticky if you're doing that.

And then go back and circle the things that you can do with your eyes closed. Like, 0 yeah, that's not a problem. Like, you might love a certain thing, but this is really easy. It's like no real effort, much more of a natural extension of your thinking.

And we'll take a look at that next time.

So get involved. Follow, subscribe to the daily sprint on whatever platform you're listening to right now.

You can ask a question anytime. Send in some of the lists and items that you have if you're looking to go deeper. You can go to designy.com/ask.

And while you're there, sign up for the free newsletter at designy.com. That's “design” with a ”y” dot com.

So thanks for listening to The Daily Sprint today.

Remember, today is a great day to design with a why.

See you next time.