Two sides of Design Impact...What teams can control vs. What orgs must enable

[Bryan]

Design impact is built on relationships.

One side of that relationship is internal: the design team’s effort to build credibility, test assumptions, and connect their work to user needs. The other side is external: the organization’s ability to create space, alignment, and lasting commitment for design to influence outcomes.

We often talk about improving design, but impact only happens when both sides move together.

How to increase design influence across your organization | Bryan Zmijewski...

What the Design Team Can Drive (Internal Influence):

• Credibility: Earned by shifting from opinion-based to evidence-based work.
• Usefulness: Gained by aligning on hunches, forming hypotheses, and testing them early.
• Desirability: Delivered by balancing trade-offs with an understanding of customer behavior and emotion.

These are areas where design teams have control, and it’s the first three rings of design impact. They can bring structure, insight, and creativity to how problems are framed and solutions are validated.

But that’s not enough on its own.

What the Organization Must Enable (External Influence):

• Viability: Requires leadership to connect design to business goals.
• Strategic Alignment: Across product, marketing, engineering, and research.
• Cultural Commitment: To continuous learning, user feedback, and shared metrics.

Without this support, design impact flattens out. The team might have the right ideas, but no path to execute or scale them.

[EricZ]

I’d also argue that, beyond flattening out the design impact, the impact can become co-opted by others or even left unmeasured. Many organizations simply don’t track a fidelity of performance data or circulate that data to the degree necessary to really understand impact.

[Bryan]

Yep, there’s a piece of this that requires influence to make any sizable dent. And those with the most influence may choose to maintain control without clarity.

Borrowing from my Linkedin comment…

For design leaders, it’s key to remember that design only creates impact when it has influence.

And for executives who want design to drive more results, the real challenge isn’t just about design itself. It’s about growing influence across:

• How teams collaborate
• How decisions are made
• How strategy is shaped
• And how the culture supports user needs

Here’s a post that builds on that idea:

Design impact only happens when design has influence. | Bryan Zmijewski

[Basava_Lucky]

Totally agree, viability part is overlooked by most design leaders, Its also a matter of “Positioning” design in the org, thanks Bryan for the beautiful and meaningful illustrations captured the essence.

[Bryan]

Basava, thank you!

“viability part is overlooked by most design leaders”

Agreed. One of the areas we address in the framework is mapping these outcomes. Design leaders are usually good at the user outcomes, and have a decent sense of the technology, but rarely connect these bake to the business outcomes.

@Helge shared some interesting ideas around CPI (he also has a great article on the through line of how employees see the impact of their work:

Capturing UX Metrics Sooner In Development Cycles

I would take a different approach. Engagement metrics are great, but they don’t get to the heart of what people are coming to your experience for in the first place. They are proxies for what the visitor values. e.g. in pharmaceutical marketing the ‘user’ is often a medical professional and they join the experience because they want to ‘learn’ something (e.g. the correct monitoring for a cancer patient). If we want to understand if we built something valuable that the medical professionals wo…

[Helge]

After spending 15 years working believing that the quality of the work is the most important thing, I joined an organization where this wasn’t the case. And I’ve come to believe my company was not an outlier, but normal.

As designers we believe that our job is to understand and solve a problem in the best possible way. And we dig into the different parts of the problem (like e.g. Design Thinkings viability, feasability, desireability).

If we can’t get the organization to come with us we dig harder, deeper, more thorough.

But what I found was that doing that I was solving the wrong problem.

And that the problem isn’t really the problem, the people are.

To get anywhere with your work in an organization people need to join in, support, sponsor. But to do that there has to be something in it for them. And we have to ask: what do they want?

What I (unfortunately) found was that most people in the organization aren’t there to do good work, they aren’t there to make any big bets, they aren’t there to venture outside the line or make the world a better place.

They are there to get ahead, themselves.

And so every decision they make is based on: where does this bring me?

I think that is where models like this creates a huge gap for designers. Because they create a picture of the world where quality of the work is the most important thing. And the illusion that other people higher up in the business care about that to.

I think we are creating a generation of designers growing further and further away from business because they think the only thing they need to do next is solve the business problem (as well .), while in reality it’s not a business problem at all, it’s a people problem (stakeholders and sponsors).

Sorry to drop this in here, but I didn’t know where to put it. But I believe the best thing that could happen to the design industry is if it added one more circle to the DT Venn diagram: “sponsorship”, and in order to make design more effective and important, that is where the battle lies.

[Bryan]

@Helge

But what I found was that doing that I was solving the wrong problem.

Deep thoughts. But true.

Selling a vision needs to incorporate how all the parties gain something. The reality is that it is very hard to do. They are all interconnected.

We can’t learn from an audience without understanding what we also want to gain. That’s a tough pill to swallow.

Love your thinking Helge.

[Helge]

Thank you @Bryan

The world bank has published a short but good introduction to stakeholder mapping which we used to get started. You can find it here: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/842721467995900796/pdf/106395-WP-PUBLIC-PPD-Stakeholder-Mapping-Toolkit-2016.pdf

We also mapped what different stakeholders needed and the relationships between them (who influences who ..) Good stuff

[Hanna]

I’m with the general premise: if there’s no design influence, there’s no design impact. But in my experience, orgs where design has influence by default are pretty rare. I see it as the design leader’s job to build that influence. And the further I go, the more I realize how critical selling/persuasion skills are.

Questions I keep circling:

1. At what point does “growing design maturity and influence” turn into just running headfirst into a wall?

2. What early signals suggest an org simply isn’t capable of this kind of transformation, so the effort is a dead end?

[Bryan]

@Hanna

design leader’s job to build that influence. And the further I go, the more I realize how critical selling/persuasion skills are.

1. Yes! A design leader’s job is to build influence. “And the further I go, the more I realize how critical selling/persuasion skills are.” I’d agree, and when you bring proof, selling becomes…waaaaaaaay easier.

2. I’d argue that if a stakeholder can’t minimally sell the rationale of a design decision in your organization, then the influence is likely to run into roadblocks. Stories need to carry the effort.

…which gets us to Glare! The idea is that if you can bring UX metrics to your stories, your influence, and collective bargaining power 10Xs. That’s been our experience.

Businesses speak the language of numbers. It’s foolish to think otherwise, unless your leader is a designer…and even then, you need to influence strong-willed people.

[Hanna]

100%. Proof turns persuasion into translation, not arm-wrestling. Stories sell, metrics scale, and together they compound influence

[MoData]

“Proof turns persuasion into translation”

Love this @Hanna! Need to put this on a shirt

[Hanna]

Haha, thank you, I keep half-joking that I should start a tiny side project with merch that says all the things I repeat in meetings, so I can just point to my shirt instead of spelling it out again

[nathaliesmith]

@Hanna haha!

[Bryan]

@Hanna

100%. Proof turns persuasion into translation, not arm-wrestling. Stories sell, metrics scale, and together they compound influence

Love this so much. Working backwards from what you wrote, these are the main facets of Glare!

• Proof (Lead- Results)
• Translation (Lead- Mapping)
• Persuasion (Focus- Decisions)
• Stories (Measure- Findings)
• Metrics (Define- UX metrics)

[Bryan]

Putting this here to keep talking about how we visualize design impact. This new chart flips the circles @Helge, so situations encapsulate the whole problem space.