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:
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At what point does “growing design maturity and influence” turn into just running headfirst into a wall?
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What early signals suggest an org simply isn’t capable of this kind of transformation, so the effort is a dead end?