You suggest as companies flatten and AI speeds everything up, the people who shape priorities, sequencing, and tradeoffs gain the most leverage. Designers who move closer to those decisions often find themselves doing work that looks a lot like product management, whether or not their title changes.
Influence comes from owning decisions, not advising on them
Designers gain influence when they move from shaping ideas to committing to priorities and tradeoffs, and being accountable for the outcome.
Technical and business fluency are required to hold that influence
Being close to decisions means understanding feasibility, sequencing, and cost. Without that credibility, influence fades quickly.
Outcomes matter more than perfect experiences
In product roles, timing and impact outweigh polish. A good decision shipped on time often beats a better one shipped too late.
Let’s jump into the discussion
Your perspective is super relevant for many product and design leaders. Whether you stay in design or move into product, the work keeps moving in the same direction. Make complexity understandable. Make tradeoffs explicit. Deliver outcomes that matter for users and the business. You rightly suggest that everything else is just role labeling.
Here’s the question I want to open up: How should designers and product teams reframe their work around influence?
Great to dig into this with you, Justin. I’m excited to jump into the questions. I’ve been a product designer my whole career, back before most people knew what that meant in a digital world, and I never really subscribed to rigid UX role definitions.
Lately, especially as we frame our work with Glare, I find myself talking more about product and design leaders rather than product design leaders. It feels like a small shift in language, but it reflects something bigger.
Here’s my first question: your article is grounded in your own experience, but are you seeing this shift play out more broadly across organizations?
Hi, Bryan! Great question, and thanks for inviting me to participate in this discussion.
Yes, I do see this as a broader shift tied to the “Great Flattening” of organizations. Middle management layers are being eliminated at an unprecedented pace across companies due to a belief that less bureaucracy equals faster outcomes. I think this is a dangerous and misguided line of thinking that will likely course correct over time, but it does open opportunities for highly-skilled, business-savvy designers to gain influence due to their core skills being exactly what is required to orchestrate high quality outcomes at pace.
Great. So these types of designers are well-positioned to gain influence because their skills will help companies orchestrate quality outcomes at speed.
Let’s get practical…what separates designers who successfully make that leap from those who stay adjacent to influence but never quite gain it? I hear these designers complain a lot.
I’m familiar with those complaints because I used to be an All-Star Complainer myself.
This might be a bit surprising, but the number one skill that we, as designers, can employ to gain influence is the same one that makes us adept at understanding our customers/users: empathy. When we apply empathy and curiosity to those we work with, as well as our stakeholders, we are much better equipped to deliver messages that resonate personally and drive alignment (the orchestration I referenced). Storytelling and truly understanding and caring about your audience is so critically important.
It seems so simple, but I failed to see this early in my career since I’m mostly introverted. I hid behind my ideas, research insights, and mock-ups and then became frustrated when senior leaders just didn’t get it. They obviously didn’t understand the importance of “capital D” Design, or care about our users, only the bottom line.
It took some tough lessons for me to understand that what’s designed only matters if it makes it into production, and that could only happen if I brought everyone along with me by speaking to their core motivations and aspirations. When I made the change, that’s when my influence skyrocketed.
Designers who are able to do this while connecting design decisions back to value are the ones who will find the most opportunity going forward.
This is beautifully said. Thank you for sharing this story.
I encourage designers to lean in. Many assume stakeholders have some mythical grasp of the business problems in front of them. In reality, the 80/20 rule applies. Designers don’t need to know everything about the business. They just need enough working knowledge to move past imposter syndrome.
Spend a little time in their world, and you quickly see that most people do not have all the answers. They are trying to take responsibility for hard decisions that affect entire teams. I love how you articulate this.
So are you suggesting that relationships play a major role in creating this influence?
Yes, relationships play the most important role in creating this influence. The big secret is everyone at every level is mostly guessing out there. It’s true that those in business leadership will likely have a better grasp on the core business than you, but they won’t have a better grasp on how to apply design methods to achieve their business goals than you. In the absence of strong design partnership in these scenarios, these leaders will bring their own judgement, taste, and subjective faults to the experience and limit success for everyone involved.
This is why I argue that while storytelling in design matters, proof travels farther and faster when it brings credibility into the conversation. That credibility comes from translating language and metrics so design decisions can stand up alongside business judgment.
Exactly! Speaking the “language of business” is a pre-requisite for building strong relationships with stakeholders and business partners.
There are a couple problems I see consistently when business leaders try to work with product and design:
They believe design and all its process will slow things down
They don’t trust their product or design partners due to their lack of business/domain expertise, and see them as delivery only
As for process slowing down progress, this is something that can be addressed. I’ve noticed many designers tend to over-index on discovery activities in order to maximally de-risk solutions, which can extend timelines and not be seen as valuable time spent by stakeholders.
I’m a big fan of time-boxing discovery activities based on a “Risk of Being Wrong” assessment — meaning, based on our current understanding of the problem to be solved, how much risk to the user and business would we introduce if we move into design and delivery now? More often than not, you’ll find that the risk is relatively low and perhaps only evaluative research or A/B experimentation will be needed vs. a full discovery with generative research activities up front.
For lack of business/domain expertise, this is something that can only be addressed by building those muscles and delivering quick value wins that tie design back to business outcomes.
Oh, love this. It also helps keep design problems small enough for business leaders to track what’s actually happening.
Thank you so much for answering my questions @justindelabar. You’ve shared a lot of great learnings here, and I’m looking forward to learning more from your work.
We’ll keep the thread open for others to jump in with questions.
Thanks for sharing more about your article @justindelabar! I really like this line “Outcomes Eclipse Experience Quality”, we’ve been discussing over the last week how our concept pages need to show the outcomes of getting user feedback and validation of designs, not just the process by which to surface the insights. Measuring the experience is important, but only in service of the design changes that your measurements lead to, and therefor the business outcomes that they affect.
