As a designer, you may want to get more involved in the strategy process. But where do you start? How can you get involved in strategy and have more influence on your company’s decisions? In this post, I’ll share some tips for getting started. So whether you’re just starting out or you’re looking for new ways to deepen your skills, read on for some helpful advice.
There are four steps to getting involved in strategy:
- understand what it means to be strategic and why it is important to your organization
- connect your tactical work to the overall strategy
- measure and evaluate your impact on the company
- build credibility with stakeholders
What is strategy and why it’s important
When people say “I want to be involved in strategy”, they often mean “I want to have influence over the important decisions.” However there are 3 different types of important decisions in every company: vision, strategy, and tactics.
Vision is where you want to end up — e.g. eating a delicious birthday cake. Strategy is choosing a path— e.g. making a cake instead of buying one. And tactics are the steps within the approach — e.g. buy groceries, bake, decorate, etc.
Vision, strategy, and tactics have to exist together: tactics without strategy is just a to-do list of things that may not be important, and strategy without tactics tend to become marching orders that are unachievable. Vision is the raison d’être that gets you out of bed each morning, but without strategy or tactics, it’s just a pipe dream.
Vision is where you want to end up. Strategy is choosing what path to take. Tactics are individual steps within the path. Vision, strategy, and tactics have to exist together.
To be involved in strategy, you have to understand why they are important to your organization — for-profit companies tend to focus on profits and market share, while non-profits tend to focus on impact that will enable them to acquire in more funding. Strategy at any organization is about survival: financial success that achieves the vision. To be involved in strategy, you have to make every tactical decision serve these goals.
Strategic decisions at any organization is about survival: financial success that achieves the vision. To be involved in strategy, you have to make every tactical decision serve these goals.
Good news: designers are already trained at tactics. These are decisions like what design methods to use, how long you spend on a design, and what to include or exclude in a design. So your path into strategy is through connecting it to your tactical work.
Connecting tactical work to strategy
As designers, we generally receive projects with “we want to solve problem X” or “we want to build feature Y”. You want to ask questions to understand the strategic reasoning behind that request — why it’s important to organizational survival. This helps you learn strategic thinking from others and gives you a chance to offer your design perspective at a strategic level.
Here’s an example:
Stakeholder: We want to add chat support to our account setup flow.
You: What problem does the chat support solve for our users?
Stakeholder: It gets their questions answered quicker than an email.
You: Why is this an important problem to solve for our business?
Stakeholders: We see the biggest drop-off in account setup when someone asks a question and never comes back even after we answer them.
You: Why is focusing on users in the account setup stage important, vs. users who’ve already set up their accounts?
Stakeholder: Because if they complete account setup, we can send them re-engagement emails even if they curn. And we also think fixing new user activation is easier than fixing retention for existing users in terms of immediate growth.
You: Why is it important to focus on immediate growth right now?
Stakeholder: Because we are fundraising in 6 months and need to show good recent growth.
In this example, you found out that the strategy is to grow new user activation first, so that the company can raise more funds to increase retention later. And a tactic within this strategy is to use chat support to reduce the biggest drop-off scenario in account setup.
Asking why contributes strategically by uncovering any misalignments in the team’s goals, or any assumptions that aren’t supported by data. (It didn’t happen in this example but often happens in real life)
And when there is clear alignment, knowing why you’re doing something will help you course-correct when things don’t go as expected. If users feel meh about your chat support designs, you can move up a level and ask “is the lack of real-time support why they’re dropping off?” If users love chat support but you’re not seeing new user growth, you can move up a level to ask “is the biggest drop-off in new user growth during account setup?” These are your tools to give your projects the best chance of being successful in a strategically relevant way.
Asking why uncovers any misalignments in the team’s goals, or any assumptions that aren’t supported by data. It also helps you course-correct when things don’t go as expected.
Evaluate your impact
Another key component of being strategic is being able to look back and evaluate whether the path you chose worked well. The most common way is for businesses to set quantitative metrics such as conversion rate, activation rate, retention rate, CAC, LTV, etc.
You don’t have to learn SQL. What’s more important is being able to use these concepts in discussions at a high level, rather than being the person to pull data direct from the database (although it’s a plus).
As a designer, you add the unique strategic value of understanding qualitative metrics — quantitative metrics only tell you the “what”, but qualitative tells you the “why”.
As a designer, you add the unique strategic value of understanding qualitative metrics , which tells you the “why”.
An example of a conversation where you can apply these concepts:
You: How’s the chat feature doing?
Stakeholder: It’s definitely bumping activation up, but we’re seeing a lower LTV and higher churn. We’re trying to re-engage them through email.
You: What’s the current click-through rate on the re-engagement email?
Stakeholder: CTR is around 1%
You: Hm… that sounds lower than industry average. Do we know why?
Stakeholder: Not sure, but we’re planning to do some A/B testing to try to get that metric up.
You: That sounds like it could take many weeks, especially since we’re fundraising so soon. How about I take a week to conduct some user research and find out if there’s a pattern in why they’re churning, that way we can implement less experiments but be more confident in each one.
You just provided strategic value: saving the company a few weeks in finding out what’s wrong means that you’re more likely to achieve better metrics before fundraising.
You may find that users are churning because the value prop doesn’t resonate with them, and that it’s also the original reason for them not finishing the signup — they didn’t need support in completing their accounts, they needed more motivation for why it’s worth it. And if that’s the reason, then the right strategy isn’t better re-engagement emails, it’s going to be onboarding messaging and education. Boom, you provided strategic value again!
Build credibility
The art and science of gaining credibility in a business setting is subtle. It’s about being proactive, but not forcing your way into conversations that don’t serve you or the organization at large. These conversations often start as informal “hey I wanna run an idea by you…” chats, so you have to show enough respect for others’ opinions that they’ll seek out yours without feeling like an interruption (or worse yet — a threat).
That doesn’t mean you should sit still in your lane until your name is called. Here are some steps to smoothly get more into strategic circles:
- Show you can do the expected — be good at your first responsibility: Create designs that makes stakeholders say “Wow, we wouldn’t be able to do it without you.” This is a pre-requisite for influence in future projects.
- Show you understand where the business goals and constraints are — Ask questions to show empathy for your stakeholders’ goals. Make stakeholders say “Wow, you really understand what I’m going through.” Make them feel like you’re eager to learn and easy to get along with. This will get you exposed to much more informal, private, conversations that are usually the beginnings of a strategy.
- Show the extra value you bring — After you’ve done the groundwork, you’ll be in the right place at the right time to contribute to strategic discussions, and you’ll have stakeholders who already trust you. Here you’ll finally have a chance to bring up additional insights, suggest outside-the-box solutions, ask questions to anchor the discussion to concrete next steps, and in general bringing out the best in other people. 🙂
As you can see, becoming a strategic designer is no easy task. It requires an understanding of not only design, but also business and how to measure success. However, if you are up for the challenge and want to make a real impact on your organization, it is definitely worth the effort. Are you ready to take your design career to the next level?
P.S. Hey, did you notice that I used AI to write this post? In fact it helped me tweak my outline and even rewrite entire paragraphs! So tell me if what we wrote together makes any sense at all and guess which parts the AI did — I’ll let you know if you’re right or wrong ;)
