To Become Valuable, Be Valuable

A fundamental principle of design leadership is to “turn the UX mirror on yourself.” This idea, popularized by Cooper U’s Design Leadership class, emphasizes utilizing design research techniques to better understand our stakeholders and teams. Design leaders recognize their success hinges on enabling their partners to achieve their goals. To take the next step in your design leader journey, we need to change our thinking in three ways: avoid an “us vs. them” mentality, be a great partner, and take responsibility for personal leadership. Mastering these concepts makes you indispensable to your team.

Collaborate, Not Conflagrate

Collaboration is easier said than done, especially when frustrations arise. It’s tempting to leave a tense meeting muttering, “They just don’t get it!” Whether “they” refers to a stakeholder, a client, the boss, or a product manager, this mindset fuels division and derails progress. Effective collaboration requires addressing the obstacles that hinder true teamwork.

Erika Hall outlined several factors that often create friction between design and stakeholders:

1. Ego: A universal human trait.
2. Organizational silos: These limit visibility into others’ work, leading to narrow development approaches.
3. Misaligned incentives: When teams pursue conflicting goals projects become a tug-of-war.
4. Company culture: Workplace dynamics significantly impact collaboration. If the culture rewards the wrong things, expect to see those behaviors magnified.
5. Personal background: Not everyone has prior experience with collaboration and may need to develop this skill.

Overcoming these challenges involves mastering the narratives we tell ourselves and cultivating influence skills. The book Crucial Confrontations introduces the Six Source model, which encourages exploring a number of different possible motivations besides assuming the worst. 

Similarly, Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People offers two particularly relevant habits:

1. Habit 4: Think Win-Win – Rather than putting your goals ahead of others or having theirs overrule yours, seek solutions where both parties will benefit. This helps fix misaligned incentives, weaken organizational siloes, and correct company cultures that spur uneven outcomes.
2. Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood – Prioritize listening to others before presenting your perspective. Starting with listening works to overcome ego and personal background and assists in piercing the siloes that hamper cross-team collaboration.

These strategies encourage empathetic thinking and establish an environment where collaboration can thrive. They are the soil where collaboration grows.

Considering alternate possibilities and seeking to understand others is the soil where collaboration grows.

Be a Great Partner

Collaboration is only the first step. The next is embracing the principle: to have a great partner, you must be a great partner. Design is just one element of a high-performing team, and all parts must function together cohesively. Designers, leading with empathy, are well-positioned to take on this charge.

To become a great partner, designers must measure what matters to stakeholders—much as they measure what matters to users. Here are some key questions to get you started:

1. What is the product’s purpose?
2. How does it fit into the organization’s portfolio?
3. Why is the timing significant?
4. What challenges or risks might arise?
5. What does success look like?

Stakeholder interviews are invaluable for gathering these insights. Begin with small, one-on-one sessions to build rapport. While some stakeholders may prefer involving their team, it’s important to also meet with decision-makers individually to ensure accurate understanding. These discussions reveal assumptions about business goals, user needs, and constraints.

During interviews, prioritize active listening and ask open-ended questions. Techniques like the “5 Whys” can help uncover root causes and motivations. When constraints arise, probe their origins rather than accepting them at face value. For example, if a project must launch before Q4, ask why this deadline matters. Understanding these drivers equips you to propose creative solutions that address both the stated requirements and broader goals.

In one instance, while designing an insurance application, my team encountered strict requirements for form completion that had originally been designed for agents assisting clients in person. By understanding the principles behind these constraints, we developed a self-service design that met legal requirements while improving the client experience.

Great partnerships stem from genuine interest in what others value. Designers can demonstrate leadership by stepping into stakeholders’ worlds, grasping their guiding principles, and aligning efforts with their priorities.

Take Responsibility for Personal Leadership

Taking personal responsibility for understanding the business and stakeholder perspectives is the key to unlocking influence. By viewing the world through your stakeholders’ eyes, you can communicate the value of your work more effectively. This approach builds trust in two critical ways defined by Lamsa and Pucetaite (2006). First, stakeholders see the tangible artifacts you create—ecosystem maps, personas, and models that bring their abstract ideas to life. These artifacts foster cognition-based trust, they see what you make as valuable. Second, by actively listening and demonstrating empathy for their perspectives, you establish affect-based trust, which connects on an emotional level. A strong partnership emerges when both types of trust are present, and achieving this requires communication that stakeholders find valuable. In essence, you must align your communication strategy with their goals—how are you helping them succeed? Answering this question shapes how you convey the impact of your work.

Effective communication of your work’s value enables you to influence decision-making. Stakeholders need actionable insights. For example, you can describe personas and their operational contexts or craft scenarios illustrating how the business can achieve its goals by creating value for those personas. Carolyn Hou, in her 2021 workshop on Business Thinking for UXers, offered guidance on integrating business strategy with design:

1. Ask yourself, “Where’s the money?” for each design concept.
2. Stress-test your design decisions to ensure they align with broader business goals and ambitions.
3. Map your recommendations to the implications for cross-functional teams.
4. Communicate how your design decisions reflect the business strategy.

⠀Every presentation is an opportunity to reinforce design’s role as a strategic partner. Clearly articulate how your recommendations strengthen the business’ foundation.

As you shape decision-making, you elevate the role of design within the organization. Just as individual designers become indispensable by creating valuable work, design as a discipline grows in significance by delivering meaningful outcomes. Valuable work is visible work, and the path to achieving this visibility lies in taking personal responsibility for leadership, while deeply understanding the business and stakeholder perspectives.

Conclusions

Your work with your team can be a dynamic working relationship, but it is not automatic. True collaboration dismantles organizational silos and fosters alignment across perspectives within the team. Start by taking the initiative to understand your colleagues’ challenges, demonstrating empathy and curiosity. Follow this with a commitment to personal leadership—taking ownership of your role in driving collaboration and trust. Build strong relationships with stakeholders by aligning your work with their goals and priorities. By applying the same user-centered mindset to stakeholders as we do to our product users, we can ensure our contributions hold real value. In the end, we become indispensable not by demanding value, but by consistently delivering it.

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References

Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide. (n.d.). [Training]. Interaction Design Foundation. Retrieved August 7, 2021, from https://www.interaction-design.org/courses/design-thinking-the-ultimate-guide/lessons/1.7

Goodwin, K. (2009). Designing for the digital age: How to create human-centered products and services. Wiley Pub.

Hall, E. (2015, November 4). Collaborative Research. UI20, Boston, MA. https://aycl.uie.com/events/ui_20

Hou, C. (2021, October 20). Business Thinking for UXers [Conference]. https://rosenfeldmedia.com/courses/business-thinking-for-uxers/

Lamsa, A.-M., & Pucetaite, R. (2006). Development of organizational trust among employees from a contextual perspective. Business Ethics: A European Review, 15(2), 130–141.

Covey, S. R., & Collins, J. C. (with Covey, S.). (2020). The 7 habits of highly effective people: Powerful lessons in personal change (Revised and updated [edition]). Simon & Schuster.

Patterson, K. (Ed.). (2005). Crucial confrontations: Tools for resolving broken promises, violated expectations, and bad behavior. McGraw-Hill.