Design communication is a critical skill
By: Kazden Cattapan
Tags: Stakeholder Management, Design, Communication Skills, Design Thinking, UX

These foundations should underpin all design presentations, regardless of who you’re sharing with. Of course, depending on stakeholder context and your specific project, there may be variations in how or what you’re sharing, but generally these four foundations should hold true across all cases. With these foundations in mind, it’s time to think about the stakeholder landscape.

Part 2: Understanding the stakeholder landscape

Many kinds of stakeholders influence our projects, and they often have very diverse priorities. Ahead of sharing your work, you should do your best to understand stakeholder priorities and tailor your sharing in a way that resonates with them. While every project has many different stakeholders, let’s assume there are three main groups.

Your immediate team External stakeholders Leads and executives

Thinking about these groups in concentric circles can help you visualize the frequency you’ll interact with these groups, and how they may care about different things depending on which group they fall into. Depending on where the person sits in relation to you, it can be difficult to know what aspects of your work are important to them. Your focus should be to identify these people and seek to understand them as best as you can.

Your team

These are the people you interact with every day. This team likely includes developers, product managers, content designers, and other designers — but of course can include other disciplines across the organization.

In general, your team is the best source of people that can help you on your project since there are daily opportunities to collaborate. The more time you spend collaborating, describing solutions, communicating value, and establishing a shared vocabulary, the better off you’ll be at shipping real value. Part of what helps with this collaboration is understanding the priorities of your peers.

This is a simple cheat sheet I use to remind myself of discipline specific priorities.

Developers: You should always empathize with developers and their perspectives on a project. As builders, they’re constantly bombarded with a backlog of bugs and enhancements, while also trying to build out new features from the roadmap. It’s important to connect with developers early and often so that you can grow an understanding of the technical effort involved in implementing different solutions. This will help you get rid of the solutions that are overly complex relative to the value they provide.

When communicating design intent, your job is to help them understand user problems, the value that different solutions offer, and how that value makes the effort worth it.

Product managers: Similar to designers, product managers have a deep understanding of the problem space and the customers. They also ensure that projects are mapped to product objectives and help teams manage scope so that projects stay on track, on budget, and are delivered on time.

When communicating design intent to product managers, help them understand where you’re at in the design process, and alert them about concerns or changes to project scope as soon as possible.

Content designers: Content designers ensure that products have a logical information architecture that helps users accomplish a task by prioritizing the right info at the right time, and organizing it in a way that matches existing mental models. They also help teams develop a shared vocabulary and understanding of abstract concepts, and ensure products communicate these concepts consistently so that users have a consistent experience. It is important to connect with content designers early and often to grow a collective understanding of the problem space and user mental models. This will help you collaboratively craft the right information architecture and hierarchy across the product.

When communicating design intent to content designers, focus on helping them understand insights from user research, how your decisions match or fit into existing content models, how solutions are consistent with other areas of the product, and how designs reduce cognitive load for users.

External stakeholders

This group is likely less involved in your day-to-day decision making, but they can still help or hurt your efforts. For example, this may be other project teams with similar roadmaps, business stakeholders, or internal clients that use what you’re designing — the list varies and so do the things that they value. In many cases, it is valuable to get support from these parties, since they may have the ear of your leads and execs and can advocate for your solutions.

It’s hard to predict what these relationships will look like early in a project. Oftentimes, knowledge of which additional parties to involve is formed while you’re in the weeds. Rely on relationship building and default to design communication foundations when presenting design intent to them. Over time, you’ll grow an understanding of their priorities and will learn when to include them and what to focus.

Leads and executives

Finally, leads and executives are the people who have influence over your project because you need their approval. The difficult part about understanding their priorities is that you may not meet with them enough to gain that perspective. Being in leadership roles, they often span multiple teams and have packed calendars. You have to empathize with the fact that they are frequently switching contexts and may not have the mental bandwidth to devote to nitty-gritty project details.

If you’re presenting to them, it is your responsibility to bring them up to speed as quickly as possible, present solutions, and solicit their feedback. Be tactful in the communication of your design intent and focus on the things that are the most important to them. To earn their trust, you need to demonstrate that you’ve thought extensively about the problem and have made decisions that align with their vision for the product or organization.