Navigating the influence gap

P.S: An excerpt from #pifo Career Clinics in 2024

A typical question that keeps coming from designers: senior designers who want to become lead designers, lead designers who want to become principal designers. It's a very sandwiched position because you are slowly moving away from the junior tag and you're getting into that expert tag. You generally have more credibility when you are becoming a lead and principal designer, so it is also very confusing because of this sandwich. You just were treated like a junior, and suddenly you're stepping up, and there is a lot of fear that you might be stepping on somebody's toes.

That's a very common fear that designers go through. As a result of this fear, they are extremely silent about their work, and this idea that "work speaks for itself" doesn't happen usually because people have so many things to see. In this attention deficit environment, visibility doesn't come very easy. Work doesn't speak for itself in all honesty because if somebody doesn't say, "This is what the work is," nobody is going to sit and dissect your Figma file to know what you have done.

So how do I increase my influence? How do I handle ambiguity? How do I seek clarity? And how do I help my junior designers and the fellow product teams to actually take a direction? These are all common questions that designers go through.

Design as a discipline sets that imagineering—they engineer the imagination and tell the world, "Hey, this is where we need to go, and this is how the industry is moving," and I think here is a great direction based on the customers' desirability. But how do I do that? And that's a typical question that designers ask for. Rightfully so, because it is very scary to get into that zone of accountability without having that authority or power, especially when something is not funded or pushed from the top.

The Uphill Journey

It is an uphill journey, so bottoms-up is always an uphill journey. Top-down is like a stone rolling from the top of the mountain. It is much easier because there is gravity, and it will take care of itself. This uphill journey requires specific approaches.

There are a few things that I have seen work in my career, and I've also seen some of my directs do a very good job in this particular area. Here are some behaviors that I see they do really well:

They are not afraid of sharing all their thought process. They say, "Here is a problem I'm solving, and here is how I would like to solve it because here is the reason, and here are some ways in which we can solve." So they are very clear about the problem and they are also very clear about the solution directions.

They understand the game of influence. Sometimes you can't go and say, "This is the direction I want you to take." Sometimes you need to put it in such a way that the direction is picked by the rest of them. So the more people say yes—"Yes, we will do this"—when you have allies in the room, you get to have more votes for that particular direction. It's a game of figuring out signals and amplifying them, figuring out noises and dulling them down.

Reading the Signals

So how do you figure out signals? When you show and tell, you tend to get better signals rather than sending it as a note or as a written document. Documents are great—they're very structured and organized—but hardly people read them unless you're at Amazon where you're forced by the leadership to read them. Hardly people read them.

Designers have an amazing way of showing it as a prototype, so you kind of put it all together as a prototype and record it as a simple snippet video, and then you are able to send it for people to consume. This fear of "oh somebody will take my idea"... trust me, nobody has the time nor the brains to take your idea just from a 2-minute video and develop it into something career-changing. If you have somebody super sharp who can take an idea from a prototype and execute it in an organization, probably that person is worth getting promoted. That's how I look at it.

What Leadership Actually Values

From a leadership position, I can tell you this: we look for designers who are thorough in the end-to-end process. These are not things where you just say "here is a prototype, here is a two-minute video." No. You talk about: here is a problem I am solving, this is how I am solving it, here are the directions I am taking, here are the pluses and minuses. The pros and cons of each. And here is where we are. I think we are below threshold, below minimum, we are just above minimum, or we could be far better. You need to give a gauge of where we are.

Here is all the thinking that I have gone through, and that is what is appreciated by the exec leadership. It's not about explaining it for two days, but the ability to show something in two minutes which has a thought process of two weeks behind it. That is where you will be able to gain that credibility because the exec team is too busy to sit and understand every single nuance.

Do not get into the weeds. You need to stay at the altitude of thirty thousand feet to three hundred thousand feet to understand where the headwinds are.

The Feedback Loop

Your job is more about figuring out signals. A signal can be an appreciation, a heart, a nod. A signal is also silence—nobody is even speaking about it, it's like awkward silence. A signal is also something where somebody has given you a comment. It's almost like machine learning, right? First you throw in your assumptions, you get feedback, and then based on the feedback you change or sculpt your output and bring it back and amplify it with your signals and cut down the noises and send it again.

This is a very iterative process and it's also a very collaborative process. For you to be able to collaborate, you need fabulous relationships because you can't just take your work—because you are interested about it—and push somebody else to do it. If it's not a part of the organization alignment, first thing first, you should also not do it. But if it is part of an alignment that somebody else is not doing, you should be able to bring them with you.

The Winning Formula

Giving constructive feedback on what is working, what is not working, talking about the issues very rationally with data... it sells better. A designer who is able to be data-driven, rational, end-to-end, shows abundance of thinking before sharing a solution is highly appreciated by the leadership. We don't have designers like that, and those are the kind of designers we keep looking for. They are not manufactured, and these are designers whom we try and sculpt and put them in the leadership fast track so that they will be able to grow.

That's how I look at how designers can increase their influence, take ambiguity and sculpt it and crystallize it into some clarity, and have the ability to collaborate and keep going forward. Sending it bottoms-up, receiving tops-down, pushing it sideways... these are all things that you do in your day-to-day job in such a way that all of it results in your next update to that assumption that you created.

You need to be super fast about it. It's not like you wait for weeks together. If somebody is not giving updates, you yourself have enough feedback based on whatever you are observing. It's almost like a self-learning algorithm... a self-supervised way of being a designer.

That's how I look at success coming to designers who are getting promoted: relationships, alignment, influence. These are the three things that help you.