Making the Design Team Visible
#74: Stakeholder alliances, lighthouse projects, and the design process for non-designers
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Making the Design Team Visible
Picture this: you are on a small team of really talented designers who are just crushing it: customers are happy, product management and engineering counterparts respect them, and all deadlines are kept. However, business stakeholders don’t even know about the existence of the design team. All the fame goes to product and engineering.
“Aren’t they just some artists who draw specs for our engineers who do the real work?” – someone from the Senior Leadership team may ask one day.
Well, that’s not the end of the world yet.
But what do you think may happen to this team when things go sideways, and leaders sit down with the finance guys to look at spreadsheets and make a few difficult calls?
These designers may be the first to leave.
A scenario that’s not so unrealistic, especially in today’s economy, where many organizations are forced to cut costs and do everything to keep themselves above the surface. In situations where business leaders misinterpret the function of design and see us only as a cost, not a strategic investment, we are simply screwed.
How to not let this ever happen? Or at least, how to minimize the risk?
The answer is to make the design team visible through:
✅ Establishing strong stakeholder alliances
✅ Proving the value with lighthouse projects
✅ Communicating the abilities of the design team
In today’s article, we will explore all the steps needed to make this happen.
Finding the balance
I feel like we go to extremes too often in our community's discussions. We romanticize our role and spend much of our energy talking about craft, visual design tools, and the future in the context of AI and vibe coding. We rarely talk about equally important parts of our job, such as strategy, leadership, and stakeholder alignment.
On the other hand, when it comes to talking business and finances, we are still bringing the same numbers to the table: McKinsey’s report revealing that companies prioritizing design have a 32% higher revenue growth and a 56% higher total return to shareholders than their competitors, or Forrester’s study on the ROI of design thinking claiming that every $1 invested in design can bring up to $100 of return.
While these numbers are valid and absolutely inspiring, they’re not translating well to all businesses and design teams, and don’t make our teams more valuable in the eyes of business stakeholders right away. The whole trick is to adjust the message to the audience and speak in the context of a specific business and organization.
One thing that has a high chance of accelerating the value of the design team and bringing more visibility to it is a lighthouse project – I’ll describe them in a moment, but first, let’s focus on the importance of stakeholder alliances first.
Why do we need stakeholders on our side?
You may think that, since you already have a few buds at work (most likely your peers from the design or engineering team), you don’t need more professional relationships. Especially with the people at the top. They’re strange, do more important work than you, and operate so differently that it’s impossible to have any link with them. Right?
When I was starting out as a designer, I used to think like that as well. A life learned lesson shows that I couldn’t be more wrong about work relationships. You need these relationships badly for a couple of reasons:
✅ Products are political
No matter how well you’ve done the research and how good your design is, someone always controls the budget, business priorities, and headcount. When this person (or a group of stakeholders) is your ally, there are fewer hurdles to getting a green light. Suddenly, office politics becomes easy, and approval becomes a formality.
✅ Early alignment beats persuasion
When you invite stakeholders to your process, they feel like they co-create solutions with you. Alignment suddenly is there, and you don’t have to sweat out trying to sell them anything late. You are not convincing them, but you’re executing something they already helped shape.
✅ Trust means faster decisions
Sooner or later, every team is forced to make trade-offs, and they can get really messy with scope cuts, delays, or quality versus speed. When this happens, leaders rely on people they trust. Once you built that trust, your judgment carries more weight.
✅ Protection during conflicts
When things go sideways (and they will do one day, for sure), allies act as buffers. A respected stakeholder backing you can prevent reactive, top-down decisions that damage the product, your credibility, and your career.
Having stakeholders on your side is important and beneficial, but it doesn’t always come easy. In a remote environment, it might be super difficult to have a casual conversation over the water sink or grab a lunch with them. So, what can you do to establish and eventually strengthen these relationships instead of just a virtual coffee?
Lead with curiosity
Assuming you’re leading an invisible design team, or you’re an individual contributor standing in the shadows, you have no power in your organization. And that’s OK. You can still influence stakeholders and build alliances with them as long as you have this one trait: agreeableness.
High-agreeableness people prioritize social harmony, empathy, and helping others. Doesn’t it sound natural to us designers who put users in the centre of our hearts?
Applying UX-style empathy to stakeholders is all about understanding their pressures, incentives, and decision-making: where their weird ideas and comments come from? They’re probably not weird, but it takes some effort to go deeper and really understand them. We, as designers, should be looking for ways to support their goals instead of fighting with them during demos and alignment calls.
Curiosity instead of critique. It means going side by side, not head to head. Leading with curiosity doesn’t mean that you stop having standards. It means that you position yourself as an explorer.
Stakeholders resist critique because it threatens their status, implies that they may be wrong (how dare you!), and creates defensiveness. On the other hand, natural curiosity signals respect, invites collaboration, and makes people feel smart and heard. Who doesn’t like to feel this way? This is the first step to grow your alliances.
Speak the language of execs
Executives ultimately care about things like growth, revenue, efficiency, and risk. When, instead, they hear things like font family, design system, daily active users, and accessibility, they might feel a little confused or even uninterested. Your job as a designer is to align the language to the audience. Drop that design jargon and focus on business outcomes during alignment calls, demos, and other work-related conversations with the stakeholders.
Continuing on my previous point about leading with curiosity, these are the questions you can safely ask during meetings to better understand the incentives of a stakeholder and not worry that they will find you weird because of the design jargon:
“What is the biggest risk you see in this direction?”
“If that fails, what would have caused it?”
“In which areas do you think we are most vulnerable in the competitive landscape?”
This shows the strategic thinking that all designers should cultivate. Curious designers look like systems thinkers, not aesthetic guardians – I can’t think of a better way to position yourself as a strategic investment rather than a cost.
Develop executive presence
The choice of words is just a part of a broader topic that boosts our credibility in the eyes of stakeholders and takes us one little step towards a stronger alliance with them. This topic is executive presence. At its core, executive presence is the ability to create confidence in others that you can handle complexity, ambiguity, and responsibility at scale.
A term coined by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and broadly expressed in her 2014 book “Executive Presence” is super important for designers – even if you are not planning to become an executive or a formal leader one day. It changes your perception from a person who’s super focused on the visual side of things to a strategic partner shaping outcomes.
How can you develop executive presence? There are a few tips:
✅ Show up as a strategic leader, not just a design advocate
Powerful designers don’t just answer — they elevate. Do that by asking strategic questions during meetings: “What risk are we most concerned about here?” and “If we had to cut this in half, what must remain?" are great examples of questions repositioning you from executor to thinker.
✅ Take your time when responding
Rushing can seem anxious, while speaking slowly conveys authority. Pause before responding. The more senior you seem, the less you need to hurry.
✅ Embrace a “Yes, and…” mindset
It comes from improv theater, but it’s incredibly powerful in design. In an executive environment, “Yes, and…” keeps momentum alive. Instead of killing conversation with “Yes, but…”, critique, and defensive positions, it allows you to build on someone else’s ideas and co-create with them.
✅ Start a writing practice
Executive presence is, for the most part, about the clarity of the message. Writing should help you sharpen your thoughts and messages. But not any writing. Practice something that really puts you into the executive thinking mode, such as a one-page decision memo or pre-meeting writeups. Executives expect “bottom line first” messages (from Recommendation through Rationale to Evidence), so learn how to structure your messages.
✅ Look the part
I don’t necessarily mean wearing a suit. It’s more about calm body language communicate self-respect and situational awareness. That subtle signal says: “I understand the room I’m in.” Whether you like it or not, people make rapid, unconscious judgments about competence and authority within seconds. When a designer’s appearance signals professionalism and alignment with the company’s leadership culture, it reduces “status friction” — stakeholders focus on the idea rather than subconsciously question credibility.
Once you align the choice of words and develop the executive presence, stakeholders will finally understand you and start respecting your ideas and treating you and your team less as a cost. Now there’s time to strengthen your relationship with them and prove to an entire organization that design is a strategic investment through a lighthouse project.
A lighthouse project – an ultimate catalyst for proving the value of design
There’s no better way to prove the value of design through a lighthouse project. Just like a lighthouse guiding sailors on the sea during nights and rough weather, these projects are highly visible and serve as a gold standard for the whole organization, demonstrating how projects should be run from a product design perspective. They show what a great project looks like and signal the direction the organization should move forward. These aren’t just successful projects, but they serve as reference projects.
Lighthouse projects usually have these four traits:
✅ High visibility
Since they touch on a key revenue stream, a critical user journey, a flagship product area, or (actually almost always and) an executive priority, leadership and almost the entire company watch them or at least hear about them once. They are rare opportunity to build a reputation.
✅ Measurable impact
In order to work, they need to produce visible results – conversion went up by X, support tickets reduced to X, significant improvement of activation, or faster time-to-value – you need some strong numbers. Without them, it’s just another nice redesign you can store in a drawer.
✅ Strong narrative
Storytelling is vital to many aspects of design, and lighthouse projects benefit from it as well. The narrative matters as much as design if it tells a compelling story: from a clearly defined and important problem, through a well-thought-out and insightful solution, to a measurable impact on business.
✅ New standard
To reinforce that this project is different and better than everything that has happened previously, it needs to set a new standard. It could be a better UX pattern, a new research practice, or a better cross-functional collaboration.
Stakeholders won’t trust your potential alone. That said, lighthouse projects are a great way to build credibility, demonstrate the power of good design, and start influencing the whole organization through a strategic approach to building products.
There’s no better way to broadly demonstrate your ability to collaborate cross-functionally. Lighthouse projects prove you understand business goals and show that these goals drive your decision-making. These projects ultimately strip you of the pixel pusher label and turn you into a strategic design partner.
The design process isn’t for designers
Treat this little story as a bonus layer for building trust and stakeholder alliances. Last year, one of the most important strategic initiatives for my design team was to make it more visible. We’ve taken a bunch of actions to make it happen, including… illustrating the design process.
Sounds crazy at first, doesn’t it?
We all know that the design process is never linear. The more senior you are, the more flexible your process becomes. You understand that every project is different and needs a tailored approach. There’s no debate about that.
However, the steps we take, or rather the activities we do to solve business problems using design methods, are repeatable. Usually not in the same order or amount, but from a high-level perspective, they are roughly the same. Frameworks like Double Diamond aren’t stupid – they are just oftentimes misinterpreted or taken too literally.
So, why have we decided to spend time and energy illustrating our design process, knowing we will never follow it strictly and won’t expect new hires to do the same?
After making the first draft, I casually presented it to a few non-designer colleagues from my closest circle. During that meeting, I realized that the design process is not for designers, but can serve as a great tool for communicating with non-designers (engineering, product, sales, support, and, finally, business) about what design is, why we do what we do, and how collaborative we can really be.
Depending on how well you structure this document, it can help non-designers understand the usual steps we take to solve problems and the rationale behind each.
Additionally, it can work as a sort of invitation to certain parts of the process. For example, if your design process includes a validation stage (I hope it does), and you work in a B2B environment and struggle to get direct contact to the customers, you can reach out to the Sales and Customer Success teams within your organization and invite them to fill out this gap in your process (or ideally, convince them on the importance of you and your team being closer to the customers, but that’s a different, much longer story).
You may not believe it, but not everyone in your organization really gets why we go deep and try to understand the problems our customers and users are facing before we jump into Figma to ideate solutions. This design process could really help with that.
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