Review

I wish I’d found this book earlier. We don’t work in a vacuum, we work with people. Much of this advice is transferable to product teams and product managers communicating product decisions.

The best designers I’ve worked with were masters at presenting their work to stakeholders. Although they did something that the book didn’t mention:

• Stretching exploration to the limit
• They explore the extremes. Designs which would never get signed off, but take an idea to the maximum. They show them to the stakeholder, who’s naturally concerned. But they slowly dial them back, and propose something more palatable.
• Stakeholders leave relieved and confident that the designers have explored a broad range of solutions

I thoroughly recommend this book!

You Might Also Like:

Designing for Behaviour Change

I made product management my profession, I’ve long been a fan of Behavioural Economics and Atomic Habits is one of my favourite books, so I was always going to like this book. It builds on prior theory, but the authors contribution is to present a few easy to follow frameworks to apply behaviour change principles to product management. Given most product outcomes are reliant on changing people’s behaviour, this is a worthwhile read for anyone building products.

andrewclark.co.uk

Book Review and Summary: Everything I Know About Life I Learned from PowerPoint by Russell Davies

Get a comprehensive review and summary of the best-selling book "Everything I Know About Life I Learned from PowerPoint" by Russell Davies, the marketing and communication expert. Learn about the key principles and practices for creating effective presentations and communicating your ideas effectively.

andrewclark.co.uk

Book Review and Summary: The So What Strategy by Davina Stanley

Get a comprehensive review and summary of the best-selling book "The So What Strategy" by Davina Stanley, the communication and leadership expert. Learn about the key principles and practices of effective communication in organizations, based on Stanley's own research and experience.

andrewclark.co.uk

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

Introduction

• Good designers can articulate how their solution solves the problem in a way that’s compelling, fosters agreement, and gets the support needed to move forward
• There are always people with the authority to dictate solutions who know little or nothing about design
• Showing stakeholders designs can result in disagreements, design-by-committee, group think or HIPPO mandates. Different opinions and a barrage of feedback can make it hard to defend our own choices.
• Communication is the job, we have to explain why we did what we did
• It’s unrealistic to believe the best ideas are the ones that will get picked
• Present your work in a way that it appeals to stakeholders’ needs and expectations
• What Makes Design Good:
1. It solves a problem
2. It’s easy for users
3. It’s supported by everyone
• To be successful at communicating designs, answer these three questions
• What problem does it solve?
• How does it affect the user?
• Why is it better than the alternative?
• Make your thought process into something real, shareable, and visible, to uncover the words that will help you to explain yourself to other people in a way that makes sense.
• Create an environment where everyone understands what you’re doing, believes in your expertise and supports your choices
• We’re looking for an agreement to move forward
• You can win trust over time by being intentional and demonstrating your thought process
• You need to express your designs to other people in a way that makes sense to them

Relationships/Stakeholders

• Good quality relationships with your stakeholders are key. Improve them to earn trust and establish rapport
• Look at things from their perspective - and be driven to action by it - as you feel their pain
• Shift from defending your work to solidarity
• Ask good questions → get them to talk to you about what’s important to them
• Be direct and uncover their views… What’s your opinion on this project?
• Stakeholders are individuals, but they often represent the concerns of their position. You can use JTBD, personas or even stakeholder stories to bring these to life

Before the meeting

• Reduce cognitive load in your meeting
• Set the context
• Remove anything that will be a distraction (placeholder copy and content)
• Write down objections you expect from stakeholders → write down your response → practice saying it
• Create and present alternatives → have a well-articulated explanation for our choices
• Create a support network → Get other people in the room who support your decision
• Do a dress rehearsal → Do everything you can to make the meeting go as expected

During the meeting

• Carefully listen → understand your stakeholder before responding
• Let your stakeholders talk:
• They will feel valued
• They will feel understood
• Their concerns will become more clear
• Work to uncover the real problem → If they propose an alternative, what problem are they trying to solve? What’s between the lines? What are they not saying?
• Match their vocabulary
• Write things down / take notes, ask questions, nod, make eye contact
• Rephrase their response in a form of a question that forces them to talk about it in a way that’s more helpful
• Convert ‘likes’ to ‘work’ → liking the solution isn’t important, the solution working is important

Mindset

• There is always someone else who can overrule us
• You can’t force agreement → you have to learn to influence people
• Get out of your bubble → sit with your stakeholder → Get on the same team
• Believe in your approach - but recognise it’s not the only way
• Always lead with a YES (the yes reflex)
• Establish a positive persona
• Don’t talk about what you like or don’t like. Focus on what works and what doesn’t work.
• Take what your stakeholders give you → deliver it back better than it was before
• Response pattern: Thank, Repeat, Prepare

• Our responses will go back to our key questions:
• What problem does it solve?
• How does it affect the user?
• Why is it better than the alternative?

• Decide which of these methods will create the best case for your designs and help you get agreement.
1. Show a comparison
2. Propose an alternative
3. Give them a choice
4. Ask others to weigh in
5. Postpone the decision

• The IDEAL Response:
• Identify the problem → state the problem your design addresses
• Describe your solution → connect your design to the problem, show how it addresses it
• Empathise with the user → State how your solution solves the problem for a specific user
• Appeal to the business → Describe how your decisions are meant to affect goals, metrics, or key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Lock in agreement→ Ask for agreement. Do you agree?” Put them in a position of needing to respond to you, and keep the project moving forward.
• Make it clear what you believe the right choice is
• Highlight the negative effect of disagreement or the positive benefits of agreeing
• E.g. Do you agree that we should improve conversion by removing these fields?

After Meeting

• Follow up quickly with your notes → Apply filters and remove the fluff
• Make and communicate decisions when there is ambiguity

If you don’t succeed

• A bad idea doesn’t have to turn out poorly and ruin everything.
• Do the difficult work to make it better → don’t miss a huge opportunity to improve the design in a way you didn’t imagine. Making great stuff with constraints, is what design is all about
• See stakeholder requests as an opportunity for change or a challenge to solve
• The Bank Account of Trust → Their willingness to trust you when it matters most is dependent on having a positive balance. Sometimes you have to relent and allow your stakeholders to make changes even when you’re opposed to them
• The outcome of the project is dependent on your ability to effectively manage these conversations and find the best solutions, given the constraints of working with real humans.

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Chapter 1: Great Designers are Great Communicators

• Being able to effectively articulate design decisions to stakeholders is critical
• The most articulate person usually wins.
• Good designers can articulate how their solution solves the problem in a way that’s compelling, fosters agreement, and gets the support needed to move forward
• Expect to spend almost as much time communicating designs as creating them
• Design is subjective
• There are always people with the authority to dictate solutions who know little or nothing about design
• They might admit they aren’t good at design - yet still insist on making changes that we believe will be detrimental to the user experience.
• It can be demeaning and confusing when they say they trust us but overrule us
• It can be hard to include them in your process in a way that’s helpful and doesn’t derail our objectives.
• Most people know good design when they see it
• Designers work is uniquely expose and visible, so it attracts comments and feedback
• Showing stakeholders designs can result in disagreements, design-by-committee, group think or HIPPO mandates
• CEO button → makes a weird decision that throws the project off
• HomePage syndrome → everyone wants a piece of the home page
• Different opinions and a barrage of feedback can make it hard to defend our own choices
• Communication is the job
• The way that we talk to people and the things we say will influence their response
• The job isn’t just to design stuff, you have to communicate it too!
• You need to work with people in a way that gives them confidence in you and your expertise
• We have to explain why we did what we did
• The key to being articulate is to understand both the message you want to communicate as well as the response you want in return
• It’s unrealistic to believe the best ideas are the ones that will get picked
• Ideas drop into meetings where competing needs vie for attention. The person who can convince the other that they’re right is the one who gets their way
• Designers who can’t explain why they did what they did - end up on the losing side of the argument, forced to make changes they disagree with
• Being articulate about designs: imparts intelligence, demonstrates intentionality, expresses confidence and shows respect
• Say why you did what you did → to help stakeholders understand our rationale
• Present your work in a way that it appeals to their needs and expectations
• Build trust by showing our expertise through logic and reason, and by delivering it to them in a way that makes sense to them
• What Makes Design Good:
1. It solves a problem
2. It’s easy for users
3. It’s supported by everyone
• Great designers can both solve the problem and articulate how the design solves it in a way that is compelling and fosters agreement.
• Solving a problem: Find out what the most important factors are for your stakeholders. Agree one or two measurable issues that you’d like to improve and write them down
• Make your thought process into something real, shareable, and visible, to uncover the words that will help you to explain yourself to other people in a way that makes sense.
• When working on a design, you need to make yourself consciously aware of every decision you’re making and why. Practicing being intentional.
• Ask yourself, “What problem am I trying to solve with this? -
• Document your thought process - write things down.
• Problem → Proposed solution
• It can also be useful to describe your designs using only words. How would you describe your designs to someone on the phone?
• uncover your thought process and articulate your decisions first to yourself
‣
If making decisions based on another app, get to the bottom of your thinking.
• Why does the other app do it this way?
• Is our context similar enough?
• Does SocialApp have any data?
• Were they intentional about this choice?
• For every decision you make, ask yourself, “How does this affect the user?”
• Often you won’t know.
• Make a guess, try it out, draw conclusions from what you observe.

• Usability is about common sense and research.
• Make a guess → do a usability study or check analytics
• Analytics can’t tell you why - test your designs with real people
• Get Support
• To get your designs implemented - you need to bring your team and stakeholders with you
• If you don’t get support - you’ll be rehashing conversations, people will be suggesting alternatives, scope will increase and you’ll be bogged down managing requests. You’ll might have to ship a compromised product.
• Get everyone on the same page - get agreement to move in the right direction
• Create an environment where everyone understands what you’re doing, believes in your expertise and supports your choices
• Use the word support over approval or agreement.
• support of our expertise, solution and plan to move forward
• you can get support even if they disagree with the solution
• we’re looking for an agreement to move forward
• You need to understand why your design is this better than the alternatives
• you need to know what the alternatives are
• you need to consider the alternatives
• you need might also need to try the alternatives
• Not exploring alternatives leave you open to people suggesting ideas you haven’t considered
• Make a list of points as to why the alternatives don’t solve the problem as well
• To be successful at communicating designs, answer these three questions
• What problem does it solve?
• How does it affect the user?
• Why is it better than the alternative?
• Being thoughtful about a problem and able to articulate your solution is more important than designing the perfect solution each time
• You can win trust over time by being intentional and demonstrating your thought process
• You need to express your designs to other people in a way that makes sense to them
• Understand your decisions → articulate them to somebody who doesn’t understand design as well as you

Chapter 2: Stakeholders are people too

• Good quality relationships with your stakeholders are key. Improve them to earn trust and establish rapport
• See your stakeholders as human
• Other people have s*** going on in their lives too
• Reactions to your work can be impacted by other things
• Each is unique, has feeling, emotions and past experiences that inform how they act today
• We attribute other people’s behaviour to their personality, but our own behaviour to circumstance
• Believe the best about people - and their intentions
• There are always other things going on in the room you don’t know about
• Create shared experiences →
• Creating connections with others is a step toward understanding them
• Identify common ground, nurture chat about common interests
• Do things together
• Develop empathy →
• Look at things from their perspective - and be driven to action by it - as you feel their pain
• Your success depends on theirs. Find ways to solve problems for them
• Shift from defending your work to solidarity
• Important for getting in the right headspace for feedback
• Don’t forget stakeholders have domain and business knowledge that is needed for success
• Ask good questions → get them to talk to you about what’s important to them
• Ask questions of stakeholders like you would of users to understand their perspective
• It makes them feel valued and opens dialog
• Get personal. Ask about their weekends, their children. Offer up information about yourself too.
• Get their take on what’s happening on active projects
• What did you think of the meeting last week?
• How’s your work going on the other project?
• Be direct and uncover their views…
• What’s your opinion on this project?
• How does this project affect your job?
• What is your priority for this project?

• Identify influencers→
• Team influencers - describe solutions, communicate value, establish shared vocabulary
• Exec influencers - you don’t see them much, so need to be able to respond realtime.
• External influencers - those outside your team but might give feedback anyhow
• Stakeholders are individuals, but they often represent the concerns of their position

Position	They Value	You should focus on
Execs	Concise information Business growth Solving problems	Getting to the point Accomplishing goals Describing the solution
Engineering	Building it right first time Efficiency and maintainability Understanding effort	Putting forward all use cases Reusing UI patterns Communicating the value
Product	Innovation and creativity Meeting business goals The big picture, longterm	Finding new approaches Connecting designs to objectives How your design moves them forward
Program	Deadlines and schedule Managing scope and budgets Keeping everyone in the loop	Efficiencies of reusable elements Managing expectations on changes Updating them on progress
Marketing	Brand consistency Consistent voice Value to customer	Copy is approved Value proposition is understood

• You can use JTBD, personas or even stakeholder stories to bring these to life

• You could use an Empathy Map

• You can plot influence and interest - and plan engagement accordingly

• Communication is much easier in good relationships
• Be proactive, check in on people.
• Show interest in them. Give gifts and hand written notes

Chapter 3: Design the meeting

• The cognitive load of your participants should be a key consideration
• Free brains to focus on the task (supporting our design decisions) by removing clutter or distractions
• Set the context → remind everyone of the goal (key metrics) and the problem you’re solving
• Summarise the last meeting
• Show a timeline of where you are … Research / Low fidelity → Finished design / High fidelity
• Specify the feedback you need
• Stake the goal again!
• Avoid naming the meeting (review, sign-off, approval)
• Optimise for memory →
• Primacy and recency → break into smaller chunks
• Repetition → of key things
• Surprise → insert something they’ll remember
• Remove anything that will be a distraction (placeholder copy and content)
• Learn what distracts your stakeholders and don’t make the same mistake twice
• Anticipate reactions →
• Write down objections you expect them to have → write down your response → practice saying it
• For each person ask:
• What do they care about the most?
• What are their personal goals for this design?
• What do I already know they want or don’t want?
• Most people are predictable, they react to the same kinds of things each time
• Personality + Role / Values + observed reactions = predictable reaction
• If you’re not sure what they want - ask them directly.
• Create and present alternatives → have a well-articulated explanation for our choices
• We need support - even after they’ve considered all the alternatives
• We arm them with the knowledge and language for why our decisions are best
• Alternatives are evidence you’ve tried other approaches and understood why they aren’t as effective
• If they’ve specifically asked for something - lead the conversation with it but prepare alternatives you think better address the problem
• You’re discussing the merits of each design, which is risky, but you’re doing it in a place, format and environment you control
• Be prepared to back up your designs with data and research
• Create a support network
• Get other people in the room who support your decision
• Ask for support, get them to speak up or ask questions
• line people up in 121’s ahead of the meeting
• Start with your team
• Others can help you accomplish what you want
• Do a dress rehearsal:
• Have the agenda to hand
• Practice out loud beforehand
• Flex the practice to match the importance of the meeting
• Prep everyone in a pre-game huddle, ask people to jump in on certain points
• Do everything you can to make the meeting go as expected
• If you can’t meet synchronously send a video presentation and request feedback

Chapter 4: Listen to Understand

• Carefully listen → understand your stakeholder before responding
• Let your stakeholders talk:
• They will feel valued
• They will feel understood
• Their concerns will become more clear
• Match their vocabulary
• What is the subtext of what they’re saying? What’s between the lines? What are they not saying?
• Work to uncover the real problem → If they propose an alternative, what problem are they trying to solve?
• Pause → make sure they’re finished, let everyone take it in, signals it’s important enough to be heard
• Explicit listening
• write things down / take notes
• ask questions
• What problem are trying to solve?
• What are the advantages of doing it this way?
• What do you suggest?
• How will this affect our goals?
• Where have you seen this before?
• nod
• make eye contact
• Notes are great because:
• they prevent you from having the same conversation again
• free you to focus on being articulate
• build trust with stakeholders
• keep the meeting on track
• Make notes accessible, organised, specific, definitive, actionable, referenced and forward-looking
• Include ‘the why’ in notes
• Repeat and rephrase
• Convert ‘likes’ to ‘work’ → liking the solution isn’t important, the solution working is important
• Rephrase their response in a form of a question that forces them to talk about it in a way that’s more helpful
• Listen to what they say → translate that into common vocab → What I hear you saying …

Chapter 5: Get in the right mindset

• There is always someone else who can overrule us
• You can’t force agreement → you have to learn to influence people
• Let go of control, stay sharp, don’t take everything personally

• Get out of your bubble → sit with your stakeholder → Get on the same team
• Our stakeholders represent our work to others - we need to give them the tools that make them comfortable doing it

• Believing in your approach - but recognise it’s not the only way
• Make solid recommendations BUT take suggestions from others seriously
• You ego will make excuses - formulating reasons why the other person can be ignored

• Reinforce that we’re all in this together → headed toward the same goals.
• Always lead with a YES (the yes reflex)
• Example: “Yes, I completely agree with you that we need to reconsider the placement of this UI control.”
• We’re not saying that their precise solution is correct and that we will implement it in that way.
• We’re only agreeing on the problem because it might still be possible that another approach will solve it.
‣
Ways to say yes without committing:
• Yes, that’s a very good point.
• Yes, thank you for sharing your perspective.
• Yes, I agree that we need to solve this.
• Yes, there are definitely some ways we can improve this.
• Yes, we should decide the best path forward.
• Yes, I understand where you’re coming from.
• Leading with a yes is about reminding people of the areas where we agree, before we get to the parts where we don’t.

• Establish a positive persona
• It will open people up to trusting you with the solution
• Confidence not arrogance
• Be yourself
• Don’t take yourself too seriously. Be kind, lighthearted, and funny
• Align yourself with the needs of others, we create a connection that can overcome any obstacles to our communication.

• We are there to facilitate a conversation about design - a discussion about solutions
• Process what you hear and turn it into something more useful.
• Take what your stakeholders give you → deliver it back better than it was before

• Make a Transition to your response that sets your up for success
• Response pattern: Thank, Repeat, Prepare
• This is the response before the response
• Thank your stakeholders, summarise what they just said, tell them you’re about to respond to their feedback
• It sets the stage - and prepares everyone to listen
• Example: “Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us about this project. Your insights are really valuable, and I appreciate you going through all that with us. I’m going to go back through all of your points so that we can discuss them, but I’d like you to understand how we came to these conclusions first…”
• Don’t launch to defend your work - get in the right frame of mind, stay positive, and make a graceful transition to what’s next.

Chapter 6: Form a response

• We want to respond to feedback in a way that yields the best response → stay focused on the goal of the meeting: to get support from them and agreement to move forward
• Objective → Strategy → Tactics → Messaging → Response
• Objective: to get support from our stakeholders and agreement to move forward
• Our responses will go back to our key questions:
• What problem does it solve?
• How does it affect the user?
• Why is it better than the alternative?
• Appeal to a Nobler Motive → attach your decisions to a goal, metric, or other problem that you’re solving.
• What problem does it solve?
• Associating your decisions with an agreed-upon metric
• find the thing that you know your stakeholders care the most about and connect it to the proposed user experience.
• Often, design feedback from stakeholders isn’t taking these goals into account at the outset.
• Represent the User → Explicitly represent the user.
• How does this affect the user?
• Representatives users at the meeting. Bring what you know about your users and present it in the form of a story that creates the kind of empathy required to drive us to action: to make the best decision for them.Create a human connection that demonstrates a real need being met.
• Demonstrate Effectiveness →
• Why is this better than the alternative?
• Demonstrate how our proposed solution is better than the alternatives, including any of those suggested by our stakeholders.
• Talk about why your design is better, but to also visually show why and how your designs will make a difference.
• Focus specifically on the differences between each design and express why your own solution is best.
• Tactics Are Actions
• Decide which of these methods will create the best case for your designs and help you get agreement.
1. Show a comparison (make differences clear)
2. Propose an alternative (meeting the needs in a different way)
3. Give them a choice (emphasise the trade-off, show them what they’ll lose)
4. Ask others to weigh in (Ask directly, or remain neutral)
5. Postpone the decision (before agreeing a negative direction - take it away and come back)

Chapter 7 - Choose A Message

• Objective → Strategy → Tactics → Messaging → Response
• Objective: get support from them.
• Strategy: to communicate that our design solves a problem, makes it easy for users, and is better than the alternatives.
• Tactics: Comparison, propose alternative, make a choice, ask others, postpone
• Messaging…
• Key messages, that work again and again

Chapter 8: Lock in Agreement

• Response to design feedback needs to hit on a number of areas
• The IDEAL Response makes this easier to do:
• Identify the problem → state the problem your design addresses
• Describe your solution → connect your design to the problem, show how it addresses it
• Empathise with the user → State how your solution solves the problem for a specific user
• Appeal to the business → Describe how your decisions are meant to affect goals, metrics, or key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Lock in agreement→ Ask for agreement. Do you agree?” Put them in a position of needing to respond to you, and keep the project moving forward.
• There is a delineation between getting the support you need and getting agreement from everyone
• You will never get agreement from everyone on a specific solution
• You can get agreement to move forward with the solution you propose.
• Whether you agree on the details doesn’t matter as much as agreeing to move forward.
• Put them in a position of needing to respond to you before you move on.
• Highlight the Benefits or Risks
• Make it clear what you believe the right choice is
• Highlight the negative effect of disagreement or the positive benefits of agreeing
• E.g. Do you agree that we should improve conversion by removing these fields?
• Putting It All Together
• Example: Control over my content:

Chapter 9: Follow Up Afterward

• Time immediately following the meeting is valuable
• Sometimes people don’t always speak up and say what they’re thinking in front of a group
• Allow them to pull you aside, and tell you what they think.
• Make plans to stick around for a few minutes after the meeting, chat with people, thank them for their participation, and see what happens.
• Follow up quickly with your notes →
• Send a follow-up to the entire team within the hour - while it’s still fresh on everyone’s mind
• Demonstrates that the meeting was a priority to you
• It values the participants because it shows that you’re doing the legwork, keeping them informed, and making the best use of their time
• It shows that you’re listening
• It gets everyone on the same page about what was decided so there is no confusion going forward
• Helps avoid re-discussion
• Follow up should include:
• A thank you, a recap with a focus on actions, next steps or expectations
• Don’t be afraid to assign tasks
• Apply filters and remove the fluff →
• Use best judgment to filter out all the unnecessary information that isn’t worth repeating to the entire team.
• Discreetly exclude information that’s just going to add clutter to the conversation.
• Can you filter it?
• What are this person’s intentions?
• Do other people agree or disagree?
• Is this person influential or not?
• Is this person likely to bring it up again in the next meeting?
• Seek out individuals who can help you →
• you may need to talk to some people afterward
• Make decisions when there is ambiguity →
• Do something, even if it’s wrong
• If there is no obvious solution or no one is really sure what to do… make the decision yourself and communicate to the rest of the team
• suddenly everyone will have an opinion about it

Chapter 10: Dealing with Changes

• You will still need to make changes to our designs that you disagree with
• Everyone is a designer! Presentation of work feels like a platform to suggest changes
• Parkinson’s Law of Triviality → Bike shedding
• Painting a duck → A feature added for no other reason than to draw management attention and be removed
• Common Reasons:
• There’s a misunderstanding → clearing up the miscommunication is usually sufficient. Check the goals of the project - have the objectives moved? Getting to the root cause and clearly redefining the goals will help guide you back to a healthy place.
• Your Designs Are Not the Best Solution → Extend trust to stakeholders when it comes to the final decision. It may not be easy, but it’s our reality.
• Stakeholder need isn’t being met → Executives want to know that the thing that’s important to them is there. Show them where it is - they’ll be satisfied. Work hard to uncover their motivations and find a way to address their needs.
• They Are Completely Unreasonable → 4% of the population are clinical sociopaths, but they’re 4x more likely to be in executive roles. Usually we just don’t see things from their perspective, and it’s possible we’d make the same decision if we were in their shoes.
• Our stakeholders simply want to know that their ideas and suggestions are being heard and taken seriously. This can happen unconsciously when they don’t feel valued in the process.
• Making Lemonade
• A bad idea doesn’t have to turn out poorly and ruin everything.
• Poor execution usually causes the issues
• Do the difficult work to make it better → don’t miss a huge opportunity to improve the design in a way you didn’t imagine before
• Making great stuff with constraints, is what design is all about
• Take the opportunity to find the best possible way to implement that idea.
• Stakeholder feedback should spark a conversation that leads to an even better solution.
• Ask questions, understand their perspective, and listening:
• Involve other people.
• Ask how they would solve the same proble
• Propose an alternative; even a bad alternative should start a conversation about solution
• See stakeholder requests as an opportunity for change or a challenge to solve
• The Bank Account of Trust
• Every relationship involves some give and take
• You build or deposit trust by:
• demonstrating your expertise
• managing their expectations
• communicating effectively
• delivering what they expect
• agreeing with your stakeholder
• when metrics improve as you promised
• when you show them an incredibly beautiful design they love
• You withdraw or lose trust when:
• when we disagree
• miss a deadline
• fail to follow up on feedback
• refuse to make a change because you believe it’s in the best interest of the user
• Their willingness to trust you when it matters most is dependent on having a positive balance.
• Sometimes you have to relent and allow your stakeholders to make changes even when you’re opposed to them
• Learn which battles are worth fighting
• The outcome of the project is dependent on your ability to effectively manage these conversations and find the best solutions, given the constraints of working with real humans.
• Admit when you’re wrong. People appreciate honesty and transparency
• You’re probably wrong if:
• The problem still exists
• Users don’t get it
• You don’t have support
• Managing Expectations
• Your ability to properly set, adjust, and communicate expectations is more important than your ability to create the perfect solution every time

Chapter 11: How Executives Can Help Designers

• Realise and appreciate the expertise of designers
• Prioritise the needs of designers
• Authorise the team to move quickly - recognise that we are people too
• Giving designers everything they need to do their jobs.
• Review and respond to work quickly
• Give permission and budget for usability testing
• Make quick decisions, stick to those decisions, and empower other people to make decisions on your behalf.
• Authorise designers to make decisions and extend a reasonable amount of authority to them
• Be kind, use helpful language, and create a conversation that yields positive results.
• When you provide feedback for our designs, focus on the designs themselves and not the designer who created them.

Things Designers Need:

• Management Vision and Goals
• What is the purpose of the product?
• What is the overall vision for the product?
• What are the short-term goals for the business overall?
• What metric can we track? How will we know we’ve succeeded?
• What is the strategy for accomplishing the goal? tasks, tactics, or deliverables
• What are the business requirements for this project?
• Users or Customers
• Who are the users? What do we know about them?
• What is the primary problem we want to solve for them? What are the biggest pain points for users right now?
• How do users interact with the site or app? (their environment, devices etc)
• What is the plan or budget for usability testing and/or user interviews?
• Workflow and Communication
• What tools should we use to communicate?
• What should our meeting cycle look like?
• What is the timeline for the project? How frequently can we release?
• Who makes the final call on decisions?
• Access to Information and People
• What technical resources will we need? Who can provide us with access?
• What existing data is available?Access to analytics, usability studies, A/B tests, or any business reports or slide decks.
• Is there an existing website or app that we can use for reference? Is there another product that we can use as a basis for this project?
• What is the org chart for the company? What people are important for our project?
• Do we have permission to work with these people? Necessary introductions or permissions need to be given for us to contact other people in the organisation
• Design and technical requirements
• Design guidelines
• Tone or style of design
• Ground rules or design goals
• What other websites or applications are similar / relevant?
• What technical requirements will influence design?
• If you’re serious about wanting your company, product, or service to be known for great UX, put a designer at an executive level