Regardless of whether your workspace has a strong design culture or not, one of the key roles of Design should always be to connect product vision with engineering execution. In this article, I will share five strategies on how to incorporate customer-centricity into your cross-functional collaboration and how this can create opportunities for designers to enhance their impact.

I believe every designer should be a strong advocate for design. If you work in a place where design thinking is fully integrated into the collaboration process, that is great! But many designers find it difficult to influence their cross-functional partners and make their voices heard. To create change, it’s important to see that design thinking is not just about your own design process; it is about how you work with your team and fit your process into theirs.

When you see a challenge, start by defining the problem and explaining why your team should consider your ideas. Here are a few tips:

In my teams—both in the past and currently during my time at Autodesk—I push for  involving the designer, user researcher (if available), product manager, and engineering manager throughout the double diamond process: Discovery, Define, Develop, and Delivery. They don't need to attend every session, but they should see the problem space, business needs, user pain points, and plans for solving them. We also involve the engineering team early in project kickoff meetings. It’s not just the product manager's job to explain "what" the project is about; designers and user researchers help teach the engineering team the "whys" and "hows." A good understanding of the whole story helps better collaboration, builds empathy for customers, and increases the team's sense of ownership in making a positive impact on the product and the company.

When working with your cross-functional team, don't just wait for the Product team to give you the requirements and then start designing. Be proactive and join important product and engineering meetings. Many important conversations happen there that can change design choices and affect the roadmaps. Don't be the last person to know about scope changes without understanding why product requirements have suddenly changed.

In these meetings, don't be afraid to ask clarifying questions. Whether you need more context on business impact, product strategy, target users, engineering resources, or prioritization, it is important to ask for that information. Often, you may not get complete answers right away. To deal with ambiguity, designers and user researchers should stay curious, collecting data through various channels and checking assumptions with key cross-functional partners. This will help shape your design strategies.

Being curious also means staying updated about industry trends and competitive products. Do some analysis in your specific product area and share your findings with your cross-functional team to show how other companies solve similar challenges. These insights can spark new solutions. Our team also works closely with our customer success teams whenever we think about new directions. They often give fresh perspectives on our problem space, and because they work closely with customers, we can check our assumptions and improve our approaches faster before doing concept tests or customer interviews.

As you gain more experience, you will start to bring the big picture into your design strategies. Aligning business needs, product vision, and design efforts is important to avoid wasted time and resources.

One common mistake designers make is jumping into detailed interaction design without fully understanding the reasons behind each product requirement. They often forget to coordinate with engineering on implementation strategies, resource capacity, and limitations. To avoid potential frustrations, it is important for designers to learn to be big picture thinkers.

Imagine your brain as a large language model. You can scan through ambiguities by using existing context and data, identify gaps, and provide high-level visualizations that show the product vision, potential phasing plans, and scope. With thoughtful design strategies, you will be able to communicate more effectively with engineering, find potential constraints, and help the team become more creative and adaptive, generating a wider range of solutions.

Being a big picture thinker also means taking on more of a leadership role. You will facilitate conversations and show your critical thinking skills. By encouraging different perspectives from your cross-functional partners, you will have more influence in the decision-making process.

Once you have put together all your designs, selling them with storytelling becomes very important. It's common now for designers and user researchers to use customer insights, research data, and visualizations to get stakeholder buy-in. While these are essential, it is also important to improve your storytelling skills. A strong story can make alignment easier.

One good way is to use analogies. A story with a good analogy can capture the audience's attention, activate their empathy, and sometimes fill in missing context. A few tips for using analogies:

However, good storytelling alone will not ensure success if the cross-functional team is not aligned first. The last thing you want in your presentation to stakeholders is many questions about unclear points. Never assume that your design and product phasing plan are well scoped with a clear implementation strategy unless it has been validated through team discussions. It is important that the team understands what is needed to build the ideal future vision and the incremental customer values needed to achieve your organization’s KPIs.

Let's say your team has got the first round of stakeholder buy-in, made some iterations, and now you are ready to communicate your decisions. How do you get the final approval? Does your organization have a decision-making process? If yes, use it to make sure everyone understands who is the decision maker and who are the consultants. If not, create one to document all the key discussion points that led to the decisions.

It may seem like a lot of preparation and follow-up work, but this process makes sure everyone is working towards creating features and products that customers will love and that drive business success.

Highly effective collaboration isn't just a nice-to-have. It's a crucial way to enhance design impact.

In summary, to thrive in your design role, follow these key principles: advocate for design thinking, be proactive and curious, and think big picture by aligning business needs, product vision, and design efforts. Use storytelling to sell your designs effectively and communicate decisions clearly by defining roles and documenting everything.

By embracing these principles, you can improve collaboration, drive innovation, and play a key role in creating products that resonate with customers and support business success.