Building Design Influence Across Product Organizations
Category
Team Leadership
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Built the case for design investment, guided UX roadmaps, developed designers, and helped move design upstream into discovery, product strategy, and cross-functional decision-making.
There Was No Practice
When I joined EZShield in 2008, there was no UX practice. Direction came from product. Design made it presentable. Engineering built it. That’s a common starting point at companies that grew up before user experience was understood as something worth integrating into product leadership, and getting out of it takes years and a specific kind of credibility.
How Credibility Actually Builds
It doesn’t happen through advocating for design thinking. It happens when a research finding changes a product decision. When a prototype resolves an engineering disagreement about feasibility. When a redesigned flow moves a business metric.
Building real influence across a product organization requires understanding what decisions those people are making and what they care about when they make them. That meant learning to read roadmaps, understand business pressure, and talk with product and engineering partners in terms they recognized, not terms that required them to first believe in design.
The 62 Percent
In 2018, I partnered with our VP of Product to restructure the customer experience across the Sontiq portfolio. The work touched core enrollment flows, the alert and notification system, the member dashboard, and several key product features. It contributed to 62 percent top-line growth in a year when the broader economy wasn’t growing.
That outcome became the business case for sustained design investment. I used it explicitly: to grow the team, establish a UX research practice, and move design from a request queue to a function with its own roadmap and input into product prioritization.
Building the Team
Hiring designers can be relatively straightforward. The harder part is defining what the function is responsible for, establishing how work moves through it, and creating conditions where designers develop rather than plateau.
I hired at multiple levels, led people through project work and career development, and expanded their ownership of product areas and stakeholder relationships over time. Several designers on the team were promoted during their tenure. I take that as evidence of the environment, not just the individuals.
Working Horizontally
The real test of design influence isn’t internal. It’s whether product managers pull designers into decisions before they’ve already been made. Whether engineering leads treat design review as a collaboration. Whether compliance teams bring design in early enough to shape the product response.
At TransUnion, I participate in program increment planning and contribute to roadmap decisions well before execution begins. I present to directors and senior vice presidents, contribute to partner sales demonstrations, and work regularly with legal and compliance teams on product decisions that carry regulatory implications. That reach across functions is where design has the most effect on actual outcomes.
Why Timing Is the Variable
When design only touches work that’s already been decided, it can improve execution but not the underlying decision. The value comes from being in the room earlier, when trade-offs are still open and the cost of changing course is low.
Design functions that consistently affect outcomes earn that influence through positioning, not through talent differences. The questions worth asking are how early design enters a decision and how much credibility it carries when it does.
