Do You Know Who Can Make or Break Your Design Project? A Stakeholder Deep Dive

I used to avoid collaborating with anyone other than designers during my first few years as a designer.

I didn’t understand the value I could get from working with stakeholders.

I saw stakeholders as people who were trying to hold back my creativity and make my designs crap! 🫣

I was so wrong 😅

Here’s an important lesson I have learned in the past few years:

The better your relationship with your stakeholders, the more success you will have at your job.

(What is a stakeholder? Anyone who has an interest in your project or with whom you need to work in some way to complete the project)

Working effectively with stakeholders is critical when it comes to designing a successful product.

Stakeholders help make your proposed design a reality.

Designers struggle to manage stakeholders effectively as they don’t understand their roles and responsibilities.

These are the stakeholders I work with on a regular basis. I will run through each of their roles and responsibilities and how you can work with them in more detail:

• Product Managers

• Leadership

• Developers/Engineers

• Marketing

• Sales

• Customer Support

• Legal and Compliance

• Analytics

The impact of a great team

Product Managers

The product manager helps connect the business, user, and development needs. They also help enable collaboration across multiple cross-functional teams (including engineers, marketing, data, compliance, sales, etc.) to deliver a successful product.

A big part of their role is gathering requirements and feeding them into projects and tasks for the team.

Product managers have extensive business goals, objectives, and vision knowledge. They will help you ensure that your design aligns with this strategy. Remember, your ultimate goal as an employee of the company is to ensure the business's success.

Working with product managers ensures you focus your design efforts on the areas that most impact business success.

Developers/Engineers

The engineers in your team turn your designs into actual working features. They have the most insight into how to build the designs you’re proposing most efficiently.

Engineers can help you refine your ideas to ease the build process. Why is this important? Because the more effort and time it takes to build your design, the more expensive it is for the business. Would you like to achieve the same positive result with less time and effort and, therefore, at a lower cost?

Remember, engineers may not know what is best for the user as well as you do, so work together to find a compromise that works for both of you.

Ensure you involve engineers throughout the process, not once you have a clear design solution. They may suggest approaches you hadn’t thought of, and you want to avoid rework.

Leadership

Leadership is responsible for the business's overall success for the part of the business you’re working in.

They have defined the vision and mission for the team/business, so they have the most knowledge on the purpose and direction of the team.

The leadership team can offer valuable insights to help you understand your design project's bigger picture and business context. By doing so, you'll be able to understand the finer details that will ensure your design aligns with the team's overall strategic direction.

This is important because you need to ensure you have a balance between your creative thinking and strategic business objectives in order for the design to be successful.

Collaborating directly with the leadership team has improved my design quality. I now have greater clarity on their vision and can design in alignment with it.

Marketing

The goal of marketing is to understand users in order to best promote the company's products or services.

Marketing invests a lot of resources into understanding customer needs and preferences. Sound familiar? They are also trying to better understand users just like we are.

Marketing can be extremely beneficial for designers, especially if we lack access to enough data or research about our users.

The marketing team will define the product's unique selling points (USPs) and market positioning to set it apart from the competitors. As the product designer, it is crucial that you understand this information and ensure that your work aligns with their strategy.

Having regular catch-ups with marketing helps me stay informed of what they learn about our users and the competitive landscape. This information feeds into my design thinking and solutions.

Customer Support

The customer support/service team ‘supports’ the business's customers. This role requires addressing customers’ issues and assisting them where they need it.

Customer support involves speaking to customers on a daily basis, especially with customers who are having problems or making complaints. These inquiries and complaints provide valuable insights to help understand users’ experiences.

This can help you if you are redesigning an existing experience, as you can see the challenges customers face based on what they say to customer support.

I work very closely with the customer support team on all my customer-facing projects, as they have extensive insight into users' challenges.

Legal and Compliance

The role of legal and compliance is to mitigate legal risks and protect the company. Companies need to ensure that they adhere to many complex legal laws and regulations.

The role of the legal and compliance team is to interpret these laws and communicate how the company should be adhering to them.

This is critical because, as designers, we will have little insight into these laws and regulations. Therefore, we need a close relationship with the legal and compliance team to ensure that what we propose in our designs is safe and meets standards.

Legal and compliance teams are more prominent in industries such as finance or other highly regulated industries.

I collaborate with legal and compliance before I finalize my design decisions to ensure I consider the legal implications early on. This avoids rework later in the process, which can be more costly.

Data Analysts

The data analyst team is responsible for analyzing the company’s data on how the product or service is being used by users. They are able to identify trends with behavior and provide insights to the business.

This data helps inform decision-making for the rest of the company to improve efficiency and company performance. It can be used to help develop company strategy and also to help guide design decisions.

This is a fantastic place for designers to get quantitative data on users' behavior and how they interact with the product and service.

This data helps us define data-backed design solutions. When starting a new project, I go here first for user insight.

Managing stakeholders is all about understanding their needs.

But most designers don’t even know who their stakeholders are.

Let alone their needs.

Now, you should have a better idea of who your stakeholders are.

In my next newsletter about stakeholders, I will cover their needs!