Driving influence as a designer*
Ways to understand what influence means and tangible tools that you can try to adapt, apply, and iterate in your workflow.
*designer in tech, but also anyone who wants to prioritize growth and collaboration in their career
Adapted from a live presentation to my fellow peers in the Uber Delivery Design team in July 2024. I’ve been designing full-time in-house and freelance since 2014, when I started my career in small to medium-sized startups as a design team of a few or the only designer on the team. I joined Uber’s Delivery Design organization in 2019 and have had the pleasure of being a part of several teams, including Merchant, Ads, Membership, and, most recently, leading the Consumer Growth design team.
Often, we talk about wanting a seat at the table, but what is the table? Once you get there, what does it mean to have the space, and how do you continue to ensure it is valued? I aim to walk through a few ways to understand what influence means and tangible tools you can adapt, apply, and iterate into your workflow so that we shift the conversation from “I want a seat at the table.” to “Here’s what I bring to the table, and what we’ll build together.”
Influence requires trust
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, to have influence is to have the capacity or power to cause an effect in an intangible or indirect way. To me, influence in the context of our careers is about our soft skills. While those technical craft skills are just as important as a designer, being able to effectively collaborate is an endeavor that requires more than being incredible as a team of one. Because your deliverables are ultimately only one part of the process, getting to the right direction or solution requires teamwork and influence.
So, to have influence, you must have a foundation of trust between yourself and the people you want to influence or build influence with.
Gaining trust requires effort
01. Establishing trust
Establishing trust is important, whether it's your first day on the job, starting a new project, or joining a new team. From my experience across each area I've worked in within Uber (and across many jobs and clients), establishing a relationship helps set the tone of the relationship across all parties.
Take the time to understand your collaborators and their motivations. It's not only about you and what you need as a designer to do your job well. It's also about ensuring that you understand your collaborators and their goals while helping them understand yours.
Specifically, ask and learn about working styles. Are your collaborators more efficient via Slack? Do they like to jump on a call or walk over to your desk to jam? Then, figure out how that fits your style better. You can always iterate as you go. When you try to meet someone where they are and feel seen, they are more likely to be able to easily work with you since you’re already tapped into their process seamlessly. Ultimately, it's about finding a middle ground to make the process more effective for all parties.
Across different organizations, each team and role also has different priorities. Understanding these priorities, along with an individual’s motivations, can help you better understand why someone prioritizes an idea or decision that may not be immediately obvious to you. Over time, building this muscle to understand motivations can also help you with negotiation and trade-off conversations.
For example, across different organizations at Uber and other tech startups I’ve worked with, teams have different OKRs (Objective and Key Results) and goals to hit. And oftentimes, it’s not simply to “deliver the best user experience.”
Product Managers, for example, focus on OKRs and business goals and ensure alignment across many areas. Just like designers, product managers all have their own styles of working but ultimately need to hit their goals and metrics (hopefully with you). So, it’s important to take the time to understand the language (key metrics, technical foundation, and tradeoffs) and the “whys” behind them to understand if something is important or isn’t to get on the same page.
Engineering, for example, often considers code efficiency, whether in the actual development process (handoff, engineering requirements documentation, etc…) or the outcome (reducing latency, load times, high code quality, etc…). They often also care about using the best methods and technologies to build effectively and scale without being bogged down by old systems or arbitrary processes. So, it's important to take the time to understand what drives your engineering counterparts to feel empowered to do their work and what they find most impactful.
Whenever you start on a new team or project, level set via informal 1:1s and formal kick-offs:
For informal 1:1s, ask about your collaborator's experiences and personal goals. This can help you understand why they might place a stronger emphasis on values like in-person communication over Slack or that they ultimately might want to strive for a particular career goal that you can align with.
For formal kick-offs, get the team together and ensure alignment in project/team/individual goals, who is accountable for what, and why. This is a great way to identify OKRs, goals, metrics, and constraints and gather initial ideas from the team.