Driving influence as a designer*
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.
02. Building trust
Once you start establishing trust between you and your partners, it doesn't stop there. To work towards influence, you must begin building trust.
Within working dynamics, learning to identify the right people within and outside your team to provide guidance and advocate for you and/or project goals is key to helping you achieve your goals. That is, identifying who the key partners and sponsors are can typically make or break projects. Partners are the folks you can tap on to split and/or delegate work with. After all, projects are not a solo endeavor. These are usually your peers who are responsible for the work. But, I find that the strongest partners are often interested in or have a superpower in a particular skill you can work with to help split work together. Sponsors, on the other hand, are key decision-makers who have the power to unlock resources, time, or ideas that you may not be able to do alone.
For example, when I joined the Merchant Access (Sign-up and Onboarding) team at Uber, I saw an opportunity to productize our then-manual sign-up and onboarding flows. I pitched the ideas to my product managers and a peer team, where folks were lukewarm. Partly, it was because my product managers had a goal focused on shorter-term wins we needed to hit on our existing roadmaps. The peer team tangentially owned another surface that didn't quite touch where I wanted to build. This was great learning for me because I realized I needed to identify both the right owners of the surface (sponsor) and a partner who was equally as motivated and could see the vision with me.
After a few months, a new product manager joined my team, and I spent time establishing my relationship with her, sharing my goals but also understanding hers—ultimately realizing that we mutually wanted to tackle this loftier merchant onboarding vision. So, we partnered up on a project outside of the roadmap at the time, split the work to shadow our agents and jam with our global product operations partners to gather enough evidence to form our perspective together and eventually pitch to our Product Management Director (in this case, a true sponsor) that our team could not only do smaller piecemeal changes but embark on fully productizing and evolving the onboarding flow globally.
This led my product manager partner and I to embed our vision work into our roadmap. Plus, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and every restaurant in the world had to shut down and rush to sign up on third-party delivery platforms like Uber Eats to continue their business, because of our efforts, it made it a no-brainer for leadership to also increase our team capacity by investing in an entire engineering team from another organization (in addition to the few we already had) to help build our vision.
Additionally, building trust also means understanding your superpower and how you can bring that to the table in projects and relationships alike. At Uber, product designers are expected to do a lot, but not everyone knows what a product designer does or what their strengths across the product development process might be. It's always helpful to give a high-level overview, where appropriate, for folks who might not be as familiar with working with designers. Or consider creating your own user guide that allows you to self-reflect on your preferred ways to work so when folks ask, or opportunities arise; you’re confident in advocating for your needs.
Otherwise, for folks familiar with me and my role, I often share what I like working in and areas I'd want to stretch. Doing so allows your collaborators to be a part of your growth process and raises awareness for ways to collaborate with you.
On a day-to-day interaction level, show and tell folks what you are both good at and what you'd like to learn or do more of. For example, recently, when I joined the Consumer Growth team at Uber, my product managers were interested in doing user research and assumed that they could only talk to our UX researcher for help. I shared some example decks of research processes I ran with other teams and laid out a plan on ways we could approach research alongside our UX researcher, and it helped my product managers realize that I could take the lead and that they didn't have to only rely on or feel that a process was a bottleneck.
As you continue your projects, while you've established alignment and support, also ensuring you meet your word is equally as important. Start small as you work your way through big, complicated projects so that you can actively show progress in your work.
For example, after establishing your 1:1s with your partners, proactively communicate your project goals and milestones. Not only does it feel good to check off a box when you complete something, but it also helps show all the work you've done. I often document larger projects with my cross-functional stakeholders in my own design documents to show progress. One example I've adapted over the years is designing a design doc. But it can even be as simple as ensuring your team's roadmap accounts for design time and work before it hits engineering and/or even hosting weekly meetings with your key partners to share updates live on what's done and what's left.
03. Maintaining trust
Ultimately, after establishing and beginning to build trust, the most important step is maintaining it. Maintaining trust requires consistency and reliability. We're asked to do a lot in our day-to-day, so ensuring we can get our work done promptly and at the high quality we intend takes practice.
That's easy to say when we're working on projects aligned with our superpowers, but what happens when you're taking on a new challenge? I often lead with honesty and ask for help after trying a few methods on my own first.
For example, when I first joined the Consumer team at Uber, I was tasked to take on a huge project of revamping our app’s navigation information architecture (IA) and filters experiences; it was daunting because I hadn't taken on something as big and impactful before on a new-to-me surface and user area. I leaned on my facilitation and collaboration superpower and pitched to run a design sprint. Selfishly, it was to allow myself some time to onboard onto the surface and identify the right stakeholders across product and design, but also to elevate the work already done before I joined the team.
After running the sprint, I was able to hit the ground running with a ton of ideas and support because I was able to meet my partners and sponsors where they already were. From there, I leveraged my weekly meetings with project leads and proactively asked for jam times with more senior designers to help me learn by active observation, specifically watching how they'd approach a problem or conversation and adapting it into my workflow as the project went on. Even though I didn't have the experience to begin with, it showed that I was willing to ask for help and consistently show up, do the work, and iterate my process to meet the team and project needs. Since then, I've been able to prove and continue to prove my value to the team.
So, throughout your projects, whenever you run into a blocker, see if you're capable of unblocking yourself first. Doing the work to come up with solutions makes it easier for parties involved. Over time, building that muscle can help your teammates see that you're proactive in problem-solving and trust that not only can you do the work, but you can also be adaptable in how the work gets done.
Lastly, lead with honesty when you're truly struggling and practice articulating your needs. Remember, it’s one team, and designers don’t work in silos. And so, asking for help shows that you take everyone's shared work seriously.
Adapting + seeking help
Our careers are long and fruitful, so whenever you’re inside a company or considering your wider network, continue to nourish both.
Inside a company, you can:
Reach out to your direct managers or others for support. As mentioned before, while there are mentors, there are also sponsors in the context of career growth that Harvard Business Review breaks down further here.
Ask a peer and shadow their process.
Join collaborative meetings and jams, even as a fly on the wall to learn.
With your wider networks, consider:
Seeking mentorship with organizations like Merit, ADPList, and First Round, where many senior leaders offer free mentorship sessions. There are also the 5 types of mentors you’ll need in your career.
Reach out to your existing network, like former colleagues, who may know someone who knows someone who could help you reach your career goals.
Never underestimate the power of a cold, direct message. Respectfully ask for time, and the worst someone can say is, “No.”
Finally, don’t just take it from me. A few years back, I spoke with my friend and former colleague, Kevin Garcia, to reflect on our careers (we started our first tech startup job together!), and he reminded me that influence starts with leaning on our communities.
Finally, be honest. Everyone is learning something. Lean into what you’re good at and say out loud the areas you hope to improve.
When I told a former manager and another teammate, “I feel strong in market research, but I’m not as confident in driving product sales,” it tripled the amount of people invested in helping me build up that skill. I got more, not less, opportunities to learn. I had people cheering me on and keeping me accountable.
Give your community the chance to be a part of your success. In my experience, they never disappoint.
—Kevin Garcia, Product Marketing Leader, in conversation with west & ease