How To Effectively Sell Your Design To Management
You did a great job creating a new design, and the last thing you need to do is to sell your work to management. Even though this might seem like a routine operation, selling design to management is often one of the most challenging parts of the design process.
In this article, I will share six practical tips that will help you achieve this goal.
1. Understand what business values
The first thing you should do before even trying to sell your design to management is to identify what management wants to accomplish—what are current business objectives and KPIs.
No matter whether you’re designing B2C or B2B products, management will likely have one of the following priorities:
- Increase revenue,
- Decrease costs,
- Increase new business (i.e., streamline conversion in a new product),
- Increase existing business (i.e, improve retention in existing product),
- Increase shareholder value.
If you your design objectives aren’t aligned with business objectives (e.g., revenue growth, cost reduction, user retention) you will be in trouble as it will be hard to convince management that your design is important for business bottom line.
- When sharing your design, always use KPIs & Metrics. Speak in numbers where possible (e.g., “This redesign improves conversion rates by 20%”).
- Try to address potential risks that your project can face. Address potential concerns upfront (e.g., cost, timeline, disruption to users).
2. Build a strong narrative
Storytelling is an integral skill for product designers. When presenting your design, instead of showing pure UI design, it’s better to wrap it in the format of a story.
Good stories sell. Good stories keep listeners engaged.
Here is a format of a story that I suggest to use:
- The problem → Clearly articulate the pain points or challenges that users face.
- The solution (your design) → Present your design in a way that directly addresses these pain points.
- The business opportunity → Show the potential impact (e.g., increased engagement, better usability).
- The outcome → Show how success will be measured.
Many product teams practice storyboarding during the design process. The great thing about this tool is that it’s possible to use storyboard artifacts not only during the ideation phase but also during the presentation phase. Of course, the storyboard you create during the ideation phase will likely be low-fidelity (you move fast and don’t have much time to create highly polished artifacts). So the storyboard will likely look like this.
If you plan to use the storyboard for a presentation, you need to give it more love. Using lo-fi storyboards during product demos for your stakeholders is not recommended because they might look unfinished for business owners. Instead, you should refine it and use a hi-fi version.
Yes, creating hi-fi storyboards takes time, but the outcome of using such storyboard will be much higher than from lo-fi.
3. Speak their language
Designers, developers, marketing specialists — everyone has their own language. When communicating with our peers, we use special words that are natural for our domain. For example, when we discuss how hard its for users to learn how to use the product, we use the special term “learning curve.” It’s not a problem when we use special terms when we talk with designers, but when we use the same language when communicating with stakeholders — it can quickly become problematic. Why? Because they might not know what this term means. And the more design-specific terms you use, the higher the chance management will become bored or even annoyed.
The rule of thumb is that when communicating your design to stakeholders, you should always use business terms instead of design jargon. Vitaly Friedman created a nice summary of common business terms and their counterparts in the design world. You can use it as a reference when planning your talk.
Another thing you should avoid is the use of abstract things. For example, when you propose a product redesign and say that it will lead to a “better user experience,” management might not understand how exactly better UX translates to business goals. So it’s better to say, “reduces customer drop-off by 15%.”
4. Show, don’t tell
Let your design speak for itself. It’s much easier for people to form opinions about something when they have a chance to interact with it. People are visual creatures, and they likely remember visuals more vividly than the words you say during the product demo.
Invest in creating high-fidelity prototypes that management can play with to form their opinion about your design. A clickable prototype helps management envision the final product.
5. Address concerns proactively
No matter how good your design is, management will likely have some concerns about it. Some people won’t like the visual language you use; others will be concerned about functional logic or even budget allocation. Be prepared to dodge concerns about your design by offering relevant research findings that will help convince management or providing additional details to help understand the implementation and test phases.
- If management says that certain interaction might not be evident for our users → Present insights from usability studies or feedback that show that that users don’t have any problems with this.
- If management mentions specific implementation risks → Have a plan for phased rollouts with clear risk assessment.
- If management mentions budget & resources concerns → Show cost-benefit analysis and potential ROI.
6. Make it easy to say Yes
Your ultimate goal when presenting design is to convince management that it’s something they should invest in. Many times, the decision whether to invest time & money in something or not is based on how risky this opportunity is. If the risk is low, the management will likely be more willing to say Yes.
When it comes to product design, large product design/redesign is always costly and takes a lot of time, so naturally, the risk will be high. Instead of selling the massive project, you might want to treat it as an experiment. For example, focus on a particular area of your product first that won’t take much time to implement (aka build MVP to validate key hypothesis) and then move forward with the larger scope if the experiment is successful.
Want to learn more? Check my course “How to measure design success!”
You will learn how to choose the right metrics for your product, how to measure product’s success in meeting business goals and communicate findings to business owners.
