Mastering the Art of Visionary Design: Skills You Need to Succeed
In my 25+ years of experience I’ve determined that there’s one key capability that separates good product designers from great designers. And that’s the ability to create extraordinary product visions that are forward thinking, innovative, and can solve your users’ biggest problems.
Creating a vision is more than putting words on paper or developing a roadmap, it’s an idealized view of the experience that users will have with the digital product and experience, and is included in the product roadmap your company follows. It captures the critical elements of the user experience and articulates the “winning idea” by focusing on the experience and downplaying the technology required to build it.
The problem is that most designers don’t know how to be visionary.
They simply follow whatever the Product Manager (PM) tells them as if it’s gospel. They can’t see what’s ahead for their products next month let alone 3–4 years from now. And because of this it will be almost impossible to move up into leadership roles that require demonstrated experience developing powerful visions.
So here’s my top skills that designers need to master to become visionary…
Skill #1: Run Towards Adversity & Uncertainty
Don’t run from adversity and uncertainty. Embrace it.
Remember, adversity is where the creative process starts.
A problem is nothing more than an opportunity to create something better. To see things differently. To discover new paths forward. Don’t let PM’s own the problem space or else you’ll constantly be surprised by your customers’ problems.
Designers should own the user research and spend a lot of time engaging with your customers and diving into all of their problems, from the biggest blockers to the smallest issues.
Another invaluable tool is building a reflex to say yes to any problem or challenge that you hear about at work, regardless of the department. For example, when I worked at E*TRADE I had the VP of Accounting tell me that they didn’t know how to create a risk management strategy for a large Workday integration project.
I blurted out “I can help with that,” without knowing a thing about Workday or risk management.
But I knew the power of Design Thinking.
So I volunteered to help lead an in-person 2-day workshop to develop a risk management strategy, and it was a smashing success! From that moment on I had other leaders approach me directly (instead of going through my boss) about helping to utilize Design Thinking to solve their biggest problems.
You’ll find that embracing adversity & uncertainty while saying yes to big challenges will infinitely reward you in the long run when you can lean on your experience overcoming big challenges for guidance on your current projects. Not to mention when you need to create a holistic vision for a new product.
Skill #2: Learn How to Become a Systems Thinker
It’s super important to be able to understand interrelationships and patterns to help teams identify opportunities and innovate, quickly solve problems, and improve their decision-making. In order to do this you need to ensure your thinking is aligned within your team. And systems thinking is the best way to build this competency.
System 1 Thinking: Our brains’ fast, automatic, unconscious, and emotional response to situations and stimuli. This mode of thinking allows us to make quick decisions and judgments based on patterns and experiences. For me, I often use this to design and/or fix problems at the feature level based on previous work I’ve done in that area. I may pivot to another solution in the process, but not having to start from scratch can be helpful when first starting out.
System 2 Thinking: The slow and logical mode in which our brains operate when solving more complicated problems. This type of thinking is used for complex problem-solving and analytical tasks where more thought and consideration are necessary. For me, this is when I’m developing visions or designs for entire products or platforms. Most of the time I haven’t designed similar apps, and so utilizing old patterns may not work. I usually approach this slowly and methodically utilizing the entire design process, often starting with user research.
It’s critical to understand systems thinking and when to apply it. For example, System 2 thinking is incredible for developing powerful visions because you move from observing events or data, to identifying patterns of behavior, to surfacing the underlying structures that drive those events and patterns.
System 2 thinking will help you to see critical connections and the full context relevant to a product or process. I see many startups fail because they want to move quickly to get to market, often utilizing System 1 thinking to develop a product. But this often leads to failure because they don’t understand the needs of the market or their target audience.
Skill #3: Enhance Your Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
I’ve noticed that visionary designers also have higher levels of emotional intelligence (EQ), which makes it easier for us to empathize with customers by engaging, listening, and learning from them; which is the secret to building awesome products.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others. It is generally said to include four core skills: emotional self-awareness, social awareness (empathy), self-management (motivation), and relationship management (social skills).
Emma Seppälä has taught emotional intelligence to thousands of leaders at the Yale School of Management and witnessed the transformative effect it can have on a person’s success. She provides three exercises to quickly boost your emotional intelligence:
Exercise 1: Tap Into Your Self-Awareness in Two Minutes
When you interact with someone in a way you later regret, it’s usually not intentional. You just failed to be self-aware.
Self-awareness is the ability to be conscious of what is happening in your mind — Am I upset? Am I tired? — and not falling prey to reactivity or impulsive behavior when someone pushes your buttons.
There is a dedicated part of our brain that pays attention to our internal state through a process neuroscientists call interoception, and there’s a simple exercise to develop self-awareness by helping you immediately tap into that part of your brain and boost your self-awareness.
Sit down, close your eyes, and focus inward. Then do these three steps:
- Step 1: Observe the state (e.g. hungry, tired, relaxed, etc.) of your body
- Step 2: Take note of your thoughts and their “traffic level” (e.g. few, some, many)
- Step 3: Notice your emotions
Exercise 2: Self-Regulate with Your Breath
There’s numerous research studies that show breathing exercises are one of the most effective and fastest ways to handle emotions in real time by calming you in just a couple of minutes.
She recommends this exercise to lengthen your exhalations because it will activate your parasympathetic nervous system to help you rest by slowing your heart rate: Close your eyes and breathe in for a count of four and out for a count of eight for a minimum of two minutes.
This can help before presenting to the senior leadership team or when you’re trying to stay patient in a frustrating meeting.
Exercise 3: Forge Connections with Special Uplifting Moments
Ever noticed how some people can leave you feeling drained, tired, and down? While after interacting with a “positive energizer” you feel hopeful, uplifted, and energized?
Studies have shown that positive energizers not only have a positive impact on our wellbeing, but they are also capable of creating super-productivity in organizations. Highly emotionally intelligent people know how to create positivity in a values-driven way: They do it with humility, empathy, compassion, honesty, integrity, and forgiveness.
Emma recommends seeing every interaction as an opportunity to leave the other person feeling uplifted. It takes less than a minute to share a compliment, a laugh, a compassionate word, or even a smile. This not only leaves the other person feeling better, but you’ll feel better too!
Skill #4: Sketching for Ideation and Solving Problems
Sketching is not only my favorite medium for ideation and envisioning new solutions, but it’s also great for solving problems. While technology is great for execution, it severely limits your creativity when ideating. Instead, I’ve found that sketching is ideal because it’s quick and easy to develop 10–20 low fidelity concepts on my own in a very short period of time.
I learned this skill by studying the work of world renown master artist Leonardo da Vinci. While he was known as an extraordinary artist, inventor, architect, and engineer, he mastered his craft by constantly following his curiosity and attempting to explain his observations by filling over 13,000 pages of journals with drawings and experiments.
He recorded his observations, looked for patterns among them, and then tested those patterns through additional observation and experimentation.
From this we know that he was among the very first to take a scientific approach towards understanding how our world works and how we see it. Follow these 6 steps to utilize sketching for ideation and problem solving like Leonardo da Vinci:
Step #1: Find a Place to Engage Your Imagination
I find the best creative environments are comfortable, quiet, and have objects & toys that spark my imagination and allow my creativity to dream and explore. If you need to jumpstart your creativity, I recommend some light exercise (e.g. walking, yoga, etc.) or reviewing competitors’ products, inspiring photos of the theme you’re tackling, and even playing with creative toys (e.g. Lego bricks, silly putty, comics, games, etc.) to get the juices flowing.
Step #2: Pick a Specific Problem
To help focus your creativity, I recommend picking a specific problem that you want to solve. Or if you haven’t found a specific problem, consider starting more broadly with a theme or topic and to ideate on the problems in that area, and then pick a specific problem.
Step #3: Sketch Lots of Ideas in 5–10 Minutes
Starting with a specific problem, I recommend letting your pen/pencil be the vessel to document, organize, and design anything from strategy to design to user flows. Sketch as many ideas and solutions as you can within 5–10 minutes.
Not all of your sketches will be revolutionary ideas, but that’s not quite the point.
The point is to have a ton of various thoughts to work from and build upon. From these concepts a few gold nuggets should emerge as you continue iterating.
Step #4: Annotate Your Sketches
I’ve found it’s super helpful to add notes to your sketches to help define the details of a specific solution (e.g. titles, keywords, callouts, questions, interactions, user types, etc.).
Step #5: Collaborate With Others When You Sketch
Consider collaborating with colleagues or friends in this exercise to help push the boundaries of your creativity. Once you both finish your first round of sketches, share your sketches and provide feedback to each other.
Then spend another 5–10 minutes sketching more ideas based off the feedback. This also works great to ideate within a team or client setting because everyone can sketch, no Leonardo da Vinci’s required.
Step #6: Look for New Combinations
Review your ideas/solution that you sketched, pick the best aspects of each one, and then spend another 5–10 minutes sketching a new set of ideas/solutions. Continue iterating until you find the best idea/solution that solves your problem.
Sketching Exercises:
Try it on your own by sketching ideas and solutions for these thought exercises, spending no more than 5–10 minutes on each exercise:
- How would you improve your favorite social media app (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, etc.)?
- What issues do you have with your email (e.g. Gmail, Outlook, etc.) experience and how would you improve it to make it more user friendly?
- How would you innovate your favorite mobile app using AI?
Skill #5: Develop Your Visual Thinking
Most designers (and PM’s) are only able to visualize entirely new products and platforms once they’ve completed the entire design process, often taking months — or even years — to get to the point they have confidence sharing their designs.
However, the best designers I know can easily visualize complete systems from end-to-end before they start the design process.
Designers are intellectually curious with a deep and persistent desire to know and constantly ask “why?” One of our primary advantages in learning and ideation is that we’re visual thinkers, where we think through situations, information & data, and problems by visualizing them in our minds.
Most people are overwhelmed by the unlimited data and information that surrounds us everyday, and yet it’s important for designers to be able to leverage this ability as visual thinkers to organize large amounts of data, which improves our ability to think, communicate, and convey complex information.
Some of the best athletes in the world utilize visualization techniques to envision successful outcomes before a game, and it often gives them a competitive edge.
Same for designers in just about any creative endeavor, especially creating product visions, where we can easily develop new products and feature ideas simply by visualizing them in our minds!
For me, I was able to develop this skill after a few years of practicing — and then mastering — sketching and creating wireframes, where I could then do this quickly in my mind. The key is to practice this skill by giving yourself problems to solve or redesign websites or apps to make them more usable. It may take a little longer than sketching, but allow your mind a week to continue to pull and shape your mental models, perceptions, and data into innovative concepts and solutions.
I tend to do this continuously even after I’ve left work and I’m not consciously focused on the problem, where my subconscious mind continues to design and iterate! I’ve even developed solutions in my dreams to complex problems and managed to wake up and scribble ideas down. It’s an extraordinary capability that allows me to quickly develop product and feature level solutions, as well as end-to-end visions of entire systems.
Once you’ve mastered this skill, you will no longer see a blank canvas but full-scale solutions without having to understand — or be constrained — by the limitations of technology.
Skill #6: The Power of Storytelling
I wrote about the power of storytelling as an “ancient and universal force that transcends cultures and spans generations, and ‘is the way knowledge and understanding have been passed down for millennia’ notes the famous author & speaker Simon Sinek. It’s a fundamental aspect of human communication, weaving narratives that connect individuals and communities worldwide. We can trace the origins of storytelling back thousands of years to some of the earliest forms of human communication, from prehistoric cave paintings to oral traditions.”
Just like branding, painting, or any other creative endeavor, I’ve found the best way to create a vision is to start with prose to better engage the free flow of your thoughts and deepen your connection to the vision exercise.
Succinctly detailing your vision in a story will make it tangible for leaders, stakeholders, and even your customers. It’s an extraordinary way to communicate design concepts because they focus on the user’s experience with your product while downplaying the implementation details. This means the “winning idea” is self-evident while being technology agnostic.
Skill #7: Build Your Design Thinking Muscles
I highly recommend utilizing a Design Thinking workshop if you ever need to collaborate with a team to create a vision together.
Design Thinking utilizes elements from our toolkit like empathy, integrative thinking, and experimentation to provide evidence that informs the process, so that we can make design decisions based on what customers want instead of relying only on historical data or making risky bets based on instinct.
A key component of Design Thinking is workshops because they’re highly collaborative sessions or series of sessions where designers, stakeholders, and other relevant team members come together to explore, ideate, and solve design challenges.
Here’s the steps to lead a product vision workshop…
1. Develop a product vision statement
I recommend having every person develop their own product vision (using the product vision template below), and then give everyone a few minutes to read through them and vote on the best ones. Work together as a group to try and combine the top 3 product visions into a single product vision.
2. Persona interviews
The next step is to conduct user interviews with your primary customers in order to check your assumptions that you made in the working product vision statement. This will also help you to better engage with your customers and develop empathy with them. From these interviews you will create the user personas that you’ll refer to throughout the workshop.
3. Elevator pitch descriptors
This step requires you to ideate on your product’s defining qualities and decide on a key differentiator that will make your product unique and help drive user adoption. Have everyone create an elevator pitch require that summarizes in 1–2 minutes what makes your product valuable in a short and direct way.
4. Storyboarding
With the team bought in on your users’ needs and product differentiator, the final question is determining how. Have everyone create storyboards that chronologically visualize how users might use your product. These creative scenarios uncover aspirational ideas for the product’s future.
Conclusion
Creatives who are able to utilize all of the above skills — embracing adversity & uncertainty while mastering sketching, storytelling, visual thinking, emotional intelligence, systems thinking, and design thinking — are able to create compelling visions that solve problems with ingenious solutions.
With that said, it will take a lot of hard work to become a visionary designer. I suggest that it’s roughly 10,000 hours — or 10 years — of late nights and lots of blood, sweat, and tears. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. So don’t shy away from the hard work. Embrace it.
Part of this process is being open to all opportunities in the various fields of product design (e.g. UX, UI, IxD, etc.) and even other fields of design (e.g. advertising, print, animation, etc.) to help you gain valuable experience that’s not one dimensional. This will also help guide your thinking in determining what you do and don’t want to do in your career.
The best designers I’ve worked with have multi-faceted backgrounds, are adept at solving big problems, and can quickly envision the next pivot via new product extension/capabilities, new markets, new segments, etc. They’re constantly looking into the market and seeing unaddressed customer problems and the gaps between existing technologies. They’re great to work with and the first ones I like to promote into leadership roles.
Vision is innovation. Thinking different. It’s the ability to see opportunities where others see problems, to visualize something from nothing, to turn complex ideas & data into simple solutions, and to passionately solve the world’s biggest problems with creativity.
That is what it means for designers to be visionary.
