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1. If you're a designer and you want more power, there's really only a few ways to get it. You either need to change your role or your reputation.
2. Often it's a PM (Product manager or Project Manager) that has the power you want. If that's true, switch roles! Seriously, if that's who really makes the design decisions, then that's where you belong.
3. Shift your role to be more accountable. Ask to present the design to the org or to leadership. Lead the discussions with engineering or marketing to get their approval. Talk to engineering about fixing bugs. The design effects everyone - who do you effect?
4.Or accept that your role is primarily about influence - you're a kind of consultant and not a decision maker - focus on becoming a master influencer and persuader (learnable skills). Learn to charm. Build allies. Be someone who gives trusted advice that people seek out.
5. The worst choice is to claim to want more power but not be willing to do anything about it. Everyone wants more influence, the people who get it usually earn it in some way.
6. Of course, power for power sake is a mistake. But good design only ever happens if the people who make the decisions make good design decisions. You can't make good things happen if good people don't have power.
7. In the end, if you work somewhere with a bad distribution of power there are only three choices: a) work to change it b) work somewhere else or for someone else c) accept it. Doing d) nothing is a bad mental health choice.
8. Design conferences and slacks often contain many conversations about broken orgs. This is a kind of therapy. It's good to not feel alone! But over time it reinforces the notion that it's OK for a career to be spent complaining about something important that doesn't change.
9. There are so many examples now of designers who a) started their own companies b) switched in powerful general management roles c) paved the way for design maturity in their orgs. It's all possible. It's all real. But it requires getting out of passive/blaming/victim mode.
10. The big takeaway might be how ignorant designers often seem to be about the fact that everyone wants more influence! It's not just designers. Everyone wants to get to make decisions. No one wants to feel left out or ignored. But there are only so many decisions to go around.
11. A thoughtful designer can learn more about how to be influential from befriending engineers and marketers and making them allies, than talking to more designers and going to more design events. You're already a design expert. Shouldn't you study the ppl u want to influence?
12. Designers are experts at human to computer interaction (HCI). But I'm not so sure about human to human interaction (HHI). Or Human to Group/Org interaction (HGI). It's HHI and HGI that define how much influence and power you have, not your HCI knowledge.
13. Designers should be great at understanding people - empathy FTW! But their coworkers are people too! If we think of the people in the org as *users*, so many design skills can be activated. "What problem is my engineering lead trying to solve?" "What need does my VP have?"
14. Influence is first and foremost about understanding other people. Pitching ideas is too. But don't start from "why don't I have more influence?" A better frame is "Who do the powerful ppl here let influence them? Why? And how did they earn that influence?"
15. Those better questions are design/user research questions! They lead to "customer interviews" with your coworkers. They unlock many skills that designers are naturally good at answering. Just aimed inside the organization, instead of outside.
16. I know many designers who tend to only read books for or by designers, which works against learning more about the people you want to influence. Once in awhile read what they're reading. Or more generally...
17. Study professional influencers - often called consultants (which for some is a dirty word, but it shouldn't be). There are many good books on their tactics. My fav is this by Weinberg - practical, useful, short, well written and widely applicable. amazon.com/Secrets-Consul…
