As designers, we excel at expressing thoughts and emotions visually. However, when it comes to verbal communication, it can feel like navigating a minefield of nerves and disappointment. How do we master the skill of conveying our ideas effectively to colleagues and leadership, especially when facing key stakeholders?
Interviewing colleagues from different job roles within Booking.com allowed me to learn how they’ve pitched ideas in the past or what key areas they’ve always found useful to know when ideas are pitched to them.
Let’s start with the basics
Let’s face it: pitching our own ideas can be daunting, especially if confidence isn’t our strong suit. So why not practice hone our skills by presenting ideas from leadership to our team for buy-in as a starting point?
“A good designer is a problem solver and a storyteller”
This is a key requirement in being a good presenter. Often, we need to illustrate an idea in a way for others to easily understand what the project is about and why they should care about it. It requires us to start by doing a lot of research on the subject, becoming an expert at it before trying to explain it to others. Don’t be afraid to ask questions from the project owners: Why are we doing this? What evidence do we have? Why is it needed for the business? It’s okay to look silly sometimes with your questions if it leads to better understanding the subject instead of blindly following vague directions and trying to convince others to support the project.
Because it comes from leadership like a micro-funnel method, which would be very important because you’d have support from them with the idea already. You’d have an opportunity to practice rallying the rest of your team to understand the issue and get buy-in from them. If you rally the rest of the team with you, they will feel like they are being included in the process and discussion to make it their own goals and projects as well. So you’ll have to collect the research shared with you and present it in a way for them to understand it better. This will allow you to learn which methods work best for others to understand your thoughts and ideas.
Challenging leadership’s ideas
Start by getting involved from the beginning, read up on the project in detail, review all available research, data, and resources shared with you, highlight all useful information found, and always look at it from different perspectives/personas. By familiarising yourself on the subject as best as you can, you should be able to highlight with ease new opportunities that leadership might not have considered and change their path in how to tackle the project.
Now that you’ve collected all your findings, map it out in whatever software/tool you feel most comfortable with. Just map out the concept to help you clear your mind and show others what you are thinking, what your analysis process was, and why you might be suggesting a different approach to their project. But make sure to be clear of what your pitch is, being that it’s a concept, and not a vision or solution. Keep it still an abstract idea (a general notion). But always remember to back your arguments with facts and numbers because without them, your storytelling will always be challenged by others. But stay fair and never explain your arguments in a critical way.
In your concept mapping:
- List what they want to do as a business.
- Share the overview of how you might change the flow, if done so.
- Write down your main concept pitch.
- Share the actual problem that they are overlooking.
- Share the research to support what the problem is.
- Share a journey map according to what that could implicate if improved by your concept.
- Basically, focus on telling a story of what is in your mind versus showing solutions and mockups. Let them process the information and not get distracted by visual endresults.
Pay attention to their common responses and behaviors. If they don’t usually listen to the qualitative or quantitative data findings and just go with what they want to build, then don’t try to push for their buy-in yet. Try to discuss with other colleagues about your idea and try to build a group support method if more and more people believe this could be a better solution when returning to approach leadership.
Note: If the project, vision plan, or report were created in a Google slide, leave some questions on the key slides that concern you. The company environment should always encourage people to ask questions.
Pitching your ideas
Now, if you’ve got some experience and a bit more confidence in pitching other people’s ideas in your team. At this point, know your colleagues who have to buy-in on your ideas, if you know they are very numbers, analytic data, or experiment tooling driven. Work with that, since they base a lot of their decisions on those methods. Even though there isn’t any one fixed method of sharing your findings, you can always use Google slide presentation or a one-pager Google doc. Your goal isn’t to have a final polished presentation with concrete insights. Start by just writing a business case (or audit), depending on what phase of the project you are in. For example, if you are just starting from scratch and there isn’t an actual business case created, then start writing it before even thinking of designing/building anything.
- Write down the subject.
- What are the answers we want to get while developing the strategy?
- How is it linked to the company and department priorities?
- What is the expected outcome?
- What is the expected investment level? (spend and full time employee needs by craft)
Don’t go any further than this until you get official buy-in, make sure you’ve put your facts and numbers very clearly from research in your business case document. Same for why this would be important with support from your qualitative and quantitative findings if available. A nice-to-have if you feel comfortable with is to include what the first step looks like in what we would need to move forward. Like an audit might need to be done and see what more findings could come out of it.
“It’s okay if you historically have never been strong at standing up, or advocating for yourself, saying what you think or are feeling about certain projects or things. That personal challenge just requires time and practice to grow.”
Try to not use “I” sentences within your arguments because that creates a biased opinion within the discussion. Think like a designer and structure your sentences around “What do we know about these users? What are they trying to do here?” Try more in speaking the user’s language if it is about a user’s problem.
We need to make others understand that just because we are within a certain craft role, that it doesn’t mean we cannot contribute to business ideas. So do not feel defeated if your attempts don’t always succeed at first. If we want to continue growing in our career, we need to learn to master our craft and product management altogether. This additional skill set will allow the individual to really understand the deeper problem we are trying to resolve and the impact that the problem will have on the business.
One method in learning is to ask for teachings from other project managers that you look up to and ask them to tell you what are the key facts that matter to them when an idea is being pitched to them. But don’t just respond that numbers and data are what drives pitches, but also explain how to use those numbers and data in a pitch. Doing this will help you understand what they want because at the end they are the face of the business.
Knowing when to stop pushing
One path that you could be doing next is to scale it up, if you still believe that a business issue is being overlooked by the project solution. Reach out to the next potential level, above your current point of contact. But always keep communication professional and polite, be transparent and include them in the conversation to discuss higher level roles. You just want to hear someone’s specific opinion on the matter to see if all potential areas have been thought through. You might even ask them if they would like to participate in that meeting, to avoid secrecy or feeling left out.
Also, always keep in mind that if it doesn’t get buy-in today, it doesn’t mean it will never happen in the future. There is always a right time and place for everything, some buy-in could take a quarter, semester or year until it’s the right time to see it your way. There could also be other external factors out of your control as to why your pitch might not work at the moment, so never take it personally.
“Sometimes you’ve got to remind yourself to beat the river, not the rock.”
Sometimes when you’ve done everything you could, just don’t try to wrestle with it and choose your battles for your own mental health because you can’t battle every single challenge and let go of some of your ideas. Staying aware of the situation is always important, to look at it and ask yourself if it is worth fighting for it. And keep in mind that sometimes leaders are in their position because they are good at what they do. It is their decision at the end of the day, they probably still welcome your feedback, but don’t doubt too much on their vision.
Conclusion
Perfectionism has its place, but so does pragmatism. Throughout the journey, ideas may morph and evolve. What matters most is the end result’s alignment with the original objective. Collaboration is key; no project belongs to a single individual.
So, choose your battles wisely. If the project aligns with principles and objectives, weigh your passion against other priorities. Take a breather, reassess, and remember: persuasion is a craft honed over time. Success may not come instantly, but with persistence, your ideas will find their moment.
