If there is one thing I am going to stress to my design students forever more, it's that for all the work you put into making good design, expect to spend about three times that into articulating your decisions and actually getting buy-in from stakeholders.

Learning how to TALK about and present your work is, at times, more vital than the work itself. It should go without saying you should do "good design" (whatever that means for your trade). But good design, unfortunately, only speaks for itself to other designers.

I'm not talking about defending your design decisions either; that's helpful as a student learning how to handle critique. Less useful when you're trying to sell stakeholders or customers why you did what you did.

Notice I said "sell"? Ew, gross, right?

Also true, though.

A caveat: I am no expert on this specific thing. I'm still learning. I always will be. But I have picked up a few useful tricks that I wish I had when I was a fledgling advertising art director.

I will talk about this in spicy take language, because we are on Twitter, the land of spicy takes. But y'all should know by now that I don't *actually* believe in absolutes and all of this is fuzzier than it's going to sound.

Cool? Cool. Let's go.

1. Your opinion doesn't matter.
No, really. How much blood and tears you poured into your design baby does not fucking matter to the non-designer across the table seeing this for the first time. You don't get pity likes. You have to sell them your shit with facts.

2. Their opinion is going to matter whether you like it or not.
Because if you don't give them facts to prove why this thing you made solves this problem they have, all they have to measure on is their opinion, and so many people still believe design is entirely subjective.

3. Know what their problem is.
You need this because everything you do should point to how you solved it. If this one thing isn't clear at the outset (and it won't be) you need to do the work to uncover it. And this work is ongoing because people change their minds constantly.

4. Document EVERYTHING.
I wish I did this sooner in my career. Because of the above changing-minds, you will pivot till you're dizzy. Document every step, every decision, every single major change to the problem, the core of your work. I favor an ever-growing slide deck, myself.

5. Do the work to think about who you serve beyond the stakeholder.
People and orgs like to talk about themselves; customer-centricity is hard for most to do innately. Make it your job to understand who THEY serve, and make sure your problem-solving takes this into account.

6. You may also have to sell them on the importance of customer (user, player, etc) centricity too, so be ready for that.
But that is honestly a thread all its own.

7. If the org is not aligned on their strategy or needs, for your own sanity, you're going to want to help coach them toward getting there. TL;DR here is have a plan for that; you may not realize there IS misalignment until you get everyone in a room/Zoom.

8. Speaking of: Get every key decision maker in one damn room or Zoom and help them come to an accord on decisions.
Sometimes it's impossible, but try to gather the key folx for big decisions. This alleviates the likely possibility of Stakeholder C vetoing at the last minute.

9. Have your documentation presentation-ready always.
This is why I like to capture it in a slide 'workbook'. I can peel the necessary slides out into a new deck when I suddenly have a meeting in 3 hours to present the designs because someone came back from vacation and is eager.

10. Your job is to guide, not to push.
I said "sell" earlier, and that is true--the convincing pitch you need to have in your brain IS a sales pitch. But that doesn't mean you need to be a pushy salesperson. Don't stand on ceremony; listen as much as you talk about the work.

11. Remember why you do this in the first place. The hustle of gaining buy-in while ALSO trying to do the craft of design is exhausting as fuck, but hopefully something originally got you invested in it. Take a break, read some industry shit, look at inspiration. Then keep going.

12. Last one: When you're done-- evaluate the process. A good post-mortem will take you a long way. I lived in agile for awhile so I like the "stop doing/keep doing/start doing" model to figure this stuff out.

Document that too, so you have yourself a process next time.

Whew.

Just a lot of design-strategy thoughts in my brain, spilled here for void consumption.

Anyway, if you liked it, I do have a ko-fi, but also maybe just consider supporting the myriad other marginalized creators on here. I'm doin' okay and would rather you pay it forward.