Pitching ideas to stakeholders

A friend recently asked me how I approach pitching design ideas to clients, or even presenting designs to my team.

This is such a great question, and one I don’t think I’ve considered writing on before.

First off, I want to say that it’s not an easy thing to figure out. Knowing how to help a client or team shift in the right direction based on my design process has always been a challenge. But, with that said, here’s a few things I’ve learned.

First, I no longer allow myself to spend too much on any single design before working with my team on the idea and getting feedback.

This doesn’t work for everyone.

I’ve had managers refuse to give input until I’ve reached a point of perfection. Then, at that point they weigh in and force 180 degree shifts multiple times over. Those types of relationships don’t work out. I’ve tried, my personality type can’t make it work. It’s not that there’s something wrong with their approach, but my brain prefers the back and forth flow of riffing on things together. If I’m in a bind I’ll try to make it work for a short period, but longterm things fall apart.

Also, I’ve seen companies fail because of the perfection expected at the design stage. The money and time spent iterating to infinity on pixels resulted in falling behind, running out of money, and layoffs. So, needless to say I’m hardened against that mindset.

So I share early, and often. I share in-process work, messy sketches, and record Looms throughout on what my brain is thinking.

This, too, can be a trap. Spending too much time here isn’t shipping, isn’t getting things out in front of customers. You need some sort of forcing function to just decide and ship, then learn in the field.

With that said, my messy sketches lead to wireframes, which lead to high fidelity designs (or sometimes we skip straight to shipping in code), which lead to seeing how the market responds.

In other fields, such as marketing design and visual design, this is trickier. You can’t measure as easily, and are subject to the opinions of the people you’re working with. This is frankly, both harder and easier. Easier in the sense that you don’t have months of development effort hinging on the perfection of your design (which, again I completely fight against, but happens in many teams), you can just take the visual and ship it.

But it’s harder in the sense that you don’t have an objective goal you’re measuring against. How will you know if this logo is better than the other? How do you know if this icon set matches the visuals more? How do you know if the colors are on brand, the illustrations clear, the typography effective? You don’t. At least not right away.

That’s part of the reason I’ve moved away from visual design as much as possible. It’s something that I still do, but within the realm of overall as part of building a great user experience in software. It’s part of what I do, not the whole.

But, again, if you’re tasked primarily with focusing on visual design, here’s a few things that have helped me.

On the one hand, I’ve heard it said that you should present one idea and hold firm (sort of Paul Rand forcing the NeXT logo on Steve Jobs—and it worked). That generally only works if you have the trust and clout built up and proven results to show your method is effective in the marketplace.

The other option is to simply present a few options. You can go with a dozen, or three. There’s pros and cons of each. A dozen is nice because you can’t possibly become a perfectionist on all of them, you just don’t have the time. The challenge with three is that you begin to feel connected to a favorite, and it rarely wins out.

My general approach, if I can’t go back to my preferred design method (iterate early and often and ship in concert with an agreed goal with your team), is to design a few options, share the pros and cons of each, tip my hand on the scale if need be for my favorite, and then ask for feedback. I prefer to do this via Loom, as it gives me time to explain my reasoning and not get cutoff before finishing.

There’s tricks that designers have suggested, such as putting intentionally wrong elements into the design so that the client will focus on that element (which you knew was wrong anyway) and approve the rest without a ton of feedback. Sometimes that works, but it’s a bandaid at best in a fraying relationship.

Most of what I shipped when focusing on marketing and visual design turned out nothing like I hoped. I had design after design melded into shadows of their original selves, and often felt like I was losing bits of my creative self piece by piece.

This, though, is part of growing and learning as a designer. Sometimes my managers were right, sometimes I was right, but ultimately I learned how to navigate through the political discussion and have a less emotional response to seeing my work trashed.

With one manager I adopted the mode of making it clear that the decision was there’s, but I’d first like to propose my preferred option. You know what? The times my design got picked went up, because I gave up control. It was rather ironic.

One other element of all this is what gets shipped to the world is just one part of the story. It’s what the market sees, and you can then generally measure if it works or not; but that’s on a long time scale, and you can’t always connect your work to the results of the company.

What I generally try to do is cherish the wins, the designs that matched my taste, and appreciate those when they come through. The rest I tried my best to learn from, but did not incorporate those into my portfolio. I’d say the hit rate was 10-20% of projects I worked on felt worthy of portfolio sharing. That’s rough, and does mean it takes longer to build up a portfolio you’re proud of.

That leads to my final point. You don’t have to share the final output in your portfolio. You can share the best work, which may not have made it to market. In a case study you also have the space to explain yourself, share what shipped, why it won, your preferred designs, and how you managed the nuance and conversations that made up the gap between the two. I’d warrant the right clients or companies (that you’d prefer to work with in the first place) will see the distinction and be excited to work with you.

At the end of the day you’ll also just keep growing, project after project. Sometimes my strong emotional reaction ended in my preferred design losing out, and sometimes I just didn’t care at all; leading to other problems. At one point a client got excited when I finally spoke up (in anger, but not hatefully), letting me know they appreciated me caring and finally having a voice.

And above all, just know you’re doing amazing. You’re learning, you’re growing. Your taste is impeccable, and your talent will someday reach the level of your taste.

Also, clients and companies can open up that appreciate you for what you offer. Those may take more time than you want, but they’ll come around.