Influencing from the ground up: A guide for product designers who want to drive change
As a Head of Product, I often get asked by early-career designers and junior team members: "How do I get leadership to listen to my ideas?" or "What can I do to influence strategy when I’m not in the room where decisions are made?" These are valid questions. And the answer isn’t about waiting to be promoted or handed power. It’s about learning how influence really works inside an organisation, and how you can use it from day one.
This article is for product designers (and adjacent roles) who want to have more impact, challenge the status quo, and help shape the future of the products they work on.
Understand the layers of influence
Influence isn’t about hierarchy. It’s about trust, credibility, timing and visibility.
Ask yourself:
Who owns the outcomes I care about?
Who’s shaping the roadmap?
Who has informal influence, even if they don’t have senior titles?
Identify the power centres around you: Heads of Product, Engineering Managers, Lead Designers, Product Marketing, and even data or research leads. These are the people you want to understand and learn how to support.
Tip 1: Start with clarity, not noise
Young designers sometimes feel the need to prove themselves by sharing a lot of ideas. But influence isn’t about volume, it’s about relevance.
Instead of saying, "I think we should redesign the dashboard," ask:
What’s the user problem we’re solving?
What metric is this affecting?
What’s the business context?
When you come to a conversation with a clear, evidence-based point of view, one grounded in research, business logic, or user behaviour, people listen. Focus on signal, not noise.
Tip 2: Make your work discoverable
Stakeholders don’t always know what design is doing. And they’re not going to dig through Figma files or Slack threads to find out.
Share your thinking proactively:
Walk through the design decisions in detail
Create short write-ups explaining the ‘why’ behind your work
Frame your updates around impact, not activities
Instead of: "We explored three variations of the settings page", try: "We identified a usability issue that could increase task completion by 15%, and here’s how we tackled it."
Tip 3: Ask smart questions in the right rooms
You don’t need to have all the answers to influence. Sometimes, a well-timed question changes the entire direction of a conversation.
For example:
"What’s the riskiest assumption we’re making about this feature?"
"How are we planning to measure success once it ships?"
"Are we solving the right problem, or just the most visible one?"
These questions show strategic thinking, and they make people remember you. I focus on asking strategic questions and find it to be an effective way to challenge people’s thinking in sessions.
Tip 4: Build relationships before you need them
Influence is earned through relationships, not meetings.
Spend time getting to know:
Your PM: What are they worried about and what outcomes are they accountable for?
Your engineers: What constraints are they juggling?
Your researchers or analysts: What do they wish designers cared more about?
The more you understand others’ perspectives, the more your input will be welcomed when things get complex.
Tip 5: Speak their language
If you want to influence leadership, learn what they care about.
Usually, that’s:
Business outcomes
Customer satisfaction
Delivery velocity
Strategic positioning
When you frame your design ideas in terms of how they support these things, you stop being “the person with opinions about colours” and start being “the person who makes the product better.”
Tip 6: Use data, but tell the story
Raw data doesn’t move people. Stories do. If you ran usability tests or saw trends in session recordings, don’t just dump the findings. Frame them.
Try something like:
"In testing, 4 out of 5 users struggled to find this button. That confusion adds friction to a critical moment in the journey."
Use quotes, screenshots, comparisons. Show impact. Make it real.
Remember, influence is a skill, not a title
You don’t have to wait to be ‘senior’ to shape product direction. Influence is about curiosity, empathy, rigour and storytelling. If you consistently connect user needs to business goals, people will listen, no matter your role.
To Heads of Product and Design leaders reading this: look out for these voices. Often, they’re seeing problems and opportunities others have missed. Create the space for them to be heard.
And to the juniors, the midweights, the folks still building confidence: keep showing up. Keep thinking bigger. Your voice matters!
