How to spot a Strategic Designer 👀

A high-performing strategic designer is essentially an unicorn. What does "being strategic" mean? We'll unpack what sets strategic designers apart from the rest, and actions you can take to become one

👋🏽 Hi, it’s Jac. Welcome to my monthly newsletter. This is where I share alternative thoughts about the design industry and new ideas that inspired me as a designer and creator.

👩🏼‍💻 Update: It’s been an incredible month! I participated in two talks and hosted an in-person half-day bootcamp session. Plus, my final Maven course has been completely remastered. 🎉 I can’t wait for the July cohort to be transformed by it.

In-person events light me up. At each of these events, I talked about my favourite topic: how can designers become more business-driven? To my surprise, all the seats sold out within 24 hours. Clearly, this is a much-needed topic to dive deeper into.

I love digging into the nuances of any business, studying their backstories, and analyzing their unique strategic moves.

When designers can speak business and talk about revenue, they gain more leverage and influence. It’s that black and white.

In this month’s newsletter, I’ll cover what it means when a manager says you need to “be more strategic” and why “being strategic” is the quality that sets high-performing designers apart from the rest.

Part 1: What does “being strategic” mean?

Part 2: How to spot a 'strategic designer'?

Part 3: Strategic thinking habits you can start building today

📖 Read time: 7 mins

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Here’s a question: Given relatively similar resources (years of experience, hours in a day, access to channels), why do most people create average work, but some exceed expectations?

Because they push beyond what they’re told to do and think in systems, thinking beyond their role of “design.”

Part 1: What does “being strategic” mean?

If you run a Google search on “strategic,” this is what you’ll find: relating to the identification of long-term or overall aims and interests and the means of achieving them.

Basically, “being strategic” means thinking beyond the task at hand to how it impacts the team, the company, and the system as a whole.

If I try to visualize being “strategic,” it’d look something like this:

• Bottom Left: You’re focused on today and this week, delivering outputs that impact yourself and your direct team.

• Top Right: You start to think about the larger parts of the organization and over longer periods of time.

As a manager, you think beyond your team into the department, looking months or much longer into the future. As a VP, your perspective is the company and years into the future. As the CEO, you consider how the company positions itself in the world, making decisions that last for years.

When your manager says you need to be more strategic, they mean moving towards the top right: considering how your decisions impact the bigger scope of the department and cross-teams. It’s time to think about expanding your impact beyond just short-term success to future outcomes.

When you become more strategic, you expand your influence and impact, both in time and scope, well into the future.

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Part 2: How to spot a strategic designer?

A high-performing strategic designer is essentially an 🦄. They have the vision to inspire the team, balance user delight with business impact, deliver value in logical slices, and the ability to unite people across teams.

Let me unpack what that look like:

They’re Business Savvy

They’re equally interested in how design choices impact the business. They ask questions like, “How does this feature align with our growth?” or “Will this design improve user retention?”

They understand a company’s growth and profit position when making design decisions.

A strategic designer analyzes user data, market trends, and business goals. They suggest design improvements that:

• Enhance user retention and engagement.

• Provide a competitive edge.

• Align with the company's long-term vision.

They’re Cross-functional collaborators

You’ll notice they’re often in meetings with different teams – engineering, marketing, customer support. They understand the importance of working together and gathering diverse perspectives.

They might say, “Let’s get the engineering team’s input on this feature’s feasibility,”

or “How can we market this new idea to gain higher adoption?” They’re the glue that holds cross-functional efforts together.

They facilitate cross-functional meetings, gather diverse feedback, and adjust the design to meet both user needs and team capabilities.

They inspire with persuasive stories

When presenting a new product idea or a new market opportunity to the company, the strategic designer crafts a inspiring narrative that highlights the product’s potential impact to its users and the world, towards the company's vision and goals.

They would also support product proposals with analytical and feasibility estimates, focuses on outcomes beyond design,

They use prototypes, illustrations and user stories to illustrate how the product solves real problems, inspiring enthusiasm and buy-in from stakeholders.

Their passion and clarity can inspire the whole company.

They’re action-oriented visionary

While strategic designers dream big, they are also practical.

They break down grand visions into manageable, actionable steps. They create a roadmap that guides the team step-by-step towards the ultimate goal.

They stay informed about industry trends, plan for scalability, and ensure designs accommodate future growth without losing focus on current user needs.

A strategic designer blends creativity with business insight, collaborates across teams, tells inspiring stories, and translates big ideas into actionable plans.

They see the bigger picture and know how to navigate the path to get there.

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Ok, all sounds well and good. Here’s the big question: How does a designer become “strategic”? Where do they even start?

I’m glad you asked. Read on…👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

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Part 3: Strategic habits you can start building today

I can’t emphasize this enough: Gain a deeper understanding on how businesses make decisions. Business acumen is the bottleneck to unblock if you want to achieve all the other unicorn skills that comes after.

Business Growth → Financial Goals → Strategic Opportunities → Inspiring Stories → Facilitate Across Teams → Communicate ROI of Design

There’re many misconceptions about “Learning business” from designers:

• Learning business is complex🥲

• Intimidated by numbers🥲

• Time and effort investment🥲

These thoughts keep designers in their comfort zone and slow down their growth.

Business is like a new language. Just like switching from Photoshop to Figma, it’s uncomfortable at first, but eventually, you find the flow and gain value from it.

You don’t need to know everything about business. Just enough to understand how your role fits into the system. If I could go back in time to early in my career, I wish someone had told me this.

Speak the language of business WILL BE the most powerful weapon for you as a designer. You can count my words on that.

👩🏼‍💻

Actions you can take straight away:

• Align every project with business goals. Ask, “How does this contribute to our business?”

• Shift from a perfect design solution mindset to “What’s the shortest, most effective way to experiment and iterate?”

• Stay curious when stakeholders talk about business decisions. Take notes and help bring their ideas to life through prototyping.

• Invest in your learning. If a book costs $25 but will bring you $250, that’s incredible value. If a course costs $1000 and it’ll 10x your growth in a year, that’s invaluable. Investing in learning always brings the best ROI. Only if you give yourself that opportunity.

And if you’re looking to take design growth courses focusing on exactly what’s covered in this blog, check out the one I’m teaching on Maven

Unlike any other courses out there, this course covers design career growth in a holistic view, delivered in a mix of self-paced learning, live cohort sessions, and assignment feedback sessions.

There are 4 weekly modules:

• Business landscape and strategic thinking

• Facilitation to influence

• Communicating ROI of design & craft convincing stories

• Building your design career on your own terms

It’s taken me 15 years of a design career, 7 years of running a multi-six-figure side hustle business, and 6 years of supporting businesses through key growth milestones to craft the gold nuggets in this course.

The sad news: This might be the last time I run this cohort in the live format.

Here’s a 10% off code for my SUBSTACK subscribers: EpicDesigner10

Your design career growth is only one click away—Don’t miss out. Join other designers from Paramount, Doordash, Linkedin in the next cohort.

Enrol now👇🏼

https://maven.com/jacalin-ding/strategic-design-career-accelerator

❤️ I hope to see you in class next week!