Designer spotlight: Julie Xu deep dive
Julie shares her strategies and framework on how to influence product strategy and get design projects on product roadmaps.
Earlier this week, we heard from product design lead at Carta, Julie Xu, about her journey from starting in editorial design to now influencing product strategy at startups, which you can read here.
Today, Julie shares with us her strategies and frameworks on how to effectively influence product strategy and get design projects on product roadmaps.
Next week, I’ll be featuring a design manager of design systems at Adobe.
How did you learn how to influence product strategy?
I've learned by reading articles or talking to mentors, but what set me first was trying things myself and seeing what didn't work.
At my last company, we had a really bad mobile experience. I looked at the data and it was saying that most of our users were on mobile. I surfaced this information to my PM, and it didn't land.
But the user research I did made me realize this was actually the most important problem to solve at the company. I just knew that this would move the needle. So, I tried to get better at influencing not only my PM, but also our director of PM by sharing this research, how this is in line with our team's and organization's top level metrics. Through that I was able to get that on the roadmap.
After getting that on the roadmap, we started a new team because that project was so successful. Once I was able to influence the roadmap, the things I said would start to get on the roadmap and lead to our team's success. So suddenly there's a time at SnapDocs where we were one of the best teams there. Everyone was growing in their career. Every project was really successful and that felt really good.
What should go on a roadmap?
Form your own thought and opinion on what's best to improve the product.
The direction should be backed with strong reasoning. The things that often did move the needle have a lot of backing and rationale behind it. For example, we heard these things from users or the data says this. There was a very high confidence that this would be successful.
The UX and visual design portion of design can be rendered useless if you're not going the right direction, if you're not building the right thing.
What is your unique skill that makes your strategy to influence work?
I have always been interested in business, too.
Design is one role in the business. If you start to think like an owner, that you have a piece of this company, what would you do to make it the most successful?
When you start to think through that lens, it helps you figure out when it makes sense to put in the effort to influence and how to go about influencing because you feel like an owner and you’re aligned with the business .
What are some things someone can do to start influencing product strategy?
Snippets from user research are really interesting. Also, digging into the data.
There are some interesting stats that you can find, like a huge drop off at this point, or X percent on mobile versus desktop.
Actively participate in meetings and speaking up. Share insights or thoughts of wanting to redesign X.
Another tactic is that you can also create problem-space meetings to brainstorm and bring people into that process.
How does someone start using data in their design work?
First know what data is tracked and where it lives. Once you have that, start to be curious and realize certain data might be missing.
Let's say you're redesigning a certain flow. Then you may be interested in the dropout rate at each part of the flow, or how are people navigating the flow.
When you start designing think, is there any piece of data that could help me figure out how to make a better design or which design choice I should make?
Who in an org can you start a conversation with about data?
Talk to your PM or engineering manager to figure out what the process is today. It will be dependent on the company.
Sometimes there's a data analyst or data scientist that you have to prioritize a request on their feature list to get that data. Sometimes you can just ask an engineer. Sometimes things are already set up, so you can self set-up those funnels. I’ve used Heap a lot to set up my own tracking.
What tips do you have to get a project on a roadmap?
First, really understand the business.
Understand how your business makes money and what top level metrics your business is moving towards. Anything you say should be on the roadmap should cater towards those top level things that the business cares about.
The second thing is understand who the relevant influential stakeholders are, who's responsible for the roadmap. When you come to roadmap discussions and you're like, hey, this is the thing I think we should do. It's a little too late. You need to constantly be influencing.
If you have any user research or insights, constantly be sharing that out. It's all a collaborative process. Gradually, people hear about it more. Things would appear on the roadmap without me saying it because of sharing things from research, or sharing, I think if we did X, it could move the needle for Y.
What are common mistakes you see designers making when trying to influence strategy?
One mistake is not fully knowing the business. You need to know the business really well: how it makes money, the business model, and the top KPIs and metrics.
Influence is about how you storytell or frame something. If you're not able to always tie it back, it'll be harder to influence.
You don’t want to say, “We want to redesign this because it will be a better user experience”, but tie it back to, “It'll move this metric by X amount, which will lead to this greater thing that our org cares about”.
The second mistake is not realizing you have your own agency to initiate.
This is a very common challenge for people where they're not invited to roadmap meetings or they feel excluded. Maybe the UX maturity isn't there, which is also very difficult, but you can have your own agency to create meetings of, “These are my user research findings”, or, “I designed this proof of concept, what do you think?”, or “I think this is one of the highest priority problems, let's brainstorm.” You can initiate things and inject influence that way.
This wraps up our designer spotlight with Julie Xu. Learn more from Julie on how to influence product strategy by saving a spot to her RETHINK workshop, Become a strategic design leader. You can also find her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Stay tuned for next week’s designer spotlight interviewing a design systems design manager at Adobe.