Create a safe space for debate and help. Designers need to build persuasion and presentation skills to be heard. Practicing it in a weekly call where we build critique, play devil’s advocate, and smooth arguments helps designers speak up in other contexts.

• Hold workshops to map user journeys, especially if there are many user types and technologies across teams.

• Ask questions that encourage them to wonder what they don’t know yet. This is excellent for encouraging user research to gain deeper understanding.

• Hold workshops that allow designers to see dependencies. Awareness across the product ecosystem allows designers to anticipate downstream effects.

• Active demos of your work. This encourages designers to collaborate or at least see where their experiences touch, catching errors that could impact effectiveness.

• Provide support and back-up for strategic conversations. “If you’re having trouble convincing or educating, you can add us to the call.”

• Provide design system documentation so they can educate and build relationships. “This is our team’s source of truth. Does it align with our thinking?

• Emphasize unity by sharing design team decisions and insights. “We the design team believe that this option is more effective because of [X].” “This also happens in [Y], and this is how the design team treats it here.”

Free up time and headspace by standardizing small decisions and creating templates when necessary. “For this type of problem, we have decided to do this.” “Use this workshop template when you want to lead a discussion.”

Support them in presentations by attending and hyping them up in the comments! This teaches stakeholders how we want to be treated, even if we don’t get a public thanks!