Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience

by Tom Greever

How will this affect our goals? Stakeholders often have our goals in mind, but they don’t always realize how what they’re saying is connected to them.

Leading with the phrase “What I hear you saying...” is the best approach to accomplishing this because it emphasizes that we are listening to them, understand what they said, and will now confirm it by expressing it in our own words.

The first step to recovery is admitting that you’re not in control.1 No matter what we think, we don’t usually have the final say when it comes to our designs. We have a significant amount of input into the process, but at the end of the day, there is always someone else who can overrule us.

He found that people were more motivated, empowered, and passionate when their ideas were given permission to succeed. Even if they didn’t fully accomplish their goal, it was far better to empower people to do great things than to shut them down at the outset.