Mastering Design Delivery: Strategies for Presenting Your Work
Delivering Impact in Every Presentation
Mastering the art of presenting design work is not just a requisite skill; it's a strategic advantage that spans all levels of expertise within the design hierarchy. Whether you're an intern navigating your first project or a seasoned design lead steering major initiatives, the ability to communicate effectively with stakeholders is important. This skill is crucial as stakeholders often lack a design background, requiring us to bridge technical intricacies and customer understanding.
However, this skill isn’t exclusive to designers. Across various departments, professionals are tasked with articulating their work to diverse audiences. Whether compiling reports or delivering updates, the need to convey complex information in a clear, concise, and compelling manner is universal.
When presenting work, individuals typically have the following goals:
Demonstrate progress and milestones achieved
Solicit constructive feedback
Assess the feasibility of implementation
Persuade team members to support a particular approach
Seek approval for proposed designs
To effectively navigate these goals and ensure your presentation resonates with stakeholders, careful preparation and consideration are essential. Here are some key factors to keep in mind:
1. Identify your audience’s interests and goals.
Effectively managing stakeholders who wield influence over your project or product is imperative. Understanding their priorities allows you to provide them with the information they need. Moreover, it's essential to identify those requiring regular updates and their preferred communication methods. Keeping stakeholders satisfied boosts their engagement and facilitates project implementation, gaining support for your team’s objectives.
For instance, when presenting to C-Level or Executives, they are primarily concerned with overarching metrics like KPIs and cash flow rather than minute details. Emphasizing how your work directly influences these metrics will strengthen your presentation and better engage your stakeholders. By aligning your presentation with their strategic objectives and demonstrating the tangible impact of your work on the company's bottom line, you can effectively convey the value of your efforts and garner support from key decision-makers.
If you're new to a team or company, I recommend creating a stakeholder management table to build relationships, enhance communication, and effectively influence stakeholders. Here's a Notion template to help.
2. Provide enough context about the problem.
When you enter a critique session or design review, the first thing you need to do is specify your ask. What type of feedback do you need? What do you need approval on?
Following this, you also need to provide a comprehensive overview of your project, including:
The problem you're addressing and why you need to solve it now
Target user demographics, behaviors, and affected use cases
Project timeline and scope
Readiness of your work (e.g. Are you showing a first draft?)
Constraints, assumptions, and potential blind spots
How competitors have done it
Defined measures of success
This approach enables stakeholders to grasp your thought process and offer relevant feedback aligned with project goals.
3. Present your solutions.
As you prepare to present your work, structure your discussion in a narrative format by addressing the following points:
Restate the problem and highlight the target user demographics.
Clarify when and where in the user journey your solution will be implemented.
Illustrate the current user experience to provide context.
Explain why the existing solution falls short in addressing the problem effectively.
Present your proposed solutions and explain the design rationale behind each.
Evaluate the pros and cons of each solution to facilitate informed decision-making.
Make a recommendation or propose the best course of action.
Additionally, it's worth noting that some stakeholders may prefer a written document to review before the feedback session. Consider preparing a document for point #2 to ensure stakeholders are adequately prepared for the discussion. Having your stakeholders review this document prior to presenting your solutions can facilitate a more focused discussion..
Conclusion
To recap, when presenting your work, it's important to understand what your audience cares about, give enough background on the problem, and explain your solutions clearly. Using frameworks for explaining design choices can help with this, making sure your presentations make sense to stakeholders.
Ultimately, being able to give well-informed recommendations based on your expertise is what makes great designers stand out, helping stakeholders achieve the best results for projects and products. By using these strategies and frameworks, you can improve how you communicate and succeed in your work.
I hope you find this useful and thanks for reading!
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Connect with me!
Email: laura.ang@expedock.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-ang/
Website: https://lauraang.design/