Building product alignment through design strategy

How the design team behind Adobe GenStudio strengthens stakeholder confidence and conviction

Illustration by Kenzo Hamazaki

It was a massive undertaking that required our design team to make a complex and layered product look and feel as simple and intuitive as possible. An effective design strategy was key.

Equally important was building confidence and conviction among our stakeholders. If stakeholders aren’t aligned and focused on the same vision and future, a design strategy will fail. Achieving alignment between teams requires understanding business and stakeholder goals, thinking about future uses for products and the technology behind them, and, finally, helping stakeholders fully understand a design strategy.

Laying the groundwork for design strategy

Design strategy is many things to many people but for me, it’s solving problems at the intersection of technology, business, and end users. If we aren't looking at that middle, no strategy will work. Design’s strength is understanding and empathizing with the needs of users, but to drive strategy designers must also understand the goals and data driving business and the underlying technology of products.

Understanding business and stakeholder goals

Design strategy must consider the entire product development process to define a clear North Star and scope a minimally viable experience. That means understanding use cases, users, workflows, journeys, and capabilities. It also means ensuring that what’s been designed can be built, which means implementation checks, collaboration, and accountability with engineering partners. Finally, since nothing that’s designed is ever really “done,” getting to “great” requires buy-in and ongoing, great working relationships and collaboration with cross-functional partners.

For GenStudio, business and stakeholder goals included bringing together disparate product capabilities, tight timelines, generative AI capabilities, and a desire to co-create with customers (internal and external). To build confidence and conviction in our design concepts, we leveraged data from other products, interactions with customers, internal marketing team co-creation, and tangential product data (feature or workflow usage, like determining the most used parts of Adobe Workfront, that could help us define the experience) to build a shared vision across design, product, engineering, go-to-market, and executives.

After building that conviction and alignment we could spend our time driving experience alignment, quality, and strategy instead of debating our destination.

Understanding how products are built and the technology they’re built on

When design teams have clarity on how products are built, and the technology they’re built on, it allows them to innovate in ways that are achievable and delightful rather than out of touch or impossible to achieve. Feasibility puts constraints on the design process based on what’s “possible” and allows designers to push for new architecture or functionality to drive product innovation.

For GenStudio we had to understand how best to combine the deep capabilities of shared services and components into fantastic end-to-end workflows. To build a strategy for these disparate services and components we had to negotiate their evolution without breaking the underlying foundation for users and use cases. But because integrations and cross-team collaboration are where magic can happen, we focused on the commonalities rather than differences. While not an easy task because of the level of cross-cloud decision making it required, in the end, it enabled us to move faster, reduced duplication and wasted effort, and allowed all boats to rise (our partners’ and ours) by evolving the services in partnership.

Strategic foresight and its role in design strategy

It can be difficult for the human brain to deeply consider a future that’s somewhere between rosy and doom and gloom. Strategic foresight developed as an academic practice to think about, define, and expand on possible futures to get closer to a preferable one. To do that, it looks across the entire landscape including the reality we're in, market forces, trends, financial dynamics, cultural signals, and what technologies are emerging.

For me, it’s very connected to the things that define design strategy: It can provide a structure for helping teams imagine different future outcomes by helping them stay open to ideas and ways to achieve a desired outcome. One of the ways it can be brought into the process without derailing an organization’s ways of working is to look at signals from inside the organization—customer sentiment, goals defined by leadership, what’s being talked about, what teams are growing—while also scanning the external landscape for new ideas, innovative technologies, and ways of working.

With GenStudio we’re designing for the future of how marketing and creative teams do business, so we’re constantly defining design strategy by looking at signals to triangulate technology, business, and end users.

Strategic facilitation: Helping teams understand and buy in to design strategy

By staying focused on the strategic objectives and outcomes of their work (where business, users, and technology intersect), design teams can create clarity for stakeholders so they can think past organizational boundaries and points of view. Driving alignment through strategic facilitation (a non-subjective and robust approach to decision making) requires using research to understand business and go-to-market goals, proof of concepts and design artifacts as validation, and sense-making to build conviction and confidence in an aligned design strategy.

Research as proof of concept

If you look closely at product development, designers are often the people thinking deeply about the right thing for how humans need or want to work. Research is design's key tool for building conviction about people and experiences. When mapped to workflows, it looks at how people work, think, and behave (and, maybe most importantly, how they say they behave versus how they actually behave).

Validate with the design artifacts

Designers have many ways to test strategy and to gauge sentiment internally and externally regardless of differing points of view. Visualization through design artifacts (prototypes, visual models, infographics, workflow diagrams) are facilitation tools, that help people make connection points. These are often not traditional “designs,” they’re simply a means to visualize and clarify things—to get to the right conversations so we can create the best user-driven experience. I talk often to my team about the artifacts that can drive alignment before getting to a “final design,” that’s often too late to have an impact on what’s being built.

While working on GenStudio we had a conversation with stakeholders about the Adobe-wide strategy for the content supply chain (the lifecycle of digital content management, from creation and documentation to delivery and measurement, to ensure it meets the needs of all stakeholders). Everyone came to it with different mental models and different points of view that were often difficult to understand across silos. We ended up spending time whiteboarding and defining a light visual representation of the possible workflows people were describing. It wasn’t a UI, it was a simple drawing with a clear workflow using arrows and text, but it was proof of an idea and concept that everyone understood and could say “yes” to. This created clarity on the destination for people across the organization.

Sensemaking: An essential tool for building understanding

To drive alignment, design teams must help stakeholders make sense of design strategy. We do that by connecting dots to ensure the elements are understandable:

• By distilling content to a single page or, even better, a single visual. Very often people say the same things in different ways. Distilling content from meetings, research, and conversations into a digestible format (a single page or visual) makes ideas coherent and fosters understanding.
• By prioritizing based on customer needs, business goals, and available technology. When there’s so much amazing technology available, that “palette to paint with” can cause teams to overlook the components of successful design strategy—where human needs, business goals, and technological capability intersect. When teams misprioritize they can end up with anti-value for customers, misidentify business goals, or misconnect to available technology.
• By being clear about thoughts, requests, and when to say no. There are always too many exciting things to be done so design teams must be able to focus on the few items that need design strategy, while working in parallel to execute against more straight-forward problems.
• By creating conviction and confidence in design strategy. Designers are magic makers who can turn a disparate set of requirements into a beautiful experience. Never rely on opinion-based design, with no expression of conviction or confidence in why a strategy needs to happen, or the opinion of the loudest person in the room will be the only one anyone hears. Create conviction through data, research, and a thorough understanding of the problem, then articulate it back visually to ensure everyone is aligned.
• By clearly defining the problem and the solution. Always make sure you’re facilitating toward a strategy that’s clearly defined, technology that’s workable, business goals that are achievable, and a specific set of user needs.

Tips for strategic facilitation

Design strategists see challenges and disconnects between what’s being said and how that may translate to an experience, or how two stakeholders may be saying something similar but have very different assumptions or expectations. Strategic facilitation helps align teams by ensuring that every viewpoint is heard, understood, and respected. Some things to keep in mind when getting started:

• Stay neutral while driving the strategy forward. As strategic facilitators, it’s easy to get caught up in opinions about what you think is “right.” To drive strategy forward, focus first on the objective, the output, and the outcome, then advocate from your position (for design it’s usually user needs) while trying to tame your biases. If you can’t be neutral, at least be honest and transparent about where you're trying to go and why—without sugarcoating or trickery.
• Maintain a curious and equanimous mindset. Approach your partners with curiosity and openness. Instead of always trying to drive decisions, listen to, and try to understand, people’s concerns, worries, and excitement.
• Be aware of challenges while looking for points of synergy rather than points of difference. When discussing design strategy, alignment never happens 100% of the time. To create a foundation based on agreement, try focusing on the 80% where you are aligned with stakeholders rather than the 20% where you’re not.
• Share your knowledge. Be generous with information and make sure it’s understandable and easy to consume. Alignment is easier when everyone has the same view of the problem.
• When you’re wrong, be honest about it. We’re all wrong some of the time but it can be difficult to own up to it. When teams can say, “Last time we made the wrong bet,” that feedback can be integrated, and teams can move forward with increased understanding.

Effective, thoughtful design strategies solve problems at the intersection of technology, business, and end users. Part of our job as designers is to help build stakeholder confidence and conviction in the strategies we’re presenting... because when we don’t, our strategies are destined to fail.