Designer as Strategist

The designer in 2025 has superpowers compared to their contemporaries just a few decades ago that puts them in a unique position to be both a craftsperson and a businessperson, having influence over product as much as they do strategy.

We are in a unique time wherein design has reached peak cultural influence and tremendous business value. Being able to leverage their unique set of skills to help direct where their organizations go and how they should present themselves puts them in an extremely rare category with immense competitive advantage. That is if they know how to use it.

There is more surface area than ever for design: design vision (setting the company’s design vision, their design positioning in the market, defining and helping shape the design principles & standards for an organization), product design (whether that’s software, fashion, merchandise, anything that a company might sell), brand design (identity, brand strategy, voice & tone), culture (how the company looks at design inside a company and how they’re represented outside of it), and more. All of these can be influenced by designers no matter where they are in the organizational chart. And even better, they don’t just have to have ideas or write them in a document that never gets read—they can visualize them, share them with graphics and animations and mood boards and prototypes, advocate for them and their possibilities, and champion them internally and externally. Even if an idea does not become reality, it’s about the exercise of imagining a better future, making a model out of it that people can see, feel, touch for themselves, and sharing them so that others might imagine a different future or think differently about your product, service, or brand.

This is not about sacrificing design skills, taste, and soul just to speak business terms. This is about using those very skills to create more impact and influence inside and outside the company.

Why Designer as Strategist

1. The scope of design becomes much bigger. When a designer is thinking beyond just their current design task, or even a level beyond the project they’re working on, it makes them see their designs as part of a complex adaptive system and not merely something that works in isolation. They realize that things and people are deeply interconnected, there are second- and third- and infinite order effects of things, and it changes their approach to design—something with obligation, longevity, and reverence. It’s not about what goes in their portfolio and what they can measure. It’s about building something they’re proud of, something they’re thrilled to put a stamp on, and something to contribute to culture. They help design the world: change perceptions, behaviors, processes, systems. That sounds like making the role of a designer more important than it is: but if we aren’t trying to influence the immediate world around us, can we actually call ourselves designers?
2. They can influence the perceived value of design. Is design inherently valuable? Designers would like to think so. To designers, aesthetics have an intrinsic value: they would scour found images for the sake of it, hunt for typefaces they might use for a future project that may never sees the light of day, mood board to create art directed alternate universes. Designers understand this intimately; they believe beauty has an objective element and subscribe to the idea that it’s one of the most important humanistic virtues, a belief going back to the ancients. While designers may feel this in their bones, it gets lost in translation to other people who are not designers or may not have the trained eye for quality, taste, and craftsmanship. But becoming strategic helps raise the value of design for everyone involved. By being able to translate the power of design into value created and value captured, it pushes the collective need for design.
3. The scale of their impact becomes much bigger. Designers are happy to design the thing they’re working on well. And honestly, that in itself is enough. Designers don’t need to do anything beyond doing their craft well. This publication is by no means suggesting that every designer needs to become some sort of manager or corporate leader or entrepreneur. If anything, it argues that designers should stay designers regardless of how their role evolves. But if and when they get a calling to want to impact more people, whether that’s other designers or as many people as possible who come across their designs, it helps to be strategic. Strategy is about winning, and winning sustainably, ideally for an extended period of time to be able to reap the benefits of the value created through design. Being strategic helps designers make the thing they work on succeed, create its intended outcome, and reach as many people as possible.

How Designers Can Be Strategists

1. Being great at a lot of things. This isn’t just about being a “generalist” but being able to apply strong design skills to a number of things. I’m in the camp that no matter where you are in the organization totem pole, from the most junior designer to the head of design, you still need to be able to design, just like chef de cuisines might have teams of chefs under them, but they never lose their touch with the craft. You might not be as attuned to the latest and greatest techniques, but design principles are pretty universal and don’t change too frequently, and the methods are still similar even as tools change: it’s being able to unpack problems deeply, talking to people to evolve your understanding and stress test your thinking, creating concepts that might solve things until you get to something that satisfies the problem, and being able to execute it. Your level of involvement might change in each of these and there might be specialists who can do specific things better than you, but being able to absorb inputs, orchestrate the direction, and make a thing come to life is what makes you a designer. Never forget that.
2. Zooming out vertically and horizontally. Designers have a way of seeing the world that’s uniquely holistic: they can develop a view that’s zoomed all the way out from how the world is currently working today, and be able to zoom all the way in as they move a pixel, present a concept, design a process, organize a team, execute a project. This does not come natural. It requires not just being in a design file or staying in a design studio—it means being a participant in the world, understanding technological, cultural, economic trends, and using these learnings in how one thinks about their designs. You need to be well-read
3. Develop business and technological acumen. This might be the most obvious one here: but learn the execution of the craft even if you’re not the one tasked to produce it. And learn business basics. There’s a lot of business books and case studies out there, but few contextualized for the designer. This is where The Strategy of Design seeks to help with.
4. Work on communication and influence. It’s easy to be the designer in a studio working on something and hoping that it would reach other people on its own. But this is not how it works, especially with so many other things in the world that compete for people’s attention. Achieving outcomes through design is hard—it’s predominantly a team sport. To increase our chances of success, we have to bring people alone, and do it effectively. Our designs are magnified when we can influence those around us to help bring the things we want come to life. This involves communication, persuasion, negotiation. All can be learned.
5. Having a strong philosophy and point of view that is malleable upon evidence. Designers have huge egos because they believe the world should fit within their particular frame. And while having strong points of view can be a strength, being stubborn and close-minded is not. The things we make interact with the broader world and the collision doesn’t always lead to what we expect. This is why humility and curiosity remain to be some of the biggest assets of a designer in addition to their skills. Being strategic requires being open, and as much as we want to influence others, it’s also willing to be influenced within reason.

To quote Michael Rock, the best description is still “designer = designer.” My argument is theoretically, every designer is already a strategist; it’s about improving their ability as strategists to maximize their impact as a designer.

This is why The Strategy of Design exists.