Leading through prototypes

You're in the room. You're being heard and design is "valued." And yet... Things aren't happening. What's going wrong?

• ✅ You're close to customers with great insights in what people need.
• ✅ You're fantastic at imagining the future and pulling together ideas with business value
• ✅ and you know exactly what moments matter in your product, what makes people say "WOW"

It's not a skill issue.

You're waiting to be called upon, to be given a nicely spec'ed & pre-prioritised project on the roadmap to give you permission to lead. Instead, you need to be the one selling the vision and convincing everyone of why it needs prioritising.

Waiting to be asked is comfortable, but it's not leadership. So how do you sell a vision? Like sales, it starts with the demo

Craft the demo

Typically the artefacts used to prioritise are dull, really dull. Things like

• Impact vs Effort charts
• Spreadsheets
• and never-ending documents packed full of acronyms

They work. But no-one's excited to build them. They try to describe a vision but ironically, no-one can see it.

This is design's edge, you already make visions well... Visual. Taking fuzzy ideas and creating clarity. We're already great at this and our best tool? Prototypes

A prototype makes an idea real, creates immediate alignment around something that everyone can point to, discuss and – importantly – get excited about. This is what sells your idea and it's something that charts, presentations and documents just can't do. If a picture is worth a thousand words then a prototype is worth a million.

But creating a prototype alone isn't enough. If no one sees it then no-one is sold.

Make the pitch

Now you just need a forum to get your ideas in front of people.

At Plain, I use our Friday Demo. Each week anyone can take a few minutes to share something we worked on. This is where (in my very biased opinion) some of our most exciting projects like Product Insights, Incidents and what a Help Centers can be came from.

For you, this could be the same, or it could be dropping a video walkthrough and a link into #general in Slack or asking for 3 minutes to share at an All Hands.

Closing the deal

Influence doesn't come from invitations, it comes from selling people on your vision. As a designer, your superpower isn't making things look good, it's making ideas feel real. That's what moves teams. That's what shifts priorities. That's what defines roadmaps.

Lead by showing what's possible, not by waiting for permission.