Early in my career I made the classic mistake of waiting for permission. I had opinions about the direction of a product, I had evidence to back them up, and I said nothing — because no one had asked me, and I was not the one in charge. That habit cost me months of influence I could have been building. What I eventually learned, through a lot of trial and a fair amount of error, is that authority is granted top-down but influence is built from the ground up. Nobody hands you it. You accumulate it slowly, through repetition and reliability.
The organisations I have worked inside — telecoms businesses, fintech platforms, large enterprise software companies — all share a common feature: they are full of smart people who have legitimate competing priorities. Design is rarely the loudest voice in the room. If you want your perspective to land, you have to earn the right to have it heard. Here is how I have done that.
Show Up Consistently Before You Need Something
The biggest mistake I see designers make is treating influence as something they turn on when they need a decision to go their way. That does not work. By the time you need influence, it is too late to start building it. Influence is accumulated during the ordinary, unremarkable moments — the standup where you flag a risk nobody asked you about, the document you annotate with a useful question, the Slack message where you share a piece of research relevant to someone else's problem.
Concretely, the habits that compound over time are:
- Being visibly useful to people outside your immediate team. If a product manager in another squad is wrestling with a problem you have already solved, tell them. You are not competing with them.
- Writing things down and sharing them. A short summary of your design rationale, emailed after a review, means your thinking persists after the meeting ends. Most people never do this.
- Attending the meetings that are not ostensibly about design. Engineering planning, commercial reviews, support escalations. The pattern of user problems that surfaces in a support call is design-relevant intelligence. Collect it.
Make Your Thinking Legible to Non-Designers
One of the most reliable ways to lose influence is to speak in design language to people who do not share it. I have been in too many reviews where a designer presented a set of screens and spoke exclusively about hierarchy, affordance, and visual weight — and watched the stakeholders disengage within three minutes. That is not their failure; it is ours.
The frame I now use for almost every stakeholder presentation is: here is the user problem, here is what we tried, here is why this solution addresses the problem better than the alternatives, here is what we expect to happen as a result. That last part — the expected outcome — is the one most designers skip. Framing a design decision in terms of a metric or a user behaviour change gives the non-designer a handle to grip. It also commits you to something, which is uncomfortable, but that discomfort is exactly what builds credibility.
Practical reframes that help:
- Replace "this creates better visual hierarchy" with "users were missing this action — this change makes it the obvious next step."
- Replace "the current flow has too much friction" with "we lose 40% of users at this step — here is what is causing that and what we are changing."
- Replace "this does not feel right" with "in testing, users hesitated here and described feeling unsure — let me show you the session."
Pick Your Battles and Win Them Visibly
Influence in a large organisation is partly a reputation game. The designers who become trusted voices are not necessarily the ones who are right most often — they are the ones who are seen to be right when it matters. That distinction shapes how I now decide which arguments to press hard and which to let go.
If I push hard on every decision, I will win some and lose some, and the wins will get lost in the noise. If I choose three things a quarter where I have genuinely strong evidence and I argue clearly and specifically for them, and those calls turn out to be right, that reputation compounds fast. The flip side is accepting that you will let some bad decisions ship. That is not failure; it is resource allocation.
The thing nobody tells you when you start in a large organisation is that your title does not protect you from irrelevance and it does not prevent you from being influential. Those outcomes depend almost entirely on what you do with the ordinary time — the meetings, the documents, the Slack threads, the small decisions you choose to engage with and the ones you let pass. Build the habit of being useful and legible and consistent, and the influence follows. It is slower than you want. It is also more durable than anything a job title could give you.
