Start With Their Goals, Not Your Figma
Why the skills that got you hired won't get you heard, and what you can do about it.
Summary: Craft gets you hired, but influence gets you heard. James Hsu's talk on designer impact breaks down how to frame your work in business terms, build trust across functions, and make sure your design recommendations don't get ignored.
I recently hosted a talk by James Hsu, a design leader who has built his career across places like Disney and Live Nation. The talk was called “Being Good at Design Isn’t Enough,” and if you’ve been in this industry for more than a few years, that title probably gets you.
One of his slides was about how to talk to stakeholders so they actually listen. Something on that slide stuck with me.
“Start with their goals, not your Figma.”
Most new designers aren’t prepared for what James said next. You can be an exceptional designer and still get completely ignored. You can deliver pixel-perfect work, and still watch your recommendations get overruled by someone who barely knows what Figma is. Not because your work was bad. Because you never learned how to make people care about it.
The Craft Ceiling
Early in your career, craft is everything. It should be. You need to learn the fundamentals: typography, layout, hierarchy, research methods, prototyping, visual storytelling, etc. Those skills earn you your first job, maybe your second. They’re the price of admission.
But somewhere around year three or four, something shifts. You start noticing that the designers who get promoted aren’t always the ones with the tightest UI. The people who shape product direction aren’t necessarily the best visual thinkers in the room. The people who get pulled into strategy meetings early? They speak a different language than the rest of the design team.
They’ve figured out something that took me years to learn: influence is a skill, and it’s separate from design skill. You can have one without the other, but you need both if you want your work to actually matter.
James put it plainly, your design skills have a ceiling if you can’t also build influence, earn trust across the business, and show that you understand what the your organization is trying to accomplish. That’s not a knock on craft. It’s a recognition that craft needs a vehicle to travel in, and that vehicle is your ability to communicate, persuade, and connect your work to what the organization actually cares about.
Learning to Speak Business
So what does this look like in practice? First, it’s worth understanding why framing your work in business terms matters so much. You’re not dumbing it down. You’re making it possible for non-designers to advocate for your work in rooms you’re not in. Your PM can’t go to their boss and say “we nailed the micro-interactions.” But they can say “this redesign should cut churn by 15%.” Speaking business means your work can travel without you.
James outlined four ways to measure the value of what you’re doing.
It makes money. Maybe your redesign improves conversion. Maybe it opens up a new revenue stream. If you can tie your work to dollars, people listen.
It saves time. A streamlined workflow, fewer steps in a process, less back-and-forth with support. Time is money, and everyone in the room understands that.
It prevents something bad from happening. Risk reduction is value. A well-designed flow that keeps users from getting confused and filing support tickets saves real money.
It makes us look good. Brand perception matters. A polished, well-considered experience builds trust with customers and gives the company a competitive edge.
If you can’t connect your design work to at least one of those four, you’re going to have a hard time convincing anyone outside of your design team that what you’re proposing matters.
Think about how most designers present their work. They explain their rationale in design terms. Consistency, usability, delight. All good things. All important things. But none of them land the way “this will reduce support tickets by 30%” does. None of them resonate like “this checkout flow redesign could recover $2 million in abandoned carts.”
The shift isn’t about ditching design language. It’s about becoming bilingual. You still think in design. But when you walk into a room with product managers, engineers, and executives, you translate your thinking into their language. You start with their goals, not your Figma.
How to Build Influence
Building influence doesn’t mean becoming a corporate schmoozer. It means developing a set of complementary skills that help your design work ship. Here’s what I’ve seen work, both in my own career and in watching designers grow through the programs I lead.
Mirror their language. This was another standout point from James’s talk. When your PM talks about conversion rates, you talk about conversion rates. When your engineering lead is worried about implementation complexity, you acknowledge that before jumping into your ideal solution. People trust people who seem to understand their world. If you only ever speak in design jargon, you’re building a wall between yourself and the people who need to say yes to your ideas.
Frame your work as a business case, not a design case. Before your next design review, ask yourself: which of those four value lenses does this work connect to? Does this redesign make us money? Save the team time? Prevent a bad experience that’s costing us customers? Make the brand look sharper in a competitive market? If you can answer that question clearly, you’ve already separated yourself from most designers in the room.
Ask smart questions early. One of the fastest ways to build credibility with cross-functional partners is to ask questions that show you understand the bigger picture. Instead of waiting for a brief and then designing to spec, try asking things like “What does success look like for this feature from a business perspective?” or “What are we most worried about with this launch?” These questions show that you’re thinking beyond the screen.
Plant seeds early. This was the last tip from James’s stakeholder communication framework, and it’s one that early-career designers almost never do. Don’t wait for the big reveal to share your thinking. Socialize your ideas informally. Drop hints in Slack. Share rough sketches over coffee. By the time you present the polished version, the key decision-makers should already feel a sense of ownership over the direction. If the first time your stakeholders see your work is in a formal review, you’ve already lost half the battle.
The Hardest Part
The hardest part of all this isn’t learning the skills. It’s accepting that you need them.
A lot of designers, especially early in their careers, feel like the work should speak for itself. And I get it. You got into design because you love making things. You love solving problems visually. You love the craft. The idea that you also need to be a negotiator and a translator can feel like a betrayal of why you chose this field in the first place.
But think about the designers you admire most. The ones leading teams at the companies you want to work for. The ones shaping products that millions of people use. They didn’t get there by being the best person in Figma. Well, they might be really effing good. But they got there by combining strong craft with the ability to influence decisions, build trust, and articulate why design matters in terms that resonate beyond the design team.
Start Small
You don’t need to overhaul your entire approach overnight. Pick one meeting where you consciously translate your design rationale into business impact. The next time you present work, lead with the problem you’re solving for the business, not the screen you’re showing. Ask one question in your next cross-functional meeting that shows you’re thinking about more than pixels.
These are small moves, but they compound. And over time, they change how people perceive you. Not just as a talented designer, but as someone who understands what the team is trying to accomplish and can help get them there.
James Hsu’s talk was a reminder I needed to hear, and one I think a lot of designers need. The best designers aren’t just good at design. They’re good at making design matter to the people around them. That’s not a compromise. That’s the whole job.