Hurry up⚠️ Only 50 tickets left in this poolWaysAwardsSubmit your WaysAwards project — enter the 2026 nominations
UX Research

Between the lines of stakeholders: maintaining a great relationship resulting in outcomes and opportunities.

September 5, 2023 11:00 AM
Long Lecture
🇬🇧 English
Wisła

About

Communicating and trust building between the designer and stakeholders is crucial for bringing great value to the digital product. If you have it, impossible becomes possible. I'd like to discuss how to maintain the awesome relationship between designer and stakeholder(s), as well as share the most important rules of thumb on research, formulating hypotheses, interviewing people, and validating your design decisions while building agreements between the two parties along the way.

Talk by

Photo of Jakub Dziedzic, Lead Product Designer, Ramp
Jakub Dziedzic
Lead Product Designer at Ramp

Watch the full talk

Watch this WaysConf session, then continue with related talks or explore the current programme.

Explore the 2026 agendaMore WaysConf recordings
From the recording

Talk in brief

A detailed playbook for improving stakeholder relationships by connecting design decisions to outcomes, evidence, and explicit agreement. The talk starts with opportunity-solution trees: define the effect the team wants, collect user and business opportunities continuously, and test several responses instead of defending the first idea. It then addresses opinion-driven conflict. Designers cannot remove subjectivity or organizational hierarchy, but they can bring new information, tailor communication to each stakeholder group, co-create with influential partners, and make meetings easier to follow. Effective critique asks how a proposal affects the intended outcome, uses realistic data, keeps alternatives ready, and closes with a clear decision rather than leaving acceptance ambiguous.

Key takeaways

  1. 01

    Begin every initiative with the desired outcome

    A measurable effect gives research, opportunities, solutions, and experiments a shared direction beyond shipping output.

    Watch from 9:31
  2. 02

    Collect opportunities from behavior and evidence

    Interviews, observation, analytics, tests, and team ideas reveal needs without asking customers to prescribe the product.

    Watch from 13:54
  3. 03

    Counter senior opinion with better information

    Designers may not own the final decision, but they can improve it by introducing user evidence, metrics, and tested alternatives.

    Watch from 21:05
  4. 04

    Match collaboration to stakeholder influence

    High-interest, high-influence partners deserve close co-creation, while other groups need communication proportional to their role.

    Watch from 28:26
  5. 05

    Close design conversations with explicit agreement

    A response should connect problem, solution, user, and business value, then confirm the decision needed to move forward.

    Watch from 43:00
Read edited transcript highlights

These concise notes were edited from automatic captions and checked against the talk structure. They are not a verbatim transcript.

Outcomes give the discovery system a center

A team should begin with the effect it wants to create, not the interface it expects to ship. Research then supplies opportunities: needs, friction, and context that may contribute to that outcome. Several solutions can sit beneath an opportunity, and each can be treated as an experiment. This structure keeps discovery connected to value while preventing one early concept from becoming the project by default.

Watch from 9:31

Customers reveal opportunities through remembered behavior

An interview is not a request for the participant to design the product. Instead of asking which qualities matter when buying shoes, ask about the last purchase and what happened step by step. Concrete behavior exposes constraints, compromises, and goals. Researchers can interpret those observations as opportunities without pretending that a direct feature request is the only valid form of customer knowledge.

Watch from 13:54

Evidence changes an opinion battle into a decision

A designer may care deeply about a proposal and still lose a subjective argument to someone with greater authority. The useful response is not to fight for personal ownership at any cost. Bring research, metrics, usability results, or a tested comparison that the decision-maker did not have before. The final authority may remain elsewhere, but the organization can now make the choice with better information.

Watch from 21:05

Feedback questions should return to the intended effect

Questions such as whether someone likes a design invite taste and place the designer in search of approval. Ask how the proposal would work in the stakeholder’s context, what it changes for the agreed outcome, or why an alternative might perform better. Keep explored alternatives ready so recurring suggestions can be answered with evidence instead of beginning the same debate again.

Watch from 34:05

Agreement is a deliverable of the conversation

A persuasive design response first restates the problem, explains how the proposal addresses it, recalls the people affected, and connects the change to business value. That sequence is incomplete until the group confirms what has been decided. Even a simple request for agreement prevents the meeting from ending with several private interpretations and gives the project a clear next step.

Watch from 42:00
Explore WaysConf 2026

View the agenda

Get tickets