How to design the right thing in high-pressure situations
What should you do if the Product team says, “stop everything and build this?”
“Junior Designers seem to struggle the most when the Product team suddenly says ‘stop everything and build this.’” A Head of UX told me the other day, which can be unfortunately common.
When design is siloed (or not part of specific meetings), it’s often the last to find out. This means it can be situations where it’s ambushed by Product and forced to change directions suddenly.
Without proper communication, a toxic design environment can easily be created. However, even though some change might need to come from higher-ups, Designers aren’t powerless.
In these situations, the way to mitigate the situation is to ask questions.
Otherwise, you may miss the business context critical to building the right design and mitigating stress.
Business context: what many teams don’t tell designers
Often, this ‘drop everything and do this’ approach isn’t just the whims of a CEO or another executive. The typical scenario is that your competitors do something you didn’t expect.
For example, your direct competitor might be about to release a game-changing feature that might cost you several sales.
In a sales call, your current customers might mention how excited they are about your competitor’s upcoming feature. Then, your sales team (or PM) investigates further and realizes that this feature might cause your customer to switch to your competitor.
Or that there’s a feature missing from our offering that all our competitors have.
As a result, the PM/CEO/Sales team re-prioritizes the feature roadmap, and then the Product Manager approaches Design and says, “Hey, stop what you’re doing. We need to design and build this thing.”
If you’re unlucky, they will explain 0% of the business context that drives this decision. It’s just a command, out of nowhere, to stop what you’re doing and do something else. As a result? Nobody’s happy.
Designers don’t realize you're ‘putting out a fire’ to reach feature parity and avoid losing business.
Product teams also aren’t sure why Design can’t expedite this process.
Products get delivered half-baked because one side of the team wants to take their time, and the other is in a rush.
Here’s how asking questions about the business context can help with that process.
Value, or why users use a product
New features don’t motivate users to act. Value does.
If there’s a new feature advertised in a banner (or video), you might get a few clicks out of curiosity. However, the majority of people engage with a product because they can see the value that it provides.
So, one of the questions designers need to ask the business about is the ‘value proposition.’
In our scenario, all we know about the feature is that our current customer is excited about our competitor’s upcoming feature. The problem is that we may have no idea why.
Ideally, UX would be able to talk with this customer more and ask some questions to uncover why that’s the case. For example:
Is there a specific problem that you’re hoping this feature solves?
How are you currently addressing this problem? How is it working?
What alternatives have you tried? What were their limitations?
If you were to explain the top 3 features of your ideal solution to the leadership team, what would they be?
However, even if you cannot talk directly with customers, there are additional questions about value you can ask the Product team about. These questions might include:
How do you measure success when it comes to implementing this feature?
What would be the tangible business impact if this issue was solved?
What features would make this a must-have vs a nice-to-have?
How would you quantify the cost (financial, time, resources, opportunities) of not solving this problem?
If you’re worried about pushback from asking questions, preface these questions by saying “just building a feature” won’t be enough to avoid losing customers to a competitor.
It’s more about understanding the reasons (and value) that users will get from this new feature, which allows designers to build something that gets users to use your product.
In addition, this helps designers avoid ‘shadow planning’, where we’re just copying other companies without understanding why.
The other part of this conversation is competitive research.
Competitive research, or who to reference
There’s a single question that many people forget to ask that can be incredibly valuable in these high-pressure scenarios:
What competitors have done this before?
Why is this important? If you were told to design a “bulk upload feature,” would you know what to design?
Certain design elements, like an ‘upload area’ that can handle multiple files, are standard design patterns.
However, the design of “bulk uploading pictures to a photo album” would likely be different than “bulk uploading a spreadsheet of items to sell.”
So, having points of reference to see what competitors do is often critical. Your product team likely knows exactly which competitors have this feature because that’s how this situation started.
So, remembering to ask about competitor names, products, and other things you can reference will help you understand if there are any standard workflows, design patterns, and more that can help you build quickly.
Rush situations suck, but don’t make it worse by keeping silent
I’ve worked in startups for a while, which can mean dealing with these ‘stop everything and do this’ regularly.
Most of the time, it comes down to a business context that designers often lack, and being blindsided by this never feels great.
But rather than immediately reacting with frustration (and job hunting), spending a few minutes asking questions can help you not only navigate these scenarios but also deliver the critical designs your business needs.
In these high-pressure situations, taking time to ask questions seems counterintuitive and intimidating. It is tempting to keep your head down, say nothing, and follow orders.
But you can’t build what a business needs unless you know what they want.
Explaining that " the more questions you answer, the better the first design will be, which will save a lot of time” is often all you need to do to get people on board.
So, if you’re surprised by a business like this, don’t just rush into designing. Take time to ask critical questions because that is often precisely what you need to tackle these rough situations.
My cohort-based course, The Influential designer, closes in 10 days
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Data and Design newsletter writer. He teaches a course, The Influential Designer, using data to communicate more effectively and get buy-in for your design recommendations.