🤿 storytelling for senior designers

Design is built on the fundamentals of craft and early in your career this is the primary skill you’re building.

But eventually you realize that if you want to make real impact then you have to get others to buy into your vision for the future.

Our job as designers is to spot opportunities that other people miss, but that only matters if you can help others see what you see.

That’s why storytelling is the #1 growth area for senior designers.

So I interviewed Chris Abad to learn everything you can do as a designer to effectively share your vision and persuade stakeholders

He shares each step of the process he’s refined over 20+ years of leading teams at Google, Square, Dropbox, etc.

Here are my highlights 👇

The biggest mistake designers make

Let’s say you have an upcoming slot in next week’s product meeting and you have some ideas for a feature area you’re working on.

The mistake most designers make is starting to craft their presentation by pulling from various visual artifacts created over the last few weeks of exploration. We default to using these visuals as “cue cards”.

That’s why Chris follows a different approach 👇

Emphasizing a single idea

Product leaders will only remember 1-2 points out of your 20 minute presentation.

So the key is to build your story around a “peak moment” that emphasizes the exact idea you want people to cling to.

In last week’s mini episode on systems thinking I talked about how I got buy-in for a new syllabus editor at Maven after 2+ years of trying.

The breakthrough was showing how the underlying tech could 1) improve the student experience 2) unlock new opportunities for instructors to preview lessons on their landing page

In that case my “peak moment” (i.e. the one idea I want to stick with people) is that we can accomplish two initiatives with a single building block.

Now the question is… where does that live in your presentation?

Framing your “Peak Moment”

Most designers tell stories that mirror the design process:

• Here’s the context

• Here’s the problem

• Here’s how we’ll solve the problem

• Q&A

But if you learned anything from Gabe Valdivia’s ideas about showcasing your work like a content creator… you already know that the best stories are rarely told linearly.

In the list above, the peak moment most likely exists somewhere in the “here’s how we’ll solve the problem” section. So what Chris often does is front-load that meaning his outline might look something like this:

• This is what the world could look like if all this works really well

• These are the obstacles getting in our way

• This is the proof I have that this is possible

The trap designers fall into is building up to the peak moment with a big crescendo… but if the executive started catching up on Slack notifications halfway through then you’ve already lost 😬

How Chris writes his story

Once Chris has his outline he does something pretty unique…

He records himself talking through it in a Loom video and then exports a transcript.

From there he refines his ideas in writing to land on a final script and storyboard.

One benefit of this is that it’s easier to get feedback on your presentation in this format too. People are naturally drawn to visuals so if you send someone a deck most of the critique will happen at that level. Not only that, but making changes to the core story is way easier when it’s nothing but text.

Once he’s figured out his story word for word, he uses ChatGPT to convert it back into bullet points so that it’s more natural to talk through and he’s not tempted to “read” his script out loud.

Only then is it time to figure out the slides 👇

Structuring your slide deck

The purpose of your slide deck is to reinforce what you’re saying and nothing more.

So whenever possible Chris avoids text on his slides because people will naturally read it first and only after they’re done will they check back in to what you’re saying).

But Chris does something else I found interesting too…

He often includes a portion of context as an “appendix” rather than the core flow of the deck. This can be useful during Q&A but it also allows him to make on-the-fly decisions about whether to go deeper into a specific topic based on what he feels the audience wants.

That might even mean he asks for permission first:

Good presentations are flexible presentations.

Storytelling tactics for senior designers

There’s a lot more where that came from… Chris gives a storytelling masterclass in the full episode.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

🤝 WITH PLAY

There’s one piece of interaction design that’s been referenced like 4 different times on this show…

It’s the split view in the Amie calendar app and it really is one of the most impressive pieces of design I’ve seen and I use it every day

But here’s the thing…

Dennis the designer says they wouldn’t have shipped the split screen interactions without their Play prototype.

And it makes sense. You could never create something like that in Figma.

But that’s where Play comes in. It allows you to create ultra realistic prototypes because for the first time you can design interactions with native iOS gestures and Apple’s Core Animation

So if you want to raise your ceiling for interaction design click the link 👇

Meet the Dive partners 

I made a list of my favorite products and asked them to come on as sponsors of the newsletter/podcast. They said yes 🥹

The #1 way to support Dive Club is to check them out👇

Dessn → How I ship like a design engineer

Framer​ → How I build my websites

Genway → How I do research

Jitter​ → How I animate my designs

Play → How I design mobile apps

Raycast ​ → How I do most things on my computer

Visual Electric → How I generate imagery

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