Plan like a PM, research like an analyst and design like a marketeer

Design isn’t just execution—it’s strategic orchestration.

Good design isn’t just about how it looks or even works— it is about why it exists in the first place. And in today’s world, the best designers think beyond their craft. Every time you look back at the design process, it usually is broken into phases—plan, understand, design, deliver, reiterate. One of the key challenges that are visible early on is the planning phase where you are only planning to execute the vision of your senior stakeholders or a C-level who arrived at the plan to launch a new experience. So, how do you go beyond being a pixel pusher?

Plan like a product manager

Great PMs already know the vision for 2030 Q3! They eat their product, they sleep with it—they own their product. They are part of conversations where decisions are made. Your PM is essentially your peer so why would you refrain from sharing your vision? As designers, we are closer to our users, we empathise and understand their needs. However, we fail to articulate the impact of solving a certain user problem. As designers, invest in pitches and decks to communicate your point of view. Over the years, I have been an ally to my PMs and we co-create, co-plan and co-build. We have extended our skills and created a reliability between to take decisions both ways.

Great PMs also get things done. They create impact by shipping great things all along managing timelines, stressing on working fast and juggling through multiple discussions and putting out fires. Over years, I’ve worked with exemplary product managers and something that most of the successful PMs have in common is their drive to impact, visibility in the company and making things happen.

Product managers are visionaries who clearly picture the roadmap, understanding diligently the first design deliverable until the final vision. They work in stages while always having their north star clear. This not only helps them to understand what they are building, but also the resource allocation, timelines, strategies and forming communication channels to make things happen.

As designers, we could adopt similar vision and look to the future in order to deliver work in phases which would make our MVPs vetted out diligently, creating less frustrations of the reduced designs from the vision.

Research like an analyst

Every organisation uses dashboards and behavioural analysis tools to understand product interaction trends. The tools may vary but the core principles of usage are mostly alike. One of my onboarding principles in any organisation as a personal goal is to understand the dashboards used in order to navigate around and make sense of the data and align with performance on set company OKRs. This habit has helped me to back my design decisions with data but also bring new ideas to the table.

Analysts are one of the finest and utmost essential roles in any organisation keeping a track on performance, spot drop offs, finding core features essential for user engagement and retention and understanding the funnel as a whole. By adopting critical thinking and skepticism, analysts are able to discern fact from fiction, identify biases, and uncover hidden nuances within complex problems.

Designers should focus on logical thinking and breaking down their screens into steps to uncover deeper performance issues. Additionally, tie design decisions with measurable outcomes. Stay in those rooms where designs are consulted to setup experiments, tracking decisions and defining success of the experiments. Just like user needs are uncovered through empathising, user behaviour is uncovered through analytics.

Design like a marketeer

In this age, the competition is high in each sector. More and more businesses are driving growth through fulfilling different user needs. Marketing is becoming a stronger muscle, equivalent to product and engineering. We see more and more increased in paid acquisitions and growth. Marketing functions not only fosters increase in users but it understands the playfield to bring uniqueness to the product offering, build a narrative that is loved and trusted by people and inspires action. To summarise it:

• grabs attention

• builds trust

• prompts action

We should equally use design to guide behaviour—through visual hierarchy (attention), microcopy (trust), and emotionally resonant visuals with clear interactions (action). Designing like marketing means to engage users through creative and attention grabbing designs. Delightful experiences do more than just make users smile—they drive meaningful product outcomes.

As a start, test new ideas through fakedoor tests, do social media testing by using creative copy and different hooks and finally test interesting visual play. More than once have I seen huge differences in results by just changing one of the above leading to more positive uplifts.

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To summarise, design is a complex function but also a unique one. It has the strengths and drive to stimulate action. Design is beyond the actual UI and user flows. Luckily for us, our design processes are far more enhanced and capture all of these. We just need to train continuously our muscle to build it into our subconscious muscle memory.