Understand the company's long-term strategy

This may sound needless to say, but honestly, it is the single most important to step to setting your idea up for stakeholder buy-in. Large tech companies, in particular, may be altering and adjusting their strategy on an annual basis. It depends on company performance, macroeconomics, and more.

When it comes to understanding the company’s long-term strategy, this will be the fundamental building block to identifying what product idea will be beneficial to both the business and the user.

It also isn’t as simple as looking through PowerPoint slides from an executive strategy share-out. Though if you can get your hands on it, you got a great start.

It may call for deeper conversations with various experts at the product management level. Or, if you’re a UX IC (individual contributor), your middle manager might be someone you can rely on for extra insights about the state of the company, what opportunities and risks there are with the company’s current strategy, and more.

Identify the theme, identify the need

As much as we wish to pull ideas out of our *sses at a snap of a finger, the most compelling and loud ideas require outreach and collective thought. If you’re a UX expert yourself, regardless of your discipline, you can use your experiences with the product to identify recurring patterns of opportunities, risks, and necessities.

You’ll want to ensure that the theme you’ve identified can be further supported by the company’s current strategy.

For example, you work at a fin-tech company that has a product that manages people’s money. The strategy for this fiscal year is to get more users to deposit and hold their money with said company.

After months or years of exposure to both its users and the product itself, you have identified a large opportunity for third-party integration of banks. Or, more abstractly, you have identified a need for users to streamline the management of their money all in one place.

This idea is high-level and ambiguous enough, while still aligning with the direction of the company’s strategy.

Throw a sketching party

This is when the fun really starts to happen. This is where creativity begins to operate in its most natural environment.

A sketching party in the context of UX design is a collaborative and creative session where designers, stakeholders, and other team members come together to ideate and sketch out design concepts.

The goal of a sketching party is to generate a wide range of ideas quickly and efficiently. Participants typically use pen and paper or digital sketching tools to visually depict their design ideas, whether it’s for interfaces, layouts, or interactions.

The emphasis is on rapid sketching and low-fidelity representations, focusing more on the core concepts and less on the details. Engaging in a sketching party can leverage more diverse design possibilities, and gather valuable input from various perspectives, ultimately driving innovation and informing the next steps in the design process.

It’s not often that UX designers (or any UX practitioner) pick up a paper and pen and draw like in the old days, however, nothing can truly replace the feeling and effectiveness of a pen and paper. Sometimes idea vomiting is exactly what we need to generate the best ideas.

The best part is that this sketching party can be done fully remotely or in person!

On a separate but related note, if you’re interested in other collaborative and rapid design activities, check out my blog:

After about 45 minutes to an hour of open sketching (or however the time you decide to allot for you and your team), the facilitator will typically leave about 10–15 minutes in the end for participants to take a look at everyone’s sketches. Participants have the opportunity to cast their votes on which ideas have a lot of potential and opportunity to be impactful on both the user and business levels.

The rules and details are all up to you but know that you don’t have to limit yourself and the participants to just one vote per person. The idea behind voting is to simply gauge what ideas are getting traction and are worth exploring more. These can be a set of ideas, not just one.

Convert them into low-fidelity

Once you’ve identified your top however-many-ideas that were most voted on, this is an opportunity for you to take these ideas back to your own table and entertain them further with low-fidelity concepts.

The purpose of low-fidelity design is to quickly and easily explore and communicate those design ideas, iterate on concepts, and gather feedback early in the design process.

By focusing on the core concepts rather than aesthetics, low-fidelity design allows you to efficiently test and validate ideas without investing excessive time or resources, enabling rapid iteration and improvement.

To learn more about low-fidelity designing, check out my blog:

Which leads me into my next point…

Seek early validation

At this point, you have your theme solidified, you have a few potential solutions to these themes, and you even have some low-fi’s to illustrate them. The reality is, this is not enough to get you buy-in from the executive level. Your UX work doesn’t stop here.

Pursuing a product solution takes an enormous amount of resources from multiple aspects of the company and can easily add a lot of risk and strain if not vetted properly.

It’s important to obtain user validation of these high-level concepts through concept testing.

The biggest value to concept testing in this particular scenario is risk reduction. Concept testing helps mitigate risks associated with developing a product or feature that may not resonate with the intended users. By validating design concepts early on, you can identify potential usability issues, identify flaws, or uncover unforeseen challenges. This early detection of problems allows for necessary adjustments and reduces the risk of launching a product that fails to meet user expectations.

If your idea or your team’s collection of ideas can pass the concept testing stage, you have increased your chances for executive and stakeholder buy-in 10 fold.

Pitch

At last, you’ve made it to this point in your journey of converting ambiguous ideas into a product solution. Congrats! You’ve done all your due diligence as a UX expert in ensuring your idea has some legs.

When pitching a product idea as a UX expert, it’s important to effectively communicate the value and potential of your concept.

Start your pitch by clearly articulating the problem or pain point your product idea addresses. Emphasize the impact of this problem on users and the potential consequences for the business. Present compelling evidence, such as user research findings or market data, to support your claims and demonstrate the significance of the problem.

Good thing you did your concept testing, right?

Then, clearly communicate how your concept addresses the pain points and meets user needs. Differentiate your product idea by highlighting its unique features or advantages over existing solutions. Showcase how your concept stands out from competitors and fills gaps in the market.

At the end of the day, you used your voice as a UX expert to advocate for your users and you got a seat at the table. If your company is structured like other large companies out there, this will now be in the hands of product management and executives to prioritize. If they are bought in that is.