Understanding this helped me be seen as an expert at Amazon (in-house)

Hey there! I’m Raika, a Senior UX and Conversation Designer at Amazon. If you’re new here, welcome! You can subscribe to my Secrets to Great UX Design newsletter for weekly insights. I share actionable ways to create great experiences, grow your career and more… for designers and non-designers.

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Last week I shared the advice that, without a doubt, shaped my career. Become an expert (read it here). Today, I want to share how to be seen as an expert.

For me being seen as an expert came easier in the consulting world than in-house.

Companies are bringing in consultants to help them solve the problems they can’t. And you have a team of colleagues you’re working with. So when someone else refers to you as an expert, others are inclined to believe you are.

Being seen as an expert in-house has been more of a challenge.

In my experience, design is either seen as a production arm. Being seen as a strategic partner or expert takes intentionality at companies that are not lead by design.

Here are two things I do to be seen as an expert in-house:

1. Find my champions

To put simply, your leadership highly values certain people’s opinions. Get those people to champion your work.

At Free People, I found that when those people were speaking highly of my designs, I started to be seen as the expert in the room. Leadership began to trust me.

I didn’t leave this up to chance.

To kick off the project, I scheduled meetings with team members from customer service, merchandising, engineering and other disciplines to interview them. To understand what made their job difficult, what their goals were, and so on. They were my customers just as much as the end customer. Then later in the design phase, I sought their feedback on my work. This meant in the bigger review for leadership sign-off, they were championing my work. I was also solving problems for them. Sure, a few times I got thrown under the bus but for the most part, I had their buy-in and support.

I also got very lucky when I was at Free People redesigning the checkout experience. Amazon had launched a new checkout experience that was very similar to the design I had been proposing. Amazon was the gold standard for us at the time. While there were differences in how our customer shopped vs the Amazon customer, Amazon’s reputation for testing and never-ending optimization, made Amazon a desirable company to reference. So when my design aligned with their design, I was seen as an expert.

Conference Room at the Amazon Sphere in Seattle

2. Be a thought leader, not a facilitator

This second learning has come from my time at Amazon.

Designers these days often facilitate design thinking workshops.

Don’t get me wrong, design thinking workshops are a great way to influence and help the business take a more customer-centric approach. And facilitating is a great skill to have.

However, design thinking workshops will have a negative impact when done incorrectly.

You need to be the thought leader, not just the facilitator.

Help the team leverage design thinking methodologies but don’t give them the pen.

Workshops started as a way to help clients and teams understand the process of design. But somehow, they have made their way into a design practice.

Too often I see workshops making everyone a designer or designing by committee.

The goal of workshops is to encourage creative problem-solving and innovation per domain expertise. To help highlight and uncover where stakeholders disagree. The objective should also be to understand the participants to drive smooth decision-making later.

There are no hard lines here but I believe the best workshops are not about collaboratively designing experiences but rather an input into the design phase.

Use workshops to learn your stakeholder’s (and teams) assumptions, opinions and values.

What’s in your way?

One of the biggest challenges to being seen as an expert is imposter syndrome.

The thing is you’ll never know everything. And being an expert doesn’t mean always being right.

Experts are right a lot.

Not always.

Imposter syndrome kills creativity and your voice because you have an insight, a hunch, or an idea and you may be worried that if you put it in front of others, they will chuckle and you’ll lose status.

But that’s when the fun part begins! Part of the role of the expert is to help others see what they can’t see. To persuade, to influence. So I’ll end with some tips to do just that.

12 tips to persuade as an expert:

1. Know your audience, understand their preferences, concerns, and priorities of the leadership team.

2. Lead with data, research insights, customer anecdotes and examples

3. Identify and align the organization's objectives

4. Anticipate and proactively address concerns

5. Frame your message strategically

6. Use visual aids like charts, graphs, and infographics to make complex concepts easier to understand

7. Cultivate strong relationships with key decision-makers in the organization

8. Be willing to adapt your proposal based on feedback from leadership

9. Communicate clearly and confidently

10. Kill your imposter syndrome

11. Showcase the ROI, show clear potential for positive impact on the bottom line

12. Follow Up! After presenting your ideas, follow up with the leadership team

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That’s it for today. Thanks for reading!

Until next week,
raika

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