Andrew Gehrke

1. Do your research. Stakeholders are users of your sales ability. Identify what they need from you and your presentations to be successful. 2. Set the tone. You're the expert. You should have evidence for your decisions, but even if not, be confident. Control your presentations and how you handle feedback. 3. Pitch Appropriately. You did your research, you have your evidence. Hit the pain points for your stakeholders. To be safe, when possible, focus on how features impact users, the business, and development. 4. Compromise and CYA Business is politics. Sometimes you need to Compromise to earn favors; sometimes to keep moving. But always Cover Your Ass and document who voted against you, when, and why. Always bring receipts!

At the end of the day, there's nothing fancy or ground breaking or amazing to consider here. If you have to explain the joke, it's not funny. If you have to explain the design, it's not working. That's not to say that training isn't necessary, or that there's a perfect solution to everything, but we know that people don't take time to read. They don't take time to consider options. They just want to do the thing and go away. So help them do the thing. Don't overcomplicate things. Don't over crowd things. If a question turns into another question, deal with it at that time. Don't ask 5 questions at one time. Apple is famous for this. Proprietary everything means you don't need to think. You know to just buy the 🍏 logo.

Beautifully said! I don't know how many times this last project I had to qualify perspectives for people by saying "but that's just anecdotal!", either for my own opinions or others' And that's great! Anecdotal evidence helps us with empathetic decision making. But we need to be self aware of those moments in order to he sure we're using empathy and research, and not just pure bias. This seems most challenging at the end of long projectsz.

Communicate with team members or me tors for support. 100%! This is also a great way to sanity check a scenario and make sure you're not just mishandling or misinterpreting a scenario. I was just discussing this the other night.

Market research is a great place to gain inspiration. You can also leverage AI to ideate. Look at the brand message and play with it like taffy. Get weird. Play games. Take a shower. Just Do things in A way That you wouldn't usually do the M.

A beautiful foundation makes a beautiful design. Don't forget the basics of gestalt principles, manage your grid structure and maintain it, and know your standards and requirements. And your end user research!