How to Shift from Reactive Design to Strategic Design

Some people spend their whole careers reacting to other people's moves.

I remember being in this position as a design manager. I had to brace myself every Monday morning for some radical change in company direction. We never knew what the new agenda would be, but we knew that it would throw our work into chaos. Sometimes, all it took was for the founder to read a single article to change the company agenda. When a competitor released a new feature, the reaction was even worse. Everything had to stop until we figured out how to deal with the competition.

The whole company forced the design team to react constantly to the changing whims of leadership and, ultimately, the competition.

When deadlines, competitors, and continuously changing goals prevent you from doing the necessary design work, you are stuck in reactive design.

Reactive design is a neverending stream of tasks assigned by somebody else. Even design managers can find themselves in this position.

The worst part about reactive design is that you don't control the speed, so you can't even establish a routine of reacting.

This is a very unstrategic position because you will spend all your energy fulfilling other people's orders and never take the time to be proactive or strategic about your design practice.

Signs you might be practicing reactive design

• Unfocused design work with no uniting theme: a shotgun approach wastes time and resources.
• Building everything the customers ask for: While it might feel good to grant every customer request, your customer only knows what’s best for them. You have to figure out if it’s good for the business.
• Building everything the sales team asks for: Salespeople are highly incentivized to promise customers the world, but this isn’t always good for the company in the long term.
• Copying stuff that worked at other companies: This is usually a manager reacting to something that worked at a past company without adapting it to the current company.
• Chasing the trends: This is tough, as people often see design as a way to stay trendy. However, trends can distract you from forging a unique path that makes sense for your company.
• Chasing maturity levels: Not every team must reach the same maturity level. Companies require different design skills and processes, so don't react to the design industry's cookie-cutter approach. Customize to your company, not industry standards.
• Trying to out-design the competitors: While it may seem intuitive, you don't want to try to beat the competition at their own game. This requires way more effort than proactively forging your strategic direction.

There is nothing wrong with these reactive approaches on their own. You can follow trends, and it might improve design. I’m just saying that they're the opposite of strategic, and I believe being proactive and company-specific with your design practice is way better.

“Strategy is about setting yourself apart from the competition. It's not a matter of being better at what you do - it's a matter of being different at what you do.” -Michael Porter

The only way to escape the reactive loop is to start being proactive.

What proactive and strategic thinking looks like

You don’t have to design a strategy to be proactive, but it will certainly help.

For me, the shift came when I realized that all the "extra" stuff I did as a manager were things that other people asked me to do. While they were good ideas, only I knew how to evolve my design team.

I had to zoom out and look at what was really going on behind the scenes. We get so caught up in optimizing our tasks that it's easy to lose sight of why we're doing a task in the first place. Thinking proactively can be therapeutic if you never give yourself a chance to breathe and observe what's happening.

I started by identifying some of the high-level challenges we faced as a team. Slowly and organically, this led to a team strategy that helped point us in the right direction.

Once I understood what was happening, I realized you could teach this process. In my?strategy course, I watch students transform in only six weeks.

Now I know that being proactive (and strategic) looks like:

• Focusing on the essence: Doing fewer things better can save time and resources.
• Making choices about the future: Decide beforehand which direction you will take.
• Doing the opposite of the norm: When the competitors zig, you should zag.
• Building to be different: Only take action when it aligns with the strategy’s direction.
• Doing more with less: Rather than fight a losing game against competitors, do your own thing and carve out a defendable niche.

The most successful people don’t wait for events to unfold. They design outcomes to their advantage, and strategy provides the tools.

Examples of designers that went from reactive to strategic

I teach a course on designing strategy twice a year, and every year I see dozens of examples of people integrating strategy into their practice. None of these people are CEOs. While some are managers, the majority are just regular individual contributors.

The Ambitious Designer: becoming head of the department

An ambitious newcomer joins a product team and quickly realizes that everyone is bogged down by repetitive tasks and that no one owns the long-term direction. They take it upon themselves to fill the gap—analyzing design patterns, presenting compelling insights, and helping leadership realize the power of a team strategy. This proactive work helps them quickly become the head of the team, gaining influence far beyond their initial role.

The Product Manager/Designer: from firefighter to visionary

This person was a weary product manager who found themselves constantly reacting to stakeholder demands. Instead of staying in a reactive loop, they started gathering insights from customers, prioritizing what would have the most long-term impact, and shaping the roadmap accordingly. They proactively developed a product strategy with a cohesive theory rather than a reactive list of features to build. Over time, they shifted from an executor to someone who set direction, ultimately driving bigger-picture decisions for their team and beyond.

The Strategic Researcher: turning insight into a competitive advantage

This researcher realized that the biggest challenge is not building features but figuring out which features can differentiate the company. They used their research skills to discover that their competitors focused on acquiring new customers, but retention was the real pain point. Instead of copying others, they designed a team strategy that put retention and long-term customer loyalty at the center, leading to an overall increase in revenue.

The Facilitative Leader: strategy as a way to bring a team together

A talented facilitator was tasked with onboarding a brand-new team onto a high-stakes venture. Instead of waiting for things to fall into place, he pitched a strategy project before the real work started. Within months, the team was running toward the same vision, avoiding the typical months of confusion and inefficiency that new teams face.

The Customer Expert: finding common ground between design and engineering

A designer was struggling to find their place in a dev-centric organization. When pitching improvements to design, they would get pushback from engineers who didn’t agree with his ideas to improve the look and feel of the product. The designer initiated a strategy project, and his research led him to focus on onboarding as a customer problem spot. Rather than pitching changes to the design, he pitched modifications to the customer experience, and he slowly developed a product strategy around onboarding and ensuring customers knew how to use the product, giving him more leadership and influence on the product team.

How to shift from reactive design to strategic design

It can be disorienting to stop reacting when that's all you do.

Manufactured urgency, such as arbitrary deadlines, competitive pressures, and stakeholder demands, can keep teams running so hard that they forget why they started running in the first place.

Stepping back to think big-picture is necessary to:

• Escape the cycle of reactive work.
• Find leverage instead of just effort.
• Make intentional decisions.
• Break free from survival mode & shape the future.

It’s helpful when leadership decides it’s time to step off the treadmill, but that might not be the case for you. Usually, there is “already a strategy” that everybody is ignoring, so it can be hard to make a case for stepping off the treadmill to be more strategic.

That’s the reality of strategy today: everyone thinks they have a strategy, but most aren’t very good.

Here are some specific ways to be more proactive about strategy when you don’t have a mandate from leadership to work on strategy:

1. Use the Socratic method. If you know where you want to lead the strategy, asking the right questions can help leaders realize what you want them to see without requiring you to say anything negative. For example, if the strategy is too vague and full of goals (a common issue), you might say: “I like the strategy here, and the goals are very inspiring. What specific actions or decisions will these goals guide? If someone on our team asked, ‘What should I do today to contribute to this goal?’—would they have a clear answer?”
2. Share content from strategy experts. A nice way to gently nudge leadership away from an idea is to offer educational sources to help them change their minds. If you are careful, you can share this information without making it feel like you are attacking anyone. For example, if the strategy is too aspirational and doesn’t face the company’s problem (a common issue), you might send them an article: Build a Strategy that Addresses Your Gnarliest Challenges by Richard Rumelt. The right article from a trusted source might be enough to change their mind.
3. Campaign for an update to the strategy. If you have the authority, you could openly campaign for an update to the strategy. Ensure you’re well-versed in strategy theory and understand the current strategy and the leadership team. You don’t want to campaign against something you don’t understand. For example, you might mention the strategy's shortcomings and volunteer to develop an update. Ensure you pitch for enough time to research the strategy properly (but take my strategy course first if you don’t know what the process looks like).
4. Call it something else and pitch that. If you want to be proactive about doing strategy, you don’t have to pitch a strategy project per se, especially if there is already a strategy and that would be politically dangerous. You can call strategy pretty much anything you like and pitch for time to work on that instead. For example, you might call it a “metrics project” and work to develop a new set of metrics that will guide the team in your chosen strategic direction. While metrics usually are only a tiny aspect of a strategy, you can pretend that metrics are the whole thing while using the time to research and design a better strategy.
5. Start working on a team-level strategy, then scale it up. Try working on a new strategy for your team (known as a functional strategy) until you have something to show before pitching a new company strategy. Most people can avoid throwing a strategy for their team without raising eyebrows. The team-level strategy can give you valuable practice for the high-risk company strategy. For example, you might start working on a strategy with your colleagues at your team’s level. Think big with the strategy, but test it on your team. Once you have a theory and some data, it will be easier to scale the thinking to the whole company. I have seen a team-level strategy scale up to the company level a few times. It takes a while, but it’s safer than starting with the company strategy.
6. Recruit an outside consultant. It’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle, and your company has the same problem with being able to judge their strategy. You don’t have to be an expert to know when a strategy sucks, but you might need an expert to fix it. An outside consultant can give valuable fresh eyes, provide a new source of trust, and won’t be as dangerous politically as you updating the strategy.F or example, you might hire a strategy consultant under the guise of some other project, then have them try to influence leadership into updating the strategy. (If you need a consultant, book a free call, and let’s talk. I can subtly push for a new strategic initiative while giving you the credit.)

If you want to build a strategic design practice even faster, check out my course on designing strategy.

You learn big-picture thinking in six inspiring weeks and work on a real strategy with my feedback and guidance.

You will build the foundations of a proactive design practice and walk away with a real strategy for propelling yourself to leadership positions.

Now, that would set you apart from all the reactive designers out there!

Until next time!

-Jeff Humble

#strategicdesign #reactivedesign #proactivedesign #designstrategy #uxstrategy #slack #innovation #continuousdevelopment #customercentric

This article was originally published on the Fountain Institute blog. Read the full version here

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