This morning, I was chatting with a colleague about a contentious interaction with a stakeholder in which they asserted decision rights over our work. I think I surprised her with my response:

“It’s just like working with clients. When it’s your money, and you have to live with the outcomes, you get to make the decisions. When it’s their money, and they have to live with the outcomes, they get to make the decisions. All we can do is try our best to convince them to do the right thing.”

It points out an interesting conflict in the life of a designer, which is:
We’re not actually accountable for much.

The reality is that we play a supporting role in most of the outcomes of our projects, and someone else ultimately takes accountability for those outcomes, not us. You bring in designers because you need to improve usability or make something more desirable, but that’s not where the project ends. It still has to be executed, priced right, marketed well, and sold. Any number of things can go wrong over the course of the project, and the person who will lose their job if it all goes wrong is the person taking accountability for your work.

Does that mean that we (designers) are powerless? No, of course not. We just don’t have authority. We can’t stand in front of a Product Manager (or whoever’s job is on the line if the project fails) and say, “You have to do it my way because I say so.”

Perversely, most of the time designers aren’t held accountable for the quality of their work at all, but they are frequently held accountable for being difficult to work with. But, I digress.

What you have to do instead is use our fundamental super-power as a designer and make them want to do it your way. That is, after all, what design is all about. We are hired to create preference. The core of our profession is about attraction and satisfaction. If we can’t attract our stakeholders to our solution, what hope do we have to attract customers?

The only way in which we’re really held accountable for our work is over the course of our careers, and the quality of our portfolio. Our ability to get the next job, where the people hiring you won’t understand all the caveats and compromises that are built into every project, is where letting people get their way too often comes back to haunt you.