The Influential designer: How to Use Data to Get Buy-In and Advance Your Career

4.6 (7)

·

4 Weeks

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Cohort-based Course

Get Executives to See the Value of Design, Buy-in to Your Ideas, and Advance your Design Career

Clients include

Designlab Learning
Northrop Grumman
Social Security
Intuit
National Cancer Institute

Course overview

Feeling undervalued? Ideas getting ignored? Design presentations falling flat?

Many talented Designers struggle for one reason:


Your designs don’t speak for themselves.


Your designs might be good (or even great), but if you can't convince your stakeholders, it doesn't matter.

Great UX will be overlooked, deprioritized, or even dismissed in favor of what's easier in the moment.


Sound familiar? The reason is simple: You aren't tying your design to business outcomes. If executives (and other decision-makers) don't see the business value of your work, they won't invest in it.


If you struggle to communicate the business impact of your designs:


 • Your best ideas will get deprioritized or shelved, limiting the impact you have to make a difference

 • You’ll have to constantly justify your role and fight for recognition, while others (who 'speak business') will get promotions and raises

 • Your career will hit a wall, because businesses only invest in designers that demonstrate measurable outcomes

 • Your job security becomes uncertain, because your contributions aren't directly tied to business results.


But what if you could speak to the value of design? Imagine instead walking into meetings knowing how to persuade your team to take action.

Picture decision-makers nodding as you present data on how design decisions impact business outcomes.


The secret? You need Data to back up your Intuition.


As one design leader said, "The Difference Between Good and Great Designers is that Great Ones can Use Data to Sell your Ideas."


In 2025, top companies aren't hiring Good Designers. They're hiring Great Ones, that know how to communicate how design impacts business outcomes.


Design Professionals who can do that jump to the top of the priority list.


When you become a designer that communicates how design affects business outcomes, you'll:


 • Consistently secure stakeholder buy-in, making your design initiatives a top priority.

 • Have Influence with executives and cross-functional partners who value clear ROI and measurable outcomes.

 • Accelerate your career growth by showcasing to businesses why your designs are valuable

 • Become indispensable to your organization as a leader who can speak clearly to both user and business needs

 • Transform from overlooked designer to strategic partner who shapes critical business decisions.


This cohort-based course will provide you with the frameworks, skills, and tools to persuasively connect Design work with desired business outcomes.


Here's exactly what you'll master:


Week 1: Design what businesses need

Spend an hour to save a month's work. Understand what the business needs from designers, and learn how to identify how design decisions affect business outcomes.


Week 2: Don't present information: present insights

You might have remarkable user findings, but it doesn't matter if no one acts on them. Turn your findings into actionable insights using frameworks employed by Netflix and Meta to harness to drive action.


Week 3: Integrate AI into your Design processes

AI is a powerful tool, especially when you know how to work with Data. You'll learn how to super-charge your Design process with AI without losing your team's trust.


Week 4: Tell a UX story that persuades your team to act

Working with Data allows you to use the powerful tools of Data visualization and Storytelling to make a real difference. No creative writing experience is needed.


Investing in these skills means:


 • Ensuring your UX work is consistently valued, prioritized, and understood in your organization

 • Becoming an influential designer, that decision-makers seek out to help drive critical business decisions

 • Accelerating your career growth in a tough job market by speaking to what businesses really need.


Why This Course Matters

In today's competitive landscape, the most successful Designers aren’t necessarily those with the best visual or technical skills. They’re the ones who clearly speak the language of business outcomes.


If you're ready to design projects faster, show how design affects business outcomes, and persuade your team to take action, you should take this course.



--

Training Your Team?

Email kai@datainformeddesign.online for bulk pricing and personalized course options.

Who is this course for

01

Senior-level UX designers who frequently need to justify their decisions to PMs, engineers, and executives.

02

Design Leaders/Managers who must consistently persuade executives and other stakeholders to buy-in to their ideas.

03

Designers seeking career growth who know their professional advancement relies on demonstrating clear business impact.

04

Designers building persuasive portfolios to clearly demonstrate measurable business impact to potential employers.

What you'll walk away with

Stop being the "make it pretty person". Start having an impact with design.

Have clear frameworks to immediately show your design impact in meetings, presentations, performance reviews, and interviews.

Consistently get buy-in to create better products

Translate what you find, from talking with users, into the exact language and techniques to secure stakeholder buy-in and approval quickly and consistently.

Learn leadership skills businesses want from designers

Become an irreplaceable UX leader to your team means gaining influence, trust, and visibility in your organization.

Have a portfolio of work that showcases design value effectively

You'll learn a proven approach to demonstrating design value in your portfolio, LinkedIn profile, and future job interviews.


Super-charge your UX process with AI, without losing creative control

The best way to use AI, as a designer, isn't to learn a new tool. It's to improve your existing design process.

Up to 90 minutes of 1:1 Data-Informed Design coaching

You won't just learn theoretical concepts. You'll learn how to apply it to your work with 1:1 coaching with a Data-Informed Design expert.

This course includes

12 interactive live sessions

Lifetime access to course materials

78 in-depth lessons

Direct access to instructor

7 projects to apply learnings

Guided feedback & reflection

Private community of peers

Course certificate upon completion

Maven Satisfaction Guarantee

This course is backed by Maven’s guarantee. You can receive a full refund within 14 days after the course ends, provided you meet the completion criteria in our refund policy.

Course syllabus

Week 1

Jun 2—Jun 8

    Jun

    2

    Workshop 1: How aligning design with business makes better products faster

    Mon 6/24:00 PM—5:00 PM (UTC)

    📚 Workshop 1 Lessons: Design what businesses need

    8 items

    Jun

    5

    Workshop 2: How to track Design Impact on Business Outcomes

    Thu 6/54:00 PM—5:00 PM (UTC)

    📚 Workshop 2 Lessons: Track Design impact on Business outcomes

    8 items

    🔍Extended Learning and Templates

    4 items

    Jun

    6

    Office Hours

    Fri 6/64:00 PM—4:30 PM (UTC)
    Optional

Week 2

Jun 9—Jun 15

    Jun

    9

    Workshop 3: Understanding what data your team needs to know

    Mon 6/94:00 PM—5:00 PM (UTC)

    📚 Workshop 3 Lessons: What does the business need to prioritize?

    9 items

    Jun

    12

    Workshop 4: Analyzing user insights and finding evidence for your recommendations

    Thu 6/124:00 PM—5:00 PM (UTC)

    📚 Workshop 4 Lessons: Turning Knowledge into design recommendations

    8 items

    Jun

    13

    Office Hours

    Fri 6/134:00 PM—4:30 PM (UTC)
    Optional

    🔍Extended Learning and Templates

    3 items

Week 3

Jun 16—Jun 22

    Jun

    16

    Workshop 5: Building a second brain with AI

    Mon 6/164:00 PM—5:00 PM (UTC)

    📚 Workshop 5 Lessons: Improve your design process with an AI second brain

    9 items

    Jun

    19

    Workshop 6: Building second brains to empathize with your team

    Thu 6/194:00 PM—5:00 PM (UTC)

    📚 Workshop 6 Lessons: Empathize with decision makers through AI second brains

    9 items

    Jun

    20

    Office Hours

    Fri 6/204:00 PM—4:30 PM (UTC)
    Optional

    🔍Extended Learning and Templates

    0 items

Week 4

Jun 23—Jun 29

    Jun

    23

    Workshop 7: Craft your Perfect Data Visualization Hook

    Mon 6/234:00 PM—5:00 PM (UTC)

    📚 Workshop 7 Lessons: Turn your Insights into Data Visualizations

    9 items

    Jun

    26

    Workshop 8: Building a UX Story through frameworks

    Thu 6/264:00 PM—5:00 PM (UTC)

    📚 Workshop 8 Lessons: UX Storytelling: How to persuade your team to take action

    13 items

    Jun

    27

    Office Hours 4

    Fri 6/274:00 PM—4:30 PM (UTC)
    Optional

    🔍Extended Learning and Templates

    5 items

4.6 (7 ratings)

What students are saying

Meet your instructor

Christopher Kai Wong

Christopher Kai Wong

Senior Product Designer at Nanthealth. Top Design Writer on Medium (52k following). Data-Informed Design Expert. Designed for 1m+ users.

Kai has over a decade of UX experience in data-centric fields like Healthcare, Federal, and B2B/SaaS UX. His designs have impacted millions of vulnerable populations, including patients, senior citizens, and medical professionals.


He has often worked as UX team of one, communicating the value of UX to teams and organizations that may not fully understand. As a result, he has learned better, more effective communication by understand effective data-focused viewpoints.

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Join an upcoming cohort

The Influential designer: How to Use Data to Get Buy-In and Advance Your Career

June Cohort

$599

Dates

June 2—29, 2025

Payment Deadline

June 1, 2025
Get reimbursed

Course schedule

3-5 hours per week

  • Mondays and Thursday

    12:00-1:00 PM EST

    I will have live lectures with Q&A, reviewing this week's lessons. These will also be where I review student's exercise and provide live feedback

  • Pre-recorded lectures

    1-2 hours per week

    In these lectures, I'll dive into the specifics around Data, Narrative, Visuals, and more. This will be a more detailed videos on the stuff I cover live on Mondays and Fridays

  • Weekly projects and exercises

    2 hours per week

    These exercises, paired with the lecture, will help you practice the concepts you learn from lectures

Free resource

Learn how to turn down requests from executives without running into trouble.

Many designers don't know how to say no, which leads to trouble. When an executive comes by with a half-baked idea, it isn't easy to know what to say.


This is a script that I've used to politely refuse requests with data without running into issues getting fired.


Want to know how you can use it in with your work? Enroll today.

Get this free resource

Learning is better with cohorts

Learning is better with cohorts

Active hands-on learning

This course builds on live workshops and hands-on projects

Interactive and project-based

You’ll be interacting with other learners through breakout rooms and project teams

Learn with a cohort of peers

Join a community of like-minded people who want to learn and grow alongside you

Frequently Asked Questions

A pattern of wavy dots

Join an upcoming cohort

The Influential designer: How to Use Data to Get Buy-In and Advance Your Career

June Cohort

$599

Dates

June 2—29, 2025

Payment Deadline

June 1, 2025
Get reimbursed

$599

4.6 (7)

·

4 Weeks