Show Your Design Impact: How to Translate Work Into Strategic Case Studies
Kai Wong
Medium.com's Top Design Writer.
You Speak UX. Executives Speak Business. That's Why Your Work Gets Dismissed.
You're a skilled designer, but your work keeps getting ignored, changed, or overruled.
Not because it's bad. Because they don't understand you.
You present user research findings. They hear opinions.
You explain design decisions. They see preferences.
You share insights from testing. They wonder why they should listen to 3 users.
The problem isn't your design. It's your communication.
As one Design Director told me: "Great designers bring data that sells their ideas."
That's what Show your Design Impact teaches: translating design work into business impact that gets you hired, trusted, and promoted.
In this 4-week program, you'll learn to:
Connect design decisions to business outcomes executives track
Create data visualizations that make problems impossible to ignore
Craft case studies that show strategic thinking, not just process
Present with frameworks that get teams to take action
The result? You stop being the designer who "makes things pretty" and become the strategic partner who shapes what gets built.
You don't need an MBA or new projects. Just better frameworks for communicating the value you already create.
What you’ll learn
Stop Getting Overruled: Communication frameworks that position your recommendations as strategic decisions, not design preferences
Learn the 9 Product Goals framework to identify which metrics your design work actually impacts.
Master the "Ladder Technique" to identify which Product Goal your Design Projects are about
Practice extracting metrics from from a real-life case study from Meta
Learn the Goals → Signals → Metrics framework to connect business objectives to user behavior
Practice translating vague requests ("improve the experience") into specific, measurable outcomes
Use the Core Challenge framework to make complex user problems instantly understandable
Use the Talk It Out framework to identify which Data Visualization best expresses your point
Understand how to find data that helps you craft an effective data visualization
Learn the ICE Prioritization framework to evaluate which design solutions move the needle on key metrics
Learn to create hypotheses, which tie design decisions to business outcomes
Understand how to effectively use data to turn ideas into evidence-based recommendations
Use AI to practice presentations and understand things from a PM/Executive view
Create a 5-minute story, a universal UX Story that can be used everywhere
Learn how to use Problem-Agitate-Solution, the persuasive framework that's sold billions of iPhones
Learn directly from Kai
Kai Wong
Medium's Top Design Writer| 13 Years Designing in Low Maturity Organizations
Who this course is for
Designers who want to use data to bypass office politics and prove their value immediately
Designers tired of watching 'strategic' roles like PMs get promoted while their insights are ignored
Designers in low-UX maturity environments where relationship-building isn't enough
What's included
Live sessions
Learn directly from Kai Wong in a real-time, interactive format.
Lifetime access
Go back to course content and recordings whenever you need to.
Community of peers
Stay accountable and share insights with like-minded professionals.
Certificate of completion
Share your new skills with your employer or on LinkedIn.
Maven Guarantee
This course is backed by the Maven Guarantee. Students are eligible for a full refund up until the halfway point of the course.
Course syllabus
30 lessons • 5 projects
Week 1
Workshop 1 Lessons: Align with Product Goals
Workshop 2 Lessons: Track Design impact on Business outcomes
Schedule
Live sessions
2 hrs / week
Projects
1 hr / week
The exercises help create a final project, which is an effective Data Story draft presentation
Async content
1 hr / week
Follow along with not only pre-recorded videos, but concept cards and templates as well
Testimonials
"Kai brought structure and clarity to our transformation stories — distilling complex, multi-layered design challenges into simple, human narratives that reveal how design drives real organisational change."
Jean-Baptiste Kaloya
VP, Product Design at BPIFrance
Frequently asked questions
$599
USD
3 cohorts