Defending your Designs

Lightning Lessons

Practical skills & tools to accelerate your career

Defending your Designs

Hosted by Ryan Scott

851 students

What you'll learn

Identify the business reasons for pushback

We'll break down how concerns about Value, Cost, & Risk drive business decisions and are often the source of opposition

Learn how to pick your battles

Learn the difference between constraints and pushback so you can prioritize your focus and preserve your credibility

Practice counter-arguments that neutralize pushback

Mitigate common arguments to win "swing voters" over to your side and keep your solutions moving forward

Why this topic matters

Your design work will receive pushback from a variety of non-design stakeholders. Effectively navigating this pushback often determines the quality of your work, which impacts your career. Today, I’m sharing MBA-level tactics & frameworks I developed from my experience at Airbnb & DoorDash for respectfully countering opposing arguments to keep design projects large and small moving forward.

You'll learn from

Ryan Scott

Design leader · Airbnb, DoorDash, Salesforce · Berkeley MBA

Ryan Scott is a multidisciplinary designer who has led cross-functional teams to launch some of today’s most recognizable products.

As an early employee at DoorDash, he spearheaded launches of live order tracking, mobile group orders, remote driver training, and the food photography program. Ryan's work dramatically impacted Airbnb, where he influenced most parts of the product through major redesigns of checkout flow, messaging platform, search platform, and mobile website.

After earning his MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Ryan now coaches and teaches critical business skills to emerging-design leaders.

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851 students

Share this lesson

851 students

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