The Cheat Codes Used by High Impact Designers
#014: How designers are uniquely advantaged to help teams understand, align, and move forward with clarity, intent, and care.
Welcome to another Tuesday issue of Systems & Signals. This week I’m writing to you from a co-working space in Cincinnati, Ohio as I kick off another whirlwind month of travel.
While I wrote today’s issue a couple days before the New York Times published Mike Isaac’s article Silicon Valley Is in Its ‘Hard Tech’ Era on AI’s rise and the fall of consumer apps and websites, I don’t think I could’ve written something more prescient than this piece on design’s very human cheat codes.
I firmly believe that the highest impact designers and design leaders’ work happens internally using their unique skillsets. This issue focuses on a handful of examples that can’t be so easily replaced by machines.
Design is often celebrated for what it produces: a polished interface, a seamless flow, or an elegant end-to-end solution to a challenging problem. But some of its greatest impact lies in what it enables before anything ships: greater understanding and alignment between the people behind the product.
Used well, design becomes the connective tissue between vision and execution. It helps teams navigate ambiguity, uncover insights that shape direction, and build shared understanding across disciplines. What’s easy to forget is that designers often carry a set of quiet advantages over others in partner disciplines — almost like organizational cheat codes.
These aren’t necessarily shortcuts, but they can be accelerators that impact ways of seeing, showing, and shaping that other roles don’t always have access to. And when those skills are brought to bear early, they can change not only what gets built, but how teams come together to build it.
The Design Work That Doesn’t Always Look Like “Design Work”
Some of the most valuable design work I’ve been part of didn’t make it into the final release. It made its impact earlier by surfacing what really mattered, revealing what was missing, and helping a team move forward with more clarity and less noise. In many cases, the design work that enabled these outcomes inevitably gets “thrown out” in service of a more intentional, polished, and aligned direction — and that’s more than okay.
Six Quiet Advantages Designers Bring to the Table
1 - Making Vision Tangible
North Star (or what I sometimes call “Lighthouse”) concepts are future-state prototypes or video demonstrations that point toward a compelling vision, unconstrained by today’s technology or roadmap. They aren’t designed to ship next quarter, or even ship at all. They’re designed to shape direction by trying new methods, stress testing them, and seeing what makes sense to move forward.
North Star concepts give teams something tangible to respond to. They pull strategy out of abstraction and make it feel real. They align people not just around a what, but a why to aspire toward.
Related Resources:
Create Shared Focus with Vision Prototypes by Nicolas Backal
Design’s North Star by Julie Zhuo
2 - Storytelling That Resonates
Designers are trained to guide attention and shape perception. That makes us especially good at internal storytelling — not just presenting data, but helping people care about it.
When strategy is delivered visually, rhythmically, and with just enough narrative tension, it tends to stick. And when people can see the story and not just read it, they’re more likely to understand and rally around it.
I often joke that PowerPoint is my main design tool, but it’s not so much a joke as an actuality. The work I do often comes in the form of visual storytelling to build understanding, support, and alignment so my teams are able to move the user experience toward a vision that resonates just as much with our internal stakeholders as it does with our target users.
Related Resources:
Airbnb’s “Snow White” Storyboards
Duarte: Story Structures in Presentations
3 - Artifacts That Align
Diagrams, journey maps, blueprints, systems models — designers create visual representations of complex ideas as part of the process. In order to arrive at these, deep understanding of process through active curiosity and observation is required, not something easily replicated by an AI actor.
These artifacts excel at showing relationships and opportunities that wouldn’t be obvious otherwise. They reveal friction points that teams can address, including opportunities that exist outside the underlying technology.
This is service design, and represents a foundational design advantage: making the invisible visible within complex systems, and then making it shared.
Related Resource:
📚 This is Service Design Doing
4 - Behavioral Framing and Experimentation
Design is behavioral at its core. Every interaction nudges a choice, suggests a action, or sets an expectation.
This makes designers well-positioned to craft thoughtful experiments — not just to see what “works,” but to understand why something does or doesn’t resonate. We know how to shape intention into action, and how to use artifacts to explore that space without overbuilding.
Related Resources:
Spotify on Hypothesis-Driven Design
Intercom’s “Building a feature no one asked for”
5 - “Canaries in a Coal Mine”: Designers as the Early Warning System for Ethical Risk
Because designers often sit closest to the user interaction layer, they are often the first to sense when something feels off. When a personalization tactic crosses the line into manipulation, or a growth experiment nudges too hard, designers feel the discomfort early and are often the ones to raise the red flag; not to slow things down, but to guide toward a more sustainable direction.
That sensitivity is a strength. It helps teams build with integrity before integrity becomes a retroactive concern.
Related Resources:
The Center for Humane Technology
What It All Adds Up To
Designers are often seen as the ones who refine and finish, the polishers of product or “pixel pushers”.
But in reality, we also:
Make sense of ambiguity
Create alignment through visuals
Generate insight through artifacts
Shape behavior through structure
Spot ethical risk before it calcifies
These aren’t bonus skills: they’re core to how products (and teams) move forward. Call them cheat codes or leverage. Either way, they’re worth remembering because when designers bring these skills forward earlier, the entire team benefits.
Love this Justin. I've often felt like designers have been under utilised within organisations. However there is a sense that perhaps it's partly our fault? The way we've positioned and sold ourselves? Maybe we haven't been very good at articulating it up until now, or even had to?