Speaking CEO: Business Fluency For Designers

Speaker: Jess McMullin

The UXLX audience knows the power and the barriers of language—speaking the same language as someone else provides a deep and meaningful connection. It lets you build empathy, share insights, and collaborate productively.

Designers need to understand the language of business for the same reasons—we need to learn to speak CEO to be our most effective. Successful designs live in the real world of business, organizational politics, and executives who approve your budget. Business fluency helps you navigate that world to build business empathy and be a more effective advocate for better experiences.

This talk will share simple but powerful business fluency frameworks to understand business priorities, manage zoom levels between execution and executives, and to translate from business direction to a clear design hypothesis. Designers don’t just need more methods to create solutions or work with users. We need better methods to work with business, and that starts with the power of language. It starts with speaking CEO.

This talk will share

How designers are particularly suited for business conversations (if we can avoid some common traps).
The formula for empathic advocacy
3 simple frameworks for thinking, speaking, and prioritizing like an executive.
Key patterns for connecting design and business value.

By growing our business fluency, we will expand our influence with executives, shape direction and strategy for our product and our organizations, and help design to have a greater impact in the world.