Effective ways for engaging executives or stakeholders?

#1

From Anita in our Slack channel:

Hi everyone, what is the most effective method you’ve tried for engaging executives to view a presentation? It’s difficult to get them all together due to busy schedules, so I’m considering delivering the presentation individually. Have you found from experience that one method works better than the other? Any insights would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

#2

Try to involve some of them in the work you do. I find that, if they have some ownership of the project, they are more engaged in inviting and evangelising to other fellow stakeholders. Let them also do a part of the presentation (the intro for example), it’s all a matter of perception. it’s not the holy grail, but these things can help. And, planning ahead does so as well :).

#3

definitely this one:

I always try to engage stakeholders giving them a slot during the presentation, for two main reasons:

  1. If they accept they will ask you to provide the core of the presentation and the goal you want to achieve. This will make you ready to express your ideas to executive people in few words
  2. If they will present your talk, somehow you will receive a kind of pre-validation about your ideas. The other stakeholders will be more curious
#4

Thanks @glenn and @dopamino for your responses. I should clarify that this specific presentation is a short video put together to promote a program of projects, so I’m not really able to get them to be a part of the presentation. I just need to be able to gather them as a group/individually to actually watch it! And am seeing if others have experience with which is more effective/practical: individual or as a group.

#5

hi @tran_anita

In my opinion, it does not matter the media (video, presentation, talk, fireworks).

As a designer, you should develop skills that allow you to explain that your duty is not pushing pixel around but pushing the business.

I’m sure you know your stakeholders and you know what they care of.

Speak the same language as they speak, for instance, “3 quick wins to increase the new subscriptions on our platform” is more friendly to them than “How to reduce the friction during the subscription process”

Good luck and let us know about the audience feedback :wink:

#6

We have landed on using a modified UX Design Sprint format where the Design Sprint is scheduled over the course of 4 weeks, one, one hour meeting a week. Using this method, we are better able to get leaders/stakeholders to make themselves available and it gives us the time to design during the week, conduct user testing, have sidebar meetings along the way if a leader/stakeholder hasn’t been available.

We have engaged stakeholders presenting strategy/business problem at the beginning of the sprint and other participants in the sprint are typically made up of UX, Stakeholder, Systems Analyst and CMS, Sometimes we add a Business Analyst. At the end of 4 weeks, we hold a “UX Tollgate” meeting where we invite a larger group and review the designs from start to finish.

Any leaders who haven’t been able to participate in weekly design sprints will usually make time to participate in the UX Tollgate meeting as there is a shared understanding that designs will be officially documented to be handed off to the Agile Teams next. It works well for us.