How to pitch your design work the right way

Isn’t it annoying when you spend hours working on a design idea, only for stakeholders to reject your design work without hearing you out?

We’ve all been there.

But it’s not because others don’t care about users or disrespect designers. It’s just that business and product stakeholders often speak a different language and use different criteria to judge and prioritize initiatives.

That’s why having a great idea isn’t enough — you need to pitch it well. No matter how brilliant your design is, if you can’t convey your message clearly, it might never get off the ground.

Great ideas are often rejected due to a poor pitch, and weak ideas get greenlighted thanks to a great pitch. So, don’t underestimate the importance of pitching. If you nail your pitching skills, your life will become significantly easier, and your career trajectory will improve significantly.

Everything about doing a design pitch right comes down to following a few basic pitching principles — the agenda for this blog. I’ve also put together a short checklist for your next design work pitch.

Tips to pitch your next design work

Tie your pitch to business objectives

Most stakeholders are focused on business objectives, not just the user experience. As much as we’d love them to care deeply about users, their priority is usually the bottom line.

So, whatever idea you pitch, make sure there’s a corresponding business objective your company is chasing, and learn how to explain how greenlighting your idea will move the needle toward that objective. Hinge your pitch on “a way to achieve a business objective X” rather than just a design proposal in isolation.

If you can’t find any relevant business objective that would tie well with your design philosophy, it’s probably not worth pitching in the first place.

Replace UX jargon with business jargon

Don’t talk about cognitive biases or heuristics in your pitches. These concepts may fascinate you and your UX peers, but they’ll likely bore the business stakeholders.

At the end of the day, business folks don’t care about following a particular heuristic or leveraging a specific bias. They care a lot more about things like cost savings, revenue uplift,

lifetime value (LTV) maximization, and traffic growth.

So, when framing your design pitch, focus your design work on the words you use about things that the business cares about. Even if all you want to do is fix a well-known dark pattern, try to tie it to a metric that matters to the business.

Don’t share all your research

This is likely going to be the most counterintuitive and hardest-to-follow-through tip on this list.

I see many designers overwhelming stakeholders with research, evidence, and insights. At first glance, it makes sense. The more you can back up your claims, the better, right?

The problem is that an abundance of insights can easily become counterproductive. What stakeholders really care about is:

• What’s the problem you are solving?
• Why is it important to solve it?
• How are you planning to solve it?
• What’s the benefit of solving it?

You should be able to answer each of those questions concisely — say, within a minute or two of your pitch. If you get stuck on the problem phase because you spend ten minutes reviewing all your evidence, people will zone out or, worse, start thinking there’s no clear plan for or benefit of solving the problem.

And, of course, that doesn’t mean you don’t need your research.

Gather all insights you have and prepare yourself for questions. But give out the absolute necessary at the start — just enough proof to make your point. If the stakeholders need more evidence or clarification, they’ll ask. If they won’t ask, it means that the evidence wasn’t very useful to your design pitch in the first place.

Give enough context to build credibility that you did your homework for your design, but share the homework only when explicitly asked.

Get buy-in before the pitch

It’s a common misconception that a pitch meeting is to get buy-in for the design work you are pitching. On paper, it even sounds like common sense.

But in the corporate world, it’s rarely that straightforward. To get your idea approved, you should get the buy-in before the pitch.

Identify key stakeholders and contact them individually, sharing your idea, explaining how it benefits them, and clarifying any doubts. You might even want to adjust the proposal based on the feedback you collect.

Then, do the actual pitch to just formalize and solidify the buy-in.

This process requires more effort, but it has a significantly higher success rate. I say this because:

• People hate to be surprised with new ideas, and by getting buy-in earlier, you prep them
• You get a chance to answer questions and clarify doubts in a safer, more private setting
• If you get counter-arguments you weren’t prepared for, you’ll have a chance to prepare for them before the pitch meeting
• You might get relevant feedback that’ll help you adjust the idea to maximize chances of buy-in
• You get an opportunity to practice the pitch
• There’s a higher chance people will back you up merely because you respected them enough to talk with them first

Get a sponsor

Speaking of buy-ins, I highly recommend getting at least one executive team member to be your champion.

Don’t only get their buy-in, but also make them excited — excited enough so that they won’t merely approve your pitch but actually pitch with you.

It’ll strengthen your design pitch, and if someone challenges it, there’s a higher chance you’ll have good counterarguments. Most importantly, you’ll have a strong representative if the discussion about your pitch reappears in a smaller, closer setup.

Never pitch alone.

Focus on the user journey

Designers tend to focus too much on the design itself. The most common design pitch is: “Here’s the current version of the screen. Here’s how I would like to change it.”

Non-designers aren’t that interested in UI tweaks.

So, instead, focus on the user journey. Explain how the user interacts with your product, what they feel along the way, and how you would like to improve that. More people will resonate with the story if you focus on a user’s journey rather than just on screens and designs themselves.

Outline clear next steps

You’d think this one is obvious, but I hear so many pitches that, although sounding high-level, lack specific next steps.

Say you are pitching a solution to a problem. Apart from the solution itself, what’s the very specific next step you want to get approval for?

Is it conducting research to confirm assumptions? Are you asking for the idea to be put in a prioritization queue? Do you need an extra budget? Do you need an engineer to take a look and provide an estimate?

It’s significantly easier to secure a buy-in if you have planned specific next steps rather than expecting the stakeholders to figure them out for you.

Putting it all together: A design pitch checklist

Pitching is a difficult process — there’s more to it than just speaking your idea out loud. The bigger the pitch, the more time you go into preparing for it.

My default design pitch checklist consists of the following boxes:

1. Did I identify a specific business objective this pitch supports?
2. Is my high-level pitch formulated in business-oriented language?
3. Do I have enough evidence to back the pitch up?
   1. Did I limit myself to the minimum viable evidence to start my pitch?
4. Have I secured enough buy-in ahead of time?
5. Do I have a sponsor for my pitch?
6. Does my pitch tie to an exciting user journey?
7. Do I have clear next steps outlined?

If you can check all these boxes, you’re ready to pitch your design work. Remember, it’s better to put extra effort into a few well-prepared pitches than to rush dozens of half-baked ideas.