3 / S C
In many product organizations, design operates in service of pre-defined decisions:
Strategy → Product plan → Design execution → Engineering build → Test → Release → Feedback → Repeat
Design, despite being a big contributor, features too late to shape strategic direction. Decision-making flows top-down, and design is reactive by design.
To change this, design needs to be a strategic partner, not just a service function.
This happens in two ways:
1. Give design a true seat at the table
Design must receive the same strategic inputs as product, engineering, or sales at the same time. This requires senior design roles with authority and proximity to leadership, without being tucked under product or engineering.
This requires a structural shift, but is a straightforward move.
2. Build bottom-up influence
More challenging, and more impactful, is creating a culture where designers are continuously generating insights, propose improvements, and influence strategy. A fearless culture that believes in experimentation and failing forward and upward.
This does not require a structural change in the org, but a mindset shift and the right framework to support it.
A framework for bottom-up design influence
At 3 Sided Coin, we work closely with decision-makers in both new and established product organizations. Our goal is to bring design’s influence earlier in the process. One of the most impactful tool we found was to make space and time for strategic experimentation. We make a habit of stepping into other roles — product manager, engineer, researcher, even CXO — to understand decisions from their perspective.
Inspired by Google’s “20% time,” we set aside half a day every Friday for our team to work on self-initiated projects.
This has given us substantial results:
- Dessert Roz began as a Friday experiment and grew into a full-fledged internal product, teaching the team skills in 3D graphics, storytelling, idea validation, and more.
- A D2C Review Platform started as a one-person prototype and evolved into a complete end-to-end design project, blending data validation, no-code tools, and lean team execution.
These experiments were safe spaces to simulate and practice strategic decision-making, cross-functional collaboration, and rapid validation. In other words, they trained the team to think and lead beyond the boundaries of “design.”
Dessert Roz with acclaim from Awwwards
How you can build this in your org
You don’t need a sweeping restructure. You need a small commitment to carve out space for experimentation. Start with:
- Protect focused time. Identify a continuous block, ideally four hours or more per week, where the design team can step away from delivery and work on self-initiated projects. Time is the most critical investment you can make in building a culture of experimentation.
- Let designers propose small, focused improvements. Invite design team members to define and propose small, focused improvements to the existing product. These could be internal facing objectives such as improved Design System documentation, Process changes; or external facing such as User Interviews, UI fixes and consistency, et al.
- Treat these as real projects. Turn proposals into scoped, time-bound projects. Encourage phased execution and regular demos. As the process matures, go one step further and form implementation-focused cross-functional teams.
- Normalize design chores in your sprints. After major releases, build a window for sanity checks, system hygiene, research consolidation, and reflection.
This isn’t an all-or-nothing play. Start small, scale gradually, and shape it to your org’s rhythm.
While it is important for these initiatives to drive tactical value—but don’t lose sight of the larger goal: building a culture where failure is safe, and strategy isn’t locked at the top.
Strategy and experimentation are too important to be left to top management alone.
Cover image created with ChatGPT (OpenAI) + DALL·E Prompt: “An ultra-realistic, cinematic 9:16 digital image of 3 children — 2 girls and a boy — playing soccer together in a lush backyard with sunlit grass, wildflowers, and a clear spring sky. One boy kicks the ball while the other two defend, with laundry drying on a clothesline in the background. The scene is viewed from a slightly elevated angle, zoomed out to show more of the yard. The mood is nostalgic yet energetic, with saturated blues and golden sunlight creating a calm, springtime atmosphere.”
