From Design Thinking to Product Decisions: How Designers Influence the Way Teams Work

Designers are uniquely positioned to influence how organizations think, collaborate, and solve problems. But cultural change rarely starts with a framework or a slide deck – it starts with behaviour. In this talk, I explore how designers can use their design thinking mindset to influence company culture by first embodying it themselves: listening with empathy, experimenting openly, and iterating in how they work with others. Through practical examples – such as running collaborative design sprints, teaching non-designers the fundamentals of discovery, getting leadership buy-in, and opening up the creative process to the wider company – I show how design practices can become shared practices. The central idea is simple: if creatives model design thinking publicly, they help reshape how the entire company thinks and acts.