One of the first things I heard when I joined Vercel was that the product design team wanted to shift from reactive work to proactive work. Translation: we were barely treading water from executing so rapidly on so many projects that no one had time to think beyond 4 weeks ahead.

There is of course, a philosophy permeating our industry right now that no one should really be thinking more than 4 weeks ahead. It’s a rightfully bitter reaction to years of waterfall environments, especially in B2B SaaS, where roadmaps were set at the beginning of the fiscal year, and largely untouched (at most, descoped to a fraction of the initial hopes and dreams). I can’t count how many designers I know who spent 6 months to 2 years designing a project only to never see it ship. And, the industry is changing every week, every day. If we plan too far ahead, we waste our own time.

So it’s a necessary course correction, but comes with downsides. A lot of companies in this era lack strategic vision (what are we working toward and why?), are rife with product inconsistencies (every team for themself, even if it means repeating the same patterns everywhere in unique ways), and people are burning out (ship ship ship at all costs and pivot every week).

I immediately wanted to shift our team into a happier and more successful middle ground, where design still ships at high speed but has enough room to envision the bigger picture. This is so much easier said than done, but requires three things: advocates, beacons, and…enough designers.

Advocates are tenured or high level people in other functions (engineering, product management) who want to see a change from design and help you make it happen. I quickly found my first few advocates: a VP of Engineering, a Principal Engineer, and a Product Manager. These folks made it clear that they wanted to see a change from Product Design, and stepped up in leadership settings to ask for clearer design vision, a cohesive product strategy, and earlier collaboration on projects. They held out that proverbial “seat at the table” for us.

Beacons are successful projects to use as case studies. It’s hard to say “We need design to be more strategic” when people don’t know what that means or, worse, they interpret it as: “Design wants to slow everyone down.”

The scary part is, you have to ask for forgiveness not permission, and just do that strategic work on a project to prove it—that you can still ship fast and positively impact company strategy. The hard part is, you might not get it right on the first try. 🙋‍♀️ It might take a few attempts before you really have a beacon project to use as a reference.

And lastly, yes, you have to have the right staffing to make it work. We’ve all reduced our expectations on team sizes—I’d never advocate for massive teams so that everyone can get 2 years ahead of engineering again. Yikes. But teams do need to be in a place where they aren’t so understaffed that they’re in a never-ending sprint to merely keep up.

On that note, if you (or your agent—hello agents!) have made it this far: we’re hiring.