Early in my leadership career, I treated internal product requests like tickets. Someone from marketing would ask for a landing page. Sales wanted a dashboard tweak. Support needed an admin tool. I’d scope it, slot it, and ship it. Efficient. Predictable. And almost entirely wrong.
What I didn’t understand then is that every internal request is a relationship in disguise. The request is never just the request. It’s a signal about how that team thinks about design, what they think is possible, and how much they trust you. The way you respond — not just what you build, but how you engage — is how the rest of the organization learns what design is for.
When you treat requests transactionally, you train the org to treat design transactionally. You become a service desk. People learn to bring you solutions instead of problems, because that’s the only language that gets a response. They stop bringing you the messy stuff — the strategic questions, the ambiguous problems, the ‘we don’t know what we need’ moments — because they’ve learned that’s not what you do.
The way you respond to internal requests is how the rest of the org learns what design is for.
The shift happened for me when I started treating every internal request as a conversation starter. Not ‘what do you want?’ but ‘what are you trying to accomplish?’ Not ‘here’s the timeline’ but ‘let me understand the problem first.’
This sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly hard in practice. Internal stakeholders often come with urgency and specificity. They’ve already decided what they need. Slowing down to ask questions can feel like resistance. The key is to make the conversation feel like investment, not obstruction.
The best internal design relationships I’ve built share a pattern: the first project is small and responsive. You demonstrate competence and reliability. The second project is where you start asking better questions. By the third, they’re bringing you problems instead of solutions. That progression doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because you treated the relationship as something worth building.
AI has made this dynamic more visible, not less. When anyone can generate a mockup or prototype in minutes, the value of design shifts from production to judgment. Internal teams can now show up with AI-generated concepts and ask ‘is this right?’ That question is a gift. It means they’re seeking your perspective, not your pixels.
But it only works if you’ve built the relationship where your perspective is valued. If the org sees design as a production function, AI just replaces you. If the org sees design as a thinking function, AI amplifies you. The difference is entirely in how you’ve positioned yourself through hundreds of small interactions.
The responsiveness piece matters too. In my experience, the single biggest predictor of design’s influence in an organization isn’t the quality of the work. It’s the speed of the response. Not the speed of delivery — the speed of acknowledgment. When someone sends a request and hears nothing for three days, they’ve already started solving the problem without you. When they hear back in three hours — even if it’s just ‘I see this, let’s talk Thursday’ — they feel seen. That feeling compounds.
I think about this in terms of organizational infrastructure. Design teams spend a lot of time thinking about user-facing infrastructure: design systems, component libraries, research repositories. But the internal-facing infrastructure — how you receive requests, how you communicate status, how you make your thinking visible — is equally important. It’s the foundation that trust is built on.
The organizations where design has the most influence are rarely the ones with the most designers. They’re the ones where design has built the strongest internal relationships. Where product managers bring problems early because they know design will make them sharper. Where engineering trusts design’s technical judgment. Where executives include design in strategy conversations because they’ve seen it change outcomes.
None of that happens because of a great portfolio review. It happens because someone in design treated an internal request as a relationship worth investing in. And then did it again. And again.
Ian Alexander
VP of Design — writing on leadership, AI product strategy, and building teams that ship.