Strategy
Design for the CMO’s boss
The stairs you'll never see.
The person who hires you is almost never the person who decides whether you were worth it. The marketing lead signs the contract, but six weeks later she's sitting across from a CFO or a CEO who asks what they got for it. You're not in the room. Your Figma file is not in the room. The only thing in the room is whatever she can hold up and explain in two sentences without you there.
She reads everything you send her twice: once to judge the work, once as the person who has to forward it upstairs and look smart doing it. Build for the second read and you keep the client. Build only for the first and you lose her the day she can't defend you.
What you build into a deliverable so it survives being explained by someone who didn't make it, to someone who never saw the process. It is not dumbing down. It is making the reasoning portable.
You redesign a page and present it as a redesign. Your buyer nods. But when her CEO asks why the homepage changed, it looks more modern now gets a budget cut. She needed the before-and-after with the reason attached: the old nav buried the three pages that drive ninety percent of demo requests; the new one puts them up front. Same design, completely different fate, because one version travels and the other dies in the meeting.
This looks great often means I like this and I have no idea how to defend it to my boss.
Give her proof she can paste.
Every real decision gets a one-line why written for someone who wasn't there. Not design rationale in our language, business rationale in hers. Name things the way her boss thinks. A number, a date, a source.
Core Web Vitals are useful here precisely because they're Google's own yardstick. A CFO doesn't argue with the referee. Proof she can hold up beats taste she has to defend.
The decision has to survive being explained by someone who did not make it, to someone who never saw the process. If it can't travel up a flight of stairs without you, it dies in the meeting. That isn't dumbing it down. It is the harder work of making the reasoning portable, business rationale in her language, named the way her boss thinks, with proof attached. That is more work than a pretty rationale in ours, not less.
The marketing lead spent her own credibility to bring us in. The least we can do is hand her work she can defend without having to become us first.
Build it to be carried up a flight of stairs you'll never see.
This looks great often means I like this and I have no idea how to defend it to my boss. The work was not the problem. The legibility of the work was. Fix that, and you don't just keep the client. You make her look like the smartest hire she made all year.
Proof she can hold up beats taste she has to defend. If you want to know whether your own site would survive that kind of scrutiny before you spend a dollar on a redesign, that's exactly what a readiness conversation with us is for.
The marketing lead spent her own credibility to bring us in. The least we can do is hand her work she can defend without having to become us first, work that reflects what we actually believe about who a deliverable is really for.