Łukasz Kowalski
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Sep 23, 2025
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9 minutes
The Shift That's Already Here
For years, design has been defined by craft: UX, UI, research, usability, accessibility and many others. All of this is essential, but the industry is changing.
Many designers dream of creating impact. But real impact rarely comes from a single screen or a minor feature. Impact happens at scale. It means working on products that touch hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of people. And that usually means large organizations, governments, or even entire nations — with all the complexity that comes with them.
AI is entering fast. It will produce flawless screens, assist with research, and even generate concepts. Designers who rely only on craft will soon compete with machines. And machines will be faster, cheaper, and good enough for most contexts.
So, where does that leave the future of our profession?
At Flying Bisons, the answer is strategic design.
Beyond craft: The Invisible 90%
In our manifesto, Strategic Design - Manifest, we described the brutal truth: in large-scale projects — enterprise platforms and government services — design craft accounts for only 10% of success.
The other 90% – the Invisible 90% – is where projects survive or fail. And this is the arena where impact at scale is created:
Navigating organizational politics,
Controlling meetings and environments,
Securing dozens of small decisions in sequence,
Building momentum toward large approvals,
Protecting the fragile bubble of design vision across a minefield of constraints.
This is where designers stop being pixel-pushers and start being change makers. This is what we call strategic design: It’s about making design deliver real impact at enterprise and government scale.
Why Enterprise and Government Complexity Is Different
In startups, a design vision can move quickly and freely. In enterprise and government, you need to create a protective bubble around that vision and push it through the organization.
That bubble is constantly under attack. Access issues, endless approvals, subjective opinions across departments, lack of domain knowledge, shifting strategies, delayed meetings, conflicting stakeholders—each hit slows the bubble down or pushes it off course.
The resistance is not accidental — it’s structural. And if the bubble isn’t defended and reinforced at every step, even the strongest vision will eventually burst before it reaches reality.
This is also why AI won’t replace human strategic design here anytime soon. The battlefield is too political, fragmented, and dependent on human alignment. This is where Strategic Designers prove their value: by protecting the bubble long enough for it to land safely and deliver impact at scale.
Our Proof of Scale, Proof of Impact
At Flying Bisons, we don’t just talk about complexity — we live in it every day. Our work touches millions of people across sectors where the stakes couldn’t be higher:
Qiwa (Saudi Arabia) – national workforce platform for 15M+ citizens and 1M+ companies, covering contracts, visas, work permits, and certificates. A benchmark for digital transformation in the Kingdom.
Madares (Saudi Arabia) – platform connecting 7,000+ schools and 1.2M+ students, enabling parents to manage enrollment, onboarding, and payments.
Ajeer (Saudi Arabia) – 3M+ workers and 150K+ employers connected through a workforce mobility ecosystem, part of Vision 2030.
Alinma Corporate Banking – full redesign of one of the Kingdom’s largest banks, transforming corporate internet banking for 15K+ clients.
Bank Pekao (Poland) – strategic redesign of mobile banking for 5.2M+ clients, the country’s second-largest bank.
KFC (Europe) – omnichannel ecosystem (kiosks, app, web) across half the continent. Few design teams worldwide have delivered omnichannel at this scale.
Ooredoo – telecom apps and design systems serving 140M+ customers across the Middle East.
NaTemat (Poland) – revitalizing the country’s largest digital media outlet, driving 10M+ active users and +30% sessions.
Eobuwie (Poland) – mobile commerce platform for one of Central Europe’s retail leaders.
Hebe (Poland) – e-commerce transformation for one of the country’s fastest-growing beauty chains.
Enel-Med (Poland) – patient-facing mobile app redesign for one of the largest healthcare providers.
But here’s the truth: many teams, working in isolation, could design a beautiful app, an elegant flow, or a polished interface for these platforms. The difference is not in the craft. The difference is in the environment.
At this scale, you’re not just designing screens — you’re navigating ministries, banks, telecoms, and enterprises where politics, strategy shifts, and legacy systems collide. That’s why even organizations with strong internal design teams still call Flying Bisons. They need a SWAT team that knows how to protect the vision, manage the invisible 90%, and push it through to reality.
The Role of Strategic Designer
A Strategic Designer is not just a better UI/UX designer. It is a new role, born from necessity.
Strategic Designers at Flying Bisons:
Protect and push the bubble – always asking: what will keep this vision moving forward through the system? It’s not enough for a design to shine in Figma — it must be defended, reinforced, and advanced step by step. Strategic Designers know the bubble gets stronger with each win and weaker with every careless move.
Build the game plan – using the Project Pyramid (Foundation ➝ Success Enablers ➝ Productivity Enhancers ➝ Execution) to structure complexity into manageable layers. They don’t just follow the process — they create the order that keeps a fragile vision alive when the environment pushes back.
Manage stakeholders & Navigate politics – knowing when to negotiate, when to compromise, when to fight, and when to stay silent. Influence in large organizations comes from timing and judgement as much as from design skill. Strategic Designers protect the vision by mastering both.
Control environments – never exposing fragile ideas to uncontrolled feedback, always shaping the room and the narrative. They know that design can be destroyed in minutes if the wrong conversation happens in the wrong setting.
Bridge business, tech, and design – acting more like consultants than just designers. They connect the dots, speaking the language of executives, developers, and end-users, ensuring the vision is understood across silos.
Deliver impact, not just screens – because success is measured by what goes live and changes user experience at scale. Strategic Designers define their value not by concepts, but by outcomes — the tangible effect of design in the real world.
Why We Bet on Strategic Design
At Flying Bisons, we have always evolved our way of working. A decade ago, we built our identity around process and later about consulting. In 2022, as we entered projects at national scale, we created the Project Pyramid to protect design in hostile enterprise environments.
Today, we are making our next bet: strategic design.
Because while AI will reshape our industry, it cannot replace the human ability to navigate politics, align stakeholders, and deliver change across complex organizations. That’s where real impact is made.
And impact always means complexity. Every transformation that matters — whether it’s redesigning a national platform, rebuilding a bank’s digital core, or even changing a law in a country — goes through the same resistance. Layers of approvals, conflicting interests, shifting priorities. To drive change at this level, you need more than design skills. You need resilience. You need the ability to stay calm under pressure, adapt when the ground shifts, and keep pushing when everyone else wants to give up.
We believe the next generation of top designers will not be only UX or UI specialists. They will be Strategic Designers: professionals with strong craft foundations, but also with communication skills, analytical thinking, negotiation power, business awareness, and the mental toughness to deliver transformation in enterprise and government.
A Call to Designers and Leaders
If you want to design for real impact, you must go where impact happens: large-scale transformations. If you want to survive AI, you must evolve beyond craft.
Become a Strategic Designer.
That’s the path we are building at Flying Bisons — and the path we believe will define the future of design.
Strategic design is the future of our industry. And we’re building it now.
Ready to Architect the Future of Strategic Design with Us?
As a Strategic Designer at Flying Bisons, you'll master what others miss–the invisible 90% that turns bold digital visions into reality.
