As digital teams grow and projects become more complex, designers are being valued by collaboration and team enablement rather than only individual tasks.
Real collaboration requires a set of rules, not a set of roles.
Pushing for more user research could be framed as growing curiosity across the team to learn more about the users and the product space.
Polishing an interaction or animation could be done in collaboration with developers and be framed as a desire to deliver high-quality experiences.
Feedback could go beyond “leaving comments on the doc”, and happen in both structured and unstructured ways.