What's in today's newsletter?
- 3 advocacy mistakes + 3 tactics to earn trust
- The ONLY checklist designers need
- Win $1,000 with a single slide
- Perplexity's lost designs
- Shaders: create, stack, animate
- Designing in chaos
Seattle, 2015.
My first proper design job at a HR software company called TINYpulse (acquired twice, but only after I left 🥲).
I was young(ish), keen, but come to learn one thing:
Everyone else just didn't get UX
So I set out to fix them.
Big mistake.
Since then, I've since watched a dozens of designers make the same.
Let me tell you about 3 that hurt the most:
Mistake 1: I treated stakeholders like students
"Let me walk you through my process"
“Here’s why users behave this way.”
“Research shows that…”
I stood at the front like a teacher. In a room full of adults with more power than me. Nobody takes a lesson from the person implying they've been doing it wrong.
Framing matters here.
In non-design orgs, stakeholders are not asking: “What is good UX?”, they are asking:
“Will this slow us down?”
“Will this make my team look bad?”
“Will this affect my targets?”
If your education about design doesn’t connect to those questions, it will stay theoretical and they'll tune out.
Mistake 2: I explained design instead of showing what it changed
"I did discovery, synthesis, ideation, validation".
Means nothing to a PM staring down a deadline.
They didn’t care HOW I worked.
They cared about WHAT visible impact I made to the product.
Don't be abstract here.
For example, say “this decision avoided 6 weeks of rework”
In non-design orgs, design becomes credible when it is tied to outcomes people already care about:
Speed, Clarity, Risk, Cost, and Confidence.
Not taste.
Not craft.
Not frameworks.
Make things concrete. Show the utility of your designs.
Mistake 3: I forced it
I felt unheard, so I pushed harder. Mandatory deck reviews before my sessions. Brainstorming workshops nobody asked for. Forced education got the “why am I here” reaction.
People complied in the room (mostly) but then ignored me the second they left.
Two years of that.
Polite nods.
Zero change.
Then in 2017, I moved to Wizeline in Guadalajara, Mexico.
First time I ever saw UX baked into the culture.
Looking back, I was too loud (and kinda obnoxious). Instead, designers there were embedded. 3 things stuck, and I've dragged them into every org I've joined since.
Tactic 1: UX in onboarding
A "What is UX" session lived inside onboarding.
Every new dev, PM, QA, went through it on day one. What we do and when to pull us in. We trained 300+ people, in 3 moths, with zero convincing required.
It was part of joining the company.
Tactic 2: A monthly newsletter that did one job
Company-wide. Small wins, projects in flight, decisions that changed direction.
No theory, lectures, or “design is valuable” chants. It was about visibility. People started seeking designers to help them solve problems.
And yes, you can start a org-wide newsletter this week!
Tactic 3: Embedded ourselves in other teams' problems
Instead of preaching UX, we just went and did design for the org.
- Run a service blueprint on how the company sold its own consulting service.
- We helped sales build the pitch.
- We ran a design sprint with HR to rebuild onboarding (60 people were joining every month).
- We facilitated silo'd PMs into actually talking to each other.
- We even trained the company on soft skills like public speaking and meeting etiquettes.
None of it was a UX lecture. All of it was UX, out in the open, solving problems other teams already cared about.
Design started being the team you call when something's a mess. Who you gonna call... Ghostbusters 👻
The problem isn't getting people to understand design. It's to get yourself to stop lecturing and start solving problems that aren't yours.
Design advocacy is an Sport.
You don't win it from the front of the room.
You have to play as part of the team.
Just be useful.
Good luck out there! 🏀
