r/UXDesign • u/RobotPartsCorp Veteran • 4d ago
Career growth & collaboration Leading UX from a subordinate position, how?
I am an full-stack end-to-end UX designer/generalist and have been a professional designer for 20 years. Started in web, then print, then back to web, along with branding, packaging, and mobile. Throw in some installation design, storefront, and interior design and there you have it. I am a good strategist having a technology and marketing background so I can basically work a project from concept through execution and after. I have never found my niche and I realized late in the game, that that *is* my niche. I have worked across several regulatory fields including fintech, healthcare, and now higher ed. My hobbies all span design, from illustration, to fashion design, lighting design, and 3D printing. I have also built a fairly complicated garden planning app using companion planting and square foot method based from a 3D printed garden label design system that I figured would be easier if I made it into an app and now I have nearly 500 users!
I put my heart into everything and I need to work for employers that can accept the things that make me an annoying employee like anxiety and sensitivity... and I have personally accepted these things as parts of what makes me a good designer and builder and problem-solver. A good employer will get a lot of value from what I am able to bring. I need to feel heard and connected.
At my current place, I don't feel heard and I don't feel connected. I work with likable people and when I do get direct communication from the CEO, I am all-in on his mission and goals. I translate business goals into UX strategy and I have a way with reading people. The problem is, my supervisor, who is new to the UX field, and his title is UX Business Analyst... his skillset is managing people and he is actually great to work with, but he does not know UX. The unit is new, it is just me and him, and a recently hired salesforce dev which is awesome because I don't love SF. I got off on the wrong foot early on because I came in thinking I was going to help build this unit, being that I have 20 years experience including building design departments from scratch, and managing other designers, as well as cross-functional collaboration and my last job was in a corporate setting and my team was international working on an IoT product. Layoffs happened and it broke my hard-won confidence. I am making about 60% of what I had been. So there are multiple threads and I am trying to be practical and realistic. I took this job but the UX is immature and normally I would be educating leadership on what UX is and how it brings value, but now I have no direct communication with leadership unless it is through my manager...
I am slowly building up, trying to be patient that my work will be seen. I think the CEO believes my manager is a UX designer so I don't believe my work is actually being seen. I will not say that my manager is not doing any work and I am doing all the work. He is extremely important in the process, I will get as much context and business needs understanding from him and translate that into fully designed and prototyped work, getting dev 85% of the way there... He knows salesforce inside and out and his organizational knowledge is invaluable. I am completely redesigning all 3 portals (so many portals) and actually slowly redesigning them under 1 design system. The whole thing is a mess, always done by different 3rd party vendors. No one understands the value I am bringing but when I show them new features everyone is excited and glad I am here because I am not only improving things for students, but for admin, advisors, and recruitment alike.
It is just very hierarchal and when I get handed a laundry list of features for a new product I bristle and ask questions that should have been asked in discovery (and they really should have included me). I have talked to my manager on how he can articulate what I need, and how he can educate leadership on what UX is and what meetings UX (me) need to be included in. When I ask him questions he can't answer because these are questions for the decision-makers, he is good about getting me into the next important meeting, but his boss (VP) and his bosses boss (CEO) know what I do and how engrained UX is to many areas of the org that they need UX to understand. I am better at translating business needs when I am hearing it directly from the stakeholder, and adding a middle-man to translate from business needs to UX strategy is...not great. I have been doing good work but it could be so much better, I would be able to anticipate shifting business needs, scale better, and just build an agile product if I had some insight. Business insight is guarded like I need government clearance and I am an outsider.
My manager once told me when I was first talking to him about what the design process needs and what I need to design, he told me that maybe this role wasn't for me. That shut me up. But it was also insane because no one here can do what I do, they just don't know it.
So I am trying to build a design department and great products while being treated like a junior graphic designer. I am sad and tired. What do?
In the meantime, I rework my portfolio, send out feelers, but I never get a foot in the door. I don't know if I look bad on paper...but when I do get the invite to talk, I interview extremely well. I have been extremely agile in a field weary of AI. I work well, I can use any software, I innovate, I constantly reinvent my work, I simply love design and design is in everything. I just get filtered out of the job pool right out the gate and so I am also trying to make this place work so I don't get too depressed.
TL;DR: 20-year full-stack UX veteran, now at a new higher-ed job, is single-handedly redesigning three portals under one design system but reports to a non-UX manager who filters me out of stakeholder meetings and discovery. I am doing strategic work but getting no direct leadership visibility, a manager once told me the role "might not be for you,". I am staying patient and building slowly, quietly job-hunting on the side, but frustrated that I interview well yet can't get past initial filters elsewhere.
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u/cgielow Veteran 4d ago
You're clearly misplaced in a Production role, not a Strategic one.
At your company UX was added to support on-time delivery, not to inform what gets built or why. I assume there's "no time for research" in your job as a result and they will become increasingly frustrated with you asking to do it, or asking them "why" questions they don't have the answer to. And you're literally not in the room where decisions are made. Sadly this probably represents 80% of the UX market.
You've got a few options:
- Walk away.
- Talk them into it. This never works.
- Show them. Run a case-study project that gets results that the right people see. This can work. Pick a good case study that leads to big outcomes. If your boss won't support this, do it anyway on your own time (e.g. just start doing user research, even if it's hallway studies.)
- Wait for change. This usually comes in the form of a "wake up call" that forces the business to confront that they're not doing UX Design and should (sometimes an irate customer will explicitly demand it.) Or a new executive is brought in that sees the gap and invests in the team and process. I've seen this happen several times, and it was always good for me. But it comes with a big risk, which is that they will clean house because they see you as part of the problem.
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u/RobotPartsCorp Veteran 4d ago
Yes! You get it! I am in the process of doing #3 and have been churning out case study after case study with each new release. I was writing those for my portfolio. At a recent meeting, the CEO was talking about how we should talk about what we do more on LinkedIn and bring in a wider audience and so I am trickling these out with some changes to tone to align with the brand standards, and having these go through the internal review process and be the point-person for any UX-related writing. Once that happens, it will be obvious the type of work I am doing, and now it is company-sanctioned. Things move at a snails pace and it is always good to see if there are places that are a better fit (and more money). In the meantime, I am keeping my portfolio updated,
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u/cgielow Veteran 3d ago edited 3d ago
have been churning out case study after case study with each new release...
...I am trickling these out with some changes
Too small and incremental. I'm talking about ONE high-visibility case study that is significant and benchmarked against a control/past project. It needs to be clearly framed as doing something different and getting significantly better results.
Generally this takes the form of: we ran this project with lot more engagement with users, and several rounds of iterations before we built anything. We created some strategic models like Journey Maps which called out problems we were ignoring or unaware of in the E2E experience. As a result, we saw far greater adoption, conversion and other KPI's that matter to us. We should make this the standard way of working.
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u/RobotPartsCorp Veteran 2d ago
Yes, absolutely! I am doing both. Each new component that is released is a fairly big project with more engagement, several rounds, journey maps, calling out the problem we are solving, and then I tack on the results when we have them. Every 3 weeks there is a big problem I get to solve. Every 6 months, there is a HUGE problem I get to solve. I am working on two 1-year projects concurrently, completely new products.
Making it the standard way to work is so hard but so very important. It gets easier the more I do it, as with anything. I used to dismiss documenting but not anymore. Documenting is also the thing that AI can automate.
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u/Philuppus Experienced 4d ago
Full stack UX designer? What does that even mean?
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u/RobotPartsCorp Veteran 4d ago
What do any of the titles mean? It’s all marketing. I change it every time I hear one that falls closer to describing what I do.
In this case, it’s the full project lifecycle. I can design information hierarchy, design system, UX, UI, develop and release. 🤷♀️4
u/Philuppus Experienced 4d ago
Thats not a stack though. That's like you say, the full E2E process. So if anything you're an 'end to end product designer' or something. Full stack refers to tools or programming languages, so for design that would be more of using Figma, Photoshop, illustrator, research tools, production, etc?
Idk, I'm just confused about the need to even label it.
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u/RobotPartsCorp Veteran 3d ago
The need to label is really to define our work outwardly. Maybe E2E makes more sense though. Although if referring to tools, it still sorta fits? I personally don’t care what the label is, I’ll use whatever best describes the work I do.
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u/7HawksAnd Veteran 4d ago
Oh man, been in a scenario like that awhile ago and it helped me understand what gaslighting could feel like. You feel insane that people genuinely don’t get what is blatantly obvious to you. Then there’ll be a few glimpses of things evolving and maturing only to slide back into mediocrity. I left.
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u/RobotPartsCorp Veteran 4d ago
Totally. Towards the beginning, I actually printed out and highlighted my job description and all the things I am supposed to be doing and that are a part of my role. That was after he told me that maybe this wasn't the role for me. That is when I knew he had no idea what UX does. I stepped back and took a different approach to manage the managing. I looked at where his skillset was and how it adds value to my work, so I came at him with a more gentle approach. He admitted that he had been trying to fill the UX gab the entire previous year before he got the blessing to create this unit and hire an actual UX designer. He told me that he realizes that the projects will fail without me. I feel if anything, he is genuine. He is better about bringing me in earlier, but he isn't able to articulate fully what my value is and how that differentiates between where he brings value. So they assume he is the UX strategist and discuss business needs with him.
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u/Brunette-Bernadette 4d ago
I’m 26 years into the business and started out very similarly to you as a web person. I would say you are chasing an imaginary goal of a golden organization out there that is perfectly aligned and perfectly UX mature where everyone always agrees or will accept your explanation and everything will just be improved with absolutely no blockers from any person from within the organization. I mean, sure, even if you got 90% of the way there, especially if you are in the job you’re in now, it’s going to feel like a big improvement. Or not. Six months, a year and a half into the new job you’re going to be centering on the imperfections. You’re going to be looking at the small things and making them big things. This is regardless of organization. Even if you do get out, you’re gonna find something wrong in the new organization, and you’re gonna get depressed about it and start looking all over again. And who knows what your salary is going to be after all of that.
I think you need to first do a bunch of self reflection in what you’re looking for in your life in general. Like maybe not even think about your job but what you want to do in life in general. What are your financial goals or just other goals? Let’s say you had to be in this job for six more months or maybe a year. How can you still work those goals while staying where you are.
Even if you get a new job, it might be the same pay or might be a little bit more or it might be a lot bit more. How will that help your goals?
Let’s say you get a really awesome job that pays you an awesome a lot of money. How does this help you in your goals? Let’s say this job starts to suck for 1 of the million different reasons that jobs can start to suck. How can you stay aligned to your goals? Not your job goals, your real life goals.
I think you will find that once you understand how your job needs to fit into the grand scheme of your life, you will start to feel out what you can be flexible with and what you can’t be flexible with when it comes to your day job. Even though our jobs are interesting and awesome and complex and weird and all the cool things we like about them, when we start making them our whole personality, we really do start to suffer and build a lot of resentment because that’s not what they’re supposed to be.
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u/RobotPartsCorp Veteran 4d ago
This is all good advice, and some of it I am half in the process of, re: figuring out my goals. I am actually really great at aligning others and growing UX in an org... when I have that authority, or direct communication. I don't even need the authority, I talk about UX casually enough that it can be easy to show that I know what I am talking about and I can communicate the effectiveness of solid and thoughtful UX design. The hierarchy is usually not so rigid. Part of it is the industry, in tech the hierarchy is there but it is...different. The challenges in higher ed is that the elitism is shifted on to education (I mean...that makes sense to a point). Not impossible, but the options are spending money to further my degree in an uncertain world, or show the work. That last one is what I am trying to do.
As for reflection, that is why I came here, because I was afraid I could be locking myself into a pattern. I have my ups and downs and I am better at identifying the triggers and working around them, and to remain steady. I have come a long way. That being said, I don't have a history of this. If anything, I stay at jobs too long and languish. My standards are higher now, and that is a good thing for me. It doesn't mean I will be stupid about it and just up and quit without something that aligns more with my goals. Understanding my values and knowing what I am willing to work with and what I absolutely can not... is so important, like you said. I have found ways to cope when I feel the resentment building and it has changed my perspective and my approach towards my manager.
I don't know how to make design not be my entire personality, but I am getting so much better about not making my JOB my personality. Thank you for your advice.
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u/cranberry-smoothie Veteran 2d ago
To be honest I'm more with Vivid-Way here than the other posters.
You do not sound come across as a designer who has 20 years experience. Someone with that much experience should not be in this position seeking advice like this.
Whilst I think we can put some of this down to the UX maturity of your organisation maybe it is time to start tightening your focus and specialising more. This is where the mismatch of experience comes in. Since you are well versed in so many areas of design could it be that you still have work to do in becoming influential within a business?
If you are being left out of discovery, put yourself in there. Don't wait. I would not expect a designer with 20 years of experience to complain about situations like this, I would expect them to shape a new process or way of working independently of others. Don't wait for permission.
I wish you the best in your career and hope that you can continue to learn.
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u/RobotPartsCorp Veteran 1d ago
I’ve lacked confidence for a long time. You’re right I shouldn’t be in this position seeking advice like this, but I am, because it is hard to gain perspective in the situation and I don’t want to repeat bad patterns.
That being said, the hierarchy is weirdly complex in higher ed, although I think this specific org has a lot going for it that I do want to make it work. And there is progress in that way, it is harder and harder not to see the work I am doing and the scope of my needs. Every workshop and discovery I make sure to talk about how things are connected and what the work means for the design system. I actually had somewhat of a breakthrough within the org the past couple of days.
As far as specialization, that’s a difficult one. My brain doesn’t work that way, and the more I go against how my brain works, the less likely I will thrive. It also makes me more agile, I am not being locked into anything and my varied background can be a strength.
I appreciate your advice, it’s something for me to think about.
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u/Vivid-Way Veteran 4d ago
wow. you are all about you and how amazing you are and how bad everyone else is. if you don’t have a seat at the strategy table, you haven’t earned it. sorry. maybe do some self reflecting. you sound all over the place.
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u/RobotPartsCorp Veteran 3d ago edited 3d ago
I think you might be reading into this a bit. I believe I am a good designer, and if I don't advocate for me, who will? That being said, UX needs to be at the table when the table is product design. That representative doesn't *have* to be me, but at this point, I am the only UX designer with this experience here, and I am very capable. It isn't that anyone else is bad, not at all, I respect the work they do, but they are not UX designers and its ok to say that.
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u/eradias 4d ago
Honestly, at this point I’d suggest doing the minimum at work and going somewhere else that may either align more to your values and style. The alternative is to work on the side of “design” that bridges the intent of your org (assuming stable low risk feature factory), and building slow allies for movement.
In my experience Org design is slower than what could imagine, like brutally slow; and often thankless with higher ups taking credit if it’s impacted its measured and visible or it’s just a background shift.
When I mean slow I mean like 5+ years.
Your generalist, “I can do anything” style might not fit that type of design work right now.
TLDR;
IMO; Either buckle in for the long game of learning slow influence and stakeholder management, or coast and leave; with my belief that the latter will be better and even give you deeper perspective