Hello, picnickers!

I’ve written before about the heady era of Design Thinking and the hangover that followed, with designers of the late ‘10s and early ‘20s lamenting that all that business of having to influence stakeholders was getting in the way of designing. Not just because it took time out of our busy schedules, but also because those stakeholders Didn’t Get It.

The path of least resistance was towards normalizing hand-offs rather than collaboration, and our tools and processes evolved in that direction. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

The Timeline

AI tools are now scaling up this maladaptive pattern — the more siloed functions become from one another, the easier it is to imagine that the outputs we see are the sum total of the work, and an LLM can replace the person behind those outputs. This is not exclusive to design; everyone is trying to do more of everything by themselves. Even developers are under exactly the same scrutiny from clueless managers who see devs as mere obstructions to faithfully implementing their brilliant vision. Other LLM tools are quick to reinforce that notion, analyzing emails for “quality” as a proxy of employee performance, so that managers don’t actually need to manage.

Unlike managers, designers can’t unilaterally impose our will on the organization; our mandate is often solely visual and we need collaboration and alignment in order to realize our vision. UX only creates value when we immerse ourselves and everyone around us in research insights.

Chasing self-sufficiency drives designers to believe that the work is just the screens, and we can increase our value to the organization by using AI tools to make more screens faster. As my colleague Megan Brown points out, that just isn’t the case — a feedback loop between only the designer and an AI model produces designs that resemble working interfaces, but fall apart under minimal scrutiny.

Again — this is not unique to design. We (as well as other delivery functions) often find ourselves on the receiving end of poorly defined “requirements” that stakeholders think can replace conversations rather than document them. This relationship is further complicated in our case, because UX doesn’t plug neatly into Scrum.

Developers understand that this does not work. Before Agile and associated concepts can function, there needs to be philosophical alignment between everyone involved (and the framework does not create that alignment on its own). If your professional identity locks you out of having these conversations because “I do design, not strategy” then you are going to be stuck forever waiting for someone else to save you.

Reading Material

What has the persistent avoidance of talking to people in favor of “focusing on the work” actually achieved? Well for one, it’s eroded our task discretion, AKA our ability to choose what to work on. 40 years of SES data has shown a steep collapse in the influence people have over their day-to-day work. If we shut out everything except our tasks and never bother to involve ourselves in higher-level conversations, this trend will only accelerate.

The workplace is a social system. Regardless of your role, you will never produce meaningful value on your own, compared to what you can achieve within a functioning process. And if the process isn’t functioning, well…you can either complain on the internet, or do something about it.

Consultants will offer to train orgs in all kinds of special sauce frameworks that ultimately do exactly the same thing: get people to talk to each other. Magically, this results in tripling revenue.

This should not be controversial; after all, UXers trumpet the importance of talking to our users. It only makes sense that we ought to include all the other people involved in the system as well. You need both vertical and horizontal buy-in¹ to fix what’s broken in your org and in your product. These people won’t show up at your door; you’ll need to hit the bricks to find them, and Abby Covert has some good advice on how to do that.

Good Questions

There’s one drum I’ll always keep banging when it comes to stakeholder alignment: they are not UX experts, and you are. Many of the requests and requirements they articulate will be well-meaning, but not rooted in an understanding of how UX creates value.

Research is the number one place where this naive optimism can get out of control. Everyone wants to be data-driven, so stakeholders will fill the docket with what is essentially trivia. To stop yourself from doing work with no value, ask:

This will not only prevent you from wasting your time, but it will also shift the conversation from low-value delivery work, into high-value strategy. If you are interested in ever getting promoted, you should look for every opportunity to make this kind of pivot.

—Pavel at the Product Picnic

1  Deep links to comments on LinkedIn posts can sometimes expire. If the link does not work, look for Joanna Weber’s comment on this post.