Summary
You’ve seen it happen repeatedly throughout your career. As a UX researcher you’ve taken the time to develop key insights, as a UX designer you’ve conceptualized and tested several hypotheses. As a design strategist you’ve created a vision for a new or existing product and yet; product roadmaps remain eerily empty of your team’s UX contriubutions. How do you take what you know and have learned at this summit and put it into practice at your companies? How do you get your stakeholders on board to not only listen but implement your recommendations? What strategies do you need to make engineering friends and influence product managers? This talk will showcase various tactics you can use to help turn the passionate UX work you do into real product roadmap influence.
Key Insights
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UX influence is a marathon, not a sprint — long-term vision must be broken into manageable milestones.
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Setting overly ambitious goals at once can lead to burnout and underachievement, as Aveta experienced at Capital One.
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Timeboxing goals into quarterly and weekly chunks helps maintain progress and stakeholder engagement.
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Moving from abstract thoughts to tangible artifacts like prototypes or visualizations speeds stakeholder alignment and reduces debate.
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Adopting the language and mental models of different stakeholders is critical to effective communication and influence.
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Treating stakeholders like research participants—listening without judgment—fosters better collaboration and understanding.
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Using multiple storytelling modes and repeating the vision in various forms ensures a wider audience catches the message.
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Early involvement of engineers as technical governance collaborators transforms UX from a handoff to an equity partnership.
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UX influence can be reframed as risk mitigation, reducing the burden of persuasion on UXers and sharing it with stakeholders.
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Having a clear personal design ethics or mission statement helps sustain motivation, focusing on social justice and human equity.
Notable Quotes
"If you don't think that you can go to battle day in and day out, UX might not be for you because that's what it is."
"My job is to convince people to create something that doesn't exist or hasn't been discovered yet."
"Break up your long-term vision into quarterly goals you can celebrate to preserve sanity and bring your stakeholders along."
"Move from thoughts to things — the faster you get something tangible, the faster people stop debating opinions."
"Treat your stakeholders like research participants — no judgment, open listening, mouth usually closed."
"The goal isn't to get people to understand design or research; the goal is to get human-centered design into products that ship."
"Our goal is to make stakeholders less wrong, not to be right all the time."
"Think of UX as risk mitigation, not a zero-sum game, and share the risk with your stakeholders."
"You don't have to be a lone hero with superpowers; it's better to be part of the Justice League with your stakeholders' superpowers."
"I stay motivated because my assignment is to have human-centered products in users’ hands changing their lives every day."
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