Turning UX Passion into Real Product Influence
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
-
•
UX influence is a marathon, not a sprint; breaking long-term visions into quarterly milestones preserves sanity and builds stakeholder alignment.
-
•
Moving from abstract thoughts to concrete artifacts accelerates stakeholder understanding and shifts conversations from debate to production.
-
•
Adopting the language and mental models of stakeholders improves communication and acceptance of UX initiatives.
-
•
Treating stakeholders like research participants by listening without judgment enhances collaboration and empathy in UX influence.
-
•
Design and research must be operationalized within organizations through incremental, visible wins rather than grand sweeping changes.
-
•
Risk mitigation, not zero-sum battles, reframes UX influence to preserve peace and encourage joint ownership of decisions.
-
•
Embedding engineers and product partners early as technical governance prevents handoff friction and fosters equity collaboration.
-
•
Storytelling matters most when delivered in multiple formats tailored to audience mental models, not just one narrative style.
-
•
Personal motivation in UX stems from a clear mission beyond business metrics, such as advancing equity and improving real lives.
-
•
Successful UX leaders move away from the lone hero archetype to a Justice League model, leveraging collective superpowers for impact.
Notable Quotes
"If you don't think 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."
"Don't get exhausted with communicating what we do, rather just show what we do."
"Breaking up a holistic vision into quarterly milestones and celebrating those wins keeps stakeholders engaged and preserves your sanity."
"Moving from thoughts to things is one of the key tools in UX influence."
"Our goal is not to be right, but to make others less wrong and give confidence in design direction."
"Think of UX influence as risk mitigation, not a zero-sum game."
"Treat your stakeholders like research participants — listen openly and without judgment."
"Your superpower may be great, but it's better together. Think Justice League, not Wolverine."
"I stay motivated because my assignment is to get human-centered design products shipped into people’s hands to improve their lives."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Combining synchronous and asynchronous communication within one session gets us from awareness to action."
Jerome “Axle” BrownHow to Use Self-Directed Learning to Ensure Your Research Insights are Heard and Acted Upon
March 11, 2021
"We could create a sustainable culture of design and use it as our leading edge weapon of transformation."
Phil GilbertA Consistent Culture of Design
May 14, 2015
"High-quality participants are the fuel that makes the whole research operation engine run smoothly."
Kate Towsey Basel Fakhoury Oren Friedman Graham GardnerParticipant Recruitment and Management Tools
March 12, 2026
"There’s been a fundamental shift in consumer products in the last five years driven by machine learning."
Sohit KarolDesigning Delightful Listening Experiences: Mixed Methods Research in the Age of Machine Learning
March 31, 2020
"Developers were hungry for the bigger picture, but the only information available to them was a set of user stories."
Christopher Taylor Edwards Valerie RoskeDesign as a Team Practice, A Practical Guide to Cross-functional Collaboration
September 30, 2021
"There is no silver bullet in system-level challenges; multiple interventions across different domains are needed."
Sheryl CababaExpanding Your Design Lens with Systems Thinking
February 23, 2023
"Researchers feel like second-class citizens when they’re not invited into early conversations."
Francesca Barrientos, PhDYou Need Your Own Definition of Design Maturity
June 8, 2022
"Mentoring new hires actually reignites the mentor’s own passion for their work."
Allison SandersOperating with Purpose
January 8, 2024
"Words are how we express our values, our philosophies, why we do what we do as designers and researchers."
Saara Kamppari-Miller"Prototype" vs "Prototype"--Breaking Down and Rebuilding Our Understanding of What We Do
October 24, 2019