If you dropped me back into a senior role tomorrow, no title, no team, just trying to prove I was ready to lead, I know exactly what I'd do (again).

I still remember the stretch right before I made the jump from senior to my first lead role. I wasn’t waiting around to be told I was ready or even what to do to "look ready”.

The designers who actually get handed a team are the ones already operating like they have one, well before the org chart catches up.

Proof point: Leadership asked me to become an "official Lead”. I didn’t apply. Crazy right? But it was because I was already doing most of the job…

Now we could debate how ridiculous it is that you have to be doing the job (unpaid), before you’re given the title, until the cows come home but I wont waste your time on a reality that none of us live in.

So this is what I’d do today. Not a checklist to grind through, don't read it as eight more things you're failing to do. It's a menu. You pick the one or two that fit your team and your situation, and you start there.

In this article:

• The 3 moves that got me from senior to lead

• The exact conversations I’d start (with your PM, your team, a junior designer)

• Where AI earns its place in leadership work, and the one use that’ll cost you

• Your one move for this week

1. Tie every design decision to what the business is chasing

This was the big one for me. The move that changed how people saw me.

I got clear on my product team’s KPIs and OKRs, knew them cold. The real numbers we were measured on that quarter. Then I stopped presenting design as design, and started presenting it as a lever on those numbers.

✘ “Here’s the redesign.”

✔ “Here’s the redesign, and here’s the activation number it’s aimed at.”

The conversation I’d start, with my PM asap:

“I want my design work to push on what we’re measured on this quarter. Can we walk through the team’s top KPIs so I’m designing toward them?”

That one question starts to alter how a PM sees you. It tells your PM you're thinking about their goals, not just your deliverables. Which is the exact thing that makes them start seeing you as a partner instead of a pair of hands.

Then I took it one step further, the step that really reads as leadership: influencing the roadmap. Once I knew the goals, I brought ideas for how design could push on them harder. A bit of research. A proposed direction. “Here’s a gap I think we’re missing.”

💡 Pro move: you don’t need authority to influence the roadmap. You need a point of view and the evidence to back it. Bring one small, researched idea to your next planning conversation and watch how it lands.

Where AI earns its place: working out the business goal when nobody hands it to you, and prepping your case before you pitch. (I wrote a whole piece on using AI to find the metric behind a vague brief, same move works for laddering your design up to an OKR.) It gets you to a sharp starting point. It doesn’t replace the conversation with your PM, it gets you ready for it.

The move: learn your team’s real KPIs this quarter. Never present a design again without naming what it’s aimed at.

This is what I teach in my design course.

Tying your design decisions to what the business cares about, and defending them in any room, is the foundation every one of these moves sits on. The course walks you through it, step by step.

👉 Check out Why Before UI →

2. Raise the whole team’s output, not just your own

The jump from senior to lead: you stop being measured soley on your work, and start being measured on everyone’s.

I started acting like that before the title existed, by being the person who raised the floor for the team. By starting small, useful things.

✘ Everyone heads-down in isolation, finding out at the review that three of us solved the same problem three different ways.
✔ A recurring “show me what you’re working on” session, so we saw each other’s projects early and borrowed each other’s thinking.

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I post a lot about tying your design work to business impact. And every time I do, my inbox gets the same reply from at least one designer:

“That’s great, but my company doesn’t share the numbers with me.”

“We don’t even track the metrics.”

So this one’s for you. Everyone wanting to do real work inside a company that stonewalls you from the very thing that would give you a chance to show your work is as valuable as it is.

You know the drill.. you get handed a task, “redesign the landing page,” “make onboarding better”, with no goal attached. You ask what the target is. You get a shrug, a “just make it better,” or the person who knows has gone quiet but your deadline sure hasn’t.

So you’re left with two bad options: design something and hope, or wait for a clarity that’s not coming.

There’s a third move, and it’s the one that separates a designer who adds business value from one who “just does design.” You work out the likely goal yourself, well enough to design toward it and walk back in as a partner in the outcome, not an order-taker waiting on instructions.

In this article:

• Why “just doing the task” is the fastest way to become replaceable

• The exact prompt that turns a vague task into the business metrics it ladders up to (tested, copy-pasteable)

• Two more prompts for other kinds of tasks

• The one guardrail that stops this backfiring in a review

• A challenge for the next vague brief that lands on you

First, and seriously: ask.

Before any of the AI stuff: ask a human. “What’s the primary thing we want this to move?” is a senior question, and if your PM can answer it, you’re done. Design toward that and skip the rest of this post.

Keep in mind… when you get “just design it,” it can be that they’ve never worked with a designer who wanted more. If every designer they’ve partnered with before delivered screens and stopped there, “what’s the target metric” isn’t info they think to bring to you, because in their head that’s not what design does. They don’t know you’re different yet. How you ask is how you show them (ex. “This will help me do my job better/create a better design”)

Everything below is for when you genuinely can’t get the answer. You’ve asked, you got a shrug, and you still want to ship something that does more than look good. That’s when guessing well beats designing blind.

Why “just doing the task” makes you replaceable

A designer who takes “redesign the landing page” and redesigns the landing page has done the task. A designer who works out that the page exists to convert visitors into trials, and redesigns it to do that better, has done the job. The person who handed it over can feel the difference.

And that difference is where your value lives. It moves you from the person they send tickets to into the partner they want in the room early, because you’re chasing the same outcome they’re measured on. That’s the designer who gets pulled into the important work and is kept when budgets tighten.

And it pays off in every job you interview for next. “I redesigned onboarding” is a task. “I redesigned onboarding to lift activation, here’s the reasoning, here’s what moved” is a designer who drives outcomes. One portfolio gets skimmed. The other gets the interview. When your company won’t give you numbers, this is how you build the latter anyway, on defensible reasoning about what the work was there to achieve, instead of leaving the impact section blank.

Silviu put impact front-and-center in his portfolio and not only ended up landing the role but, multiple he had to choose between, and got praise about how impressive his portfolio was even after he was hired as Lead.

The prompt that finds the goal for you

This is the one to save. Feed it the task and what you know about the business, and it hands back the likely metric, the assumptions it’s making, and the questions to go confirm.

Copy this:

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There’s a word all over my feed right now, and it’s being sold to you as the thing that saves your career from AI.

Taste.

The pitch is everywhere: AI can churn out “good enough” in seconds, so the one thing you’ve got that it doesn’t is taste. Your eye. Your instinct for what’s good. Build your taste and you’ll be fine.

But that is absolute BULL, and anyone selling it, a lot of them “design leaders” who should know better, are setting designers up to fail.

Because the obsession with taste isn’t protecting us. It’s dragging us back about a decade, right when we’d finally clawed our way out of the “make it pretty” corner.

I will die on this mountain so let me explain….

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In this article:

• Why “taste” is most harmful advice being handed to designers right now

• Why AI slop is really getting shipped, and why taste does nothing to stop it

• The exact language to argue a design decision with evidence instead of your eye

• A copy-pasteable acceptance-criteria checklist for AI and vibe-coded work

• One challenge for your next design review

Try arguing “taste” in an actual design review.
Do it, I’ll wait.

If a designer walked into one of my design reviews and defended a decision because it was more tasteful, I might laugh them out of the room.

I mean it. “It’s more tasteful” is not an argument. It’s a preference that I could rip apart in seconds.

And that’s when you’re up against designers, who at least share some vocabulary. Now take it into a room of non-designers.

You think you get a lot of opinions in your reviews now? Put taste at the front and watch what happens. Not a f*cking chance you walk away with a win. Every PM, every eng lead, every stakeholder in that room has “taste” too, or thinks they do, and the second you make taste the reason, yours is worth exactly as much as theirs. Just because you’re the designer doesn’t mean you have more authority on taste… anyone with even 6 months of experience in this industry knows that.

That’s the problem with taste as a career strategy. You can’t argue it and you can’t own it.

We spent years dragging design out of the “just make it pretty” box. Taste-as-strategy marches us straight back in, except now we’ve slapped a sophisticated label on it and called it a moat.

The fear about AI is real and valid.

AI slop getting shipped into products is very much the reality we’re all living in. Stuff going out the door because anyone can prompt a screen now and it looks done. It’s a genuine problem and it’s getting worse.

But taste is not the answer to it.

Because “we just need more taste” is unmeasurable, subjective, and impossible to defend. You can’t scale taste across a team. You can’t put taste in a ticket. You can’t look at an engineer vibe-coding a feature and go “make it more tasteful” and expect a single thing to change.

Even the people building the AI think taste is a shaky place to plant your flag. , who lead design for Claude over at Anthropic, said designers may be holding onto taste and judgment as a moat “a little too tightly,” and that AI is going to keep getting better at exactly that.

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What actually keeps you in the room

The designers who come out of this stronger won’t be the ones with the best eye. They’ll be the ones who can do the thing AI can’t: connect a design decision to something the business already cares about, and defend it with more than “trust me, I’ve got taste.”

That’s the skill. Evidence. Reasoning. The thing I bang on about constantly.

Here’s the difference, and it’s not subtle:

✘ “This layout feels cleaner.” → ✔ “This layout reduces complexity to improve bounce rate.”

✘ “This pattern is more elegant.” → ✔ “This matches the mental model people already showed us in testing, we’ll reduce support tickets coming from this flow.”

✘ “It’s more tasteful this way.” → ✔ “This version makes it easier to read the primary action, which is the thing costing us conversions right now.”

The left loses to a stronger opinion. The right column illustrates real reasoning. You’re not defending a preference anymore, you’re defending an outcome to benefit the business. Much harder to overrule that with “well, I don’t love it.”

So when I say taste is setting us back, this is what I mean. Every hour you’re pouring into “developing your taste” is an hour you’re not learning to make a real case. And that case is the whole difference between the designer who gets seen and heard in a room vs one who’s completely bypassed. Guess which one keeps their job through this wave of change?

The exact sentences, steal them for your next review

Keep these somewhere you can grab them fast. The second you feel “I just think this is better” forming in your mouth, reach for one of these instead:

Anchor to a metric: “The reason I went this way is [metric]. Here’s the number it ties to and here’s what I expect it to move.”

Pull rank with evidence: “I hear the preference. What I’m weighing it against is [research or data]. If there’s evidence pointing the other way, we can change it.”

Break a taste-vs-taste stalemate: “We could go around in circles on which one feels better. Can we agree what we’re optimising for, and let that make the call which we think will be most effective?”

That last one is what lifts the whole room off taste, yours and theirs, and drops it onto the only ground where design reliably wins: what are we here to do, and which option gets us there.

This is the entire thing I teach in Why Before UI.

Become the designer who can defend any decision in the room. Find the why underneath a design decision and learn to defend it in a way non-designers listen to. Taste gets you overruled. A real, strong defence gets you recognised.

“This forced me to articulate my thinking and ask ‘why’ for every decision. It’s changing how I approach design entirely.”, Sammie, Sr. Product Designer

👉 Learn more →

Got a team that keeps defaulting to “I just like it better”? It works well as a shared foundation.

The actual fix for slop: guardrails, not vibes

So if taste isn’t the answer to AI slop, what is?

Guardrails. Acceptance criteria. The boring, defensible, scalable stuff nobody’s putting on a carousel because it doesn’t sound sexy.

Ai slop gets ships because vibe-coded and AI-generated work is going out with no quality threshold to clear first. No definition of done. So “looks finished” becomes the bar by default, and “looks finished” is the one thing AI is world-class at.

Taste tries to catch slop by feel, one designer at a time, after the thing’s already built. Acceptance criteria catches it by definition, across the whole team, before it ships. One of those scales to a company. The other one is you, tired, spotting problems in a review after the fact.

So here’s a starter checklist. Nick it, adapt it, make it yours. Before anything AI-generated or vibe-coded ships, it clears these:

• ✔ Named user goal. What’s the user actually trying to do here? If nobody can say it, it doesn’t get a pass.

• ✔ Real content, real states. Does it survive real data, empty states, errors, and the longest realistic string? Or does it only work in the happy-path demo?

• ✔ Accessibility floor. Contrast, focus states, keyboard nav, labels. This is a floor, not a polish pass you get to skip.

• ✔ Decision you can trace. Can someone point to why this pattern? Tied to research or a number, not “the model suggested it and it looked nice.”

• ✔ Failure handled. What happens when it breaks, hangs, or gets junk input? AI doesn’t check by default. A standard does.

• ✔ Fits the system. Does it reuse what you’ve got, or did it invent three new components someone now has to maintain forever?

Not one line of that needs taste. All of it is teachable, ticketable, and defensible to entire teams. A standard you can hand to someone else beats an instinct only living in your head.

That’s the craft moat, if we’re going to insist on having one. Not “my eye is better than the machine’s.” It’s “I know how to build the guardrails that keep what ships at quality, whoever, or whatever, built it.”

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Your challenge this week

In your next design review, catch yourself before you defend anything with a feeling.

Every time you’re about to say “cleaner,” “nicer,” “more elegant,” “more tasteful”, stop. Find the outcome sitting underneath it. What is that cleaner layout actually doing for the user or the business? Say that instead.

Just once. One review. And watch how differently the room treats you when you stop handing them your taste and start handing them a reason.

And if you’re one of the “design leaders” out there telling your people to go build their taste: sit down and think long and hard about what you actually need from them. The fix isn’t hiring a better eye. It’s defining the quality bar everything needs to pass before it ships. That’s your job. Do that instead.

I get why taste is the comfortable answer. It flatters us. It tells us the thing we’ve always been proud of, the eye, is the thing that saves us. Of course that’s the version everyone wants to hear.

But it isn’t, and I’d rather tell you that now than watch you lose your next design review. The designers I’ve watched become genuinely impossible to overrule didn’t get there on taste. They got there because they could tell you exactly why, tied to something the business already cared about, and stand behind it when the room pushed back. That’s harder than having a nice eye. It’s also the only version of this job I don’t think AI is coming for.

Build that one.

I’m happy you’re here.

-Miranda

💬 Chat with Miranda — does your portfolio lean too much on taste andnot enough on strategic judgement? Drop it in and I’ll help you swap the taste argument for the evidence one Try it →

Know a designer who’s been sold the taste gospel? Send them this. Better they hear it from me now than lose the argument later.

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Nobody warns you that the more senior you get, the vaguer the briefs get.

The Leads I coach don’t get handed clean tickets. They get “make an AI vision.” “Redesign the whole sales flow for how it should look three years from now.” “Make onboarding better.” No real target, no definition of done, sometimes three teams who each think they own it.

A lot of designers spin out on that for one reason: they can’t tell ambiguity from chaos.

They feel identical but they need opposite responses.

In this article:

• A 30-second diagnostic: are you in ambiguity, or chaos?

• Four moves that turn “I don’t know where to start” into work that reads as senior+

• The exact sentences to say in the room, so you’re not improvising under pressure

• One challenge to run on your messiest project this week

Ambiguity and chaos are not the same problem

Ambiguity = the goal is real, the path isn’t. Your job: draw the map. This is the good kind. It’s where senior-level work gets made, because whoever draws the map gets remembered as the one who led.

Chaos = the goal itself keeps moving. Your job: stop designing and force a decision. No amount of good design survives a target that won’t hold still.

Mix them up and you’ll burn weeks and yourself. You use the ambiguity response on a chaos problem, then wonder why nothing you build sticks.

Ask me how I know…

That “make a vision” brief? I’ve spent weeks designing my way around it (more than once). Building screens, hoping the direction would reveal itself.

It didn’t. It was chaos in an ambiguity costume, a moved-on exec’s after thought with no stable definition of what he wanted “a vision” to change. It’s trying to draw a map for a destination in complete darkness.

So before anything else, work out which room you’re in.

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The tool: ambiguity or chaos?

Run your messiest current project through this:

You’re in AMBIGUITY if…

✔ You could write the goal in one sentence and most people would get it
✔ The disagreement is about how, not what
✔ When you propose a direction, people react to it, they don’t rewrite the premise
✔ The same definition of success has held more than a couple of weeks

You’re in CHAOS if…

✘ “What does success look like” gets a different answer depending who’s in the room
✘ The definition of done has changed more than once this month
✘ Two or more people each think they own the final call
✘ You’re designing against a moving target and you’ve started to feel a little crazy about it

Mostly top four? The moves below are for you.

Mostly bottom four? Skip to “Move 4”. Your job right now isn’t to design.

Knowing the difference alone will save you weeks. I wish someone had handed it to me before that vision mess ate weeks out of my life, for nothing.

Move 1: Name it out loud before you build

The instinct with a vague brief is to go heads down and start working, so you look capable.

But, it reads as the opposite and makes you look like you didn’t notice the brief was vague.

Address it head on instead:

“Before I start building, I want to make sure I’m solving the right problem. Right now I’m reading the goal as ___. Is that how everyone else is reading it?”

That surfaces the ambiguity, shows you already have a view, and makes you the one shaping the definition.

Move 2: Propose a frame, don’t ask for one

When you’re unsure, the tempting question is “what do you want me to do?”

It feels safe but it keeps you junior. You’ve handed the thinking back to someone who was hoping you’d figure it out.

Flip it. Bring a frame, invite correction:

✘ “What direction do you want here?”

✔ “Here’s how I’m proposing we frame this: ___. I think it gets us to the goal fastest. Thoughts?”

Being confidently corrected beats waiting for direction. Even a half-right proposal gives the room something to react to, and reacting is easier than inventing.

You did the hard part. They’ll remember that.

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A quick aside, because these moves are a big skillset that doesn’t surface overnight…

Everything here sits under one competency: facilitation. Walking into an undefined room and leaving it with a shared direction.

It’s the highest-leverage skill for senior designers, and it’s what I built the Strategic Facilitator’s Handbook around, the exact scripts and agendas I use to turn a fuzzy, three-owner, nobody-agrees kickoff into a room that leaves aligned. Including the full version of the frame move above, and the chaos-escalation script below.

Grab the Strategic Facilitator’s Handbook →

(Want your whole team facilitating like this? Team licences come with a significant discount.)

Move 3: Make the smallest reversible call you can

Ambiguity tempts you to wait for full clarity before committing to anything.

Full clarity isn’t coming. Waiting for it is how projects rot.

Read more

A year ago I could tell a designer exactly what to do to reach the next title. Ship this kind of work. Show this kind of thinking. Hit these markers. I’d coached close to a dozen people from senior to lead on exactly that map inside my company.

Then Ai hit and that map stopped being true.

So I went looking at the data, because I wanted to know if it was just my company or all of us. It’s all of us. Figma’s 2026 research: 56% of hiring managers want more senior designers. The rung above it — Staff, Principal — isn’t moving with it. Tech promotion rates overall dropped 42% between 2022 and 2025.

The room above you got smaller while the room you’re in got more crowded.

In this article:

• Why nobody — including your boss — can give you a straight answer on what “the next level” means right now

• The two numbers that prove it’s not you: senior demand is up, the rung above it isn’t

• The four skills worth building this week, while everyone above you argues about the role compentencies

• What to actually say if you’re the leader stuck giving vague answers (the honest version pulls more trust)

• One challenge to run in a real meeting before this piece leaves your head

You already know this feeling

If you’re aiming for the next title, you know it even if you haven’t put your finger on it yet. The goalposts that used to feel fixed now feel vague, or worse, silent. You ask what “ready” looks like and get an answer that used to be clear and now sounds like a shrug dressed up in corporate language.

If you’re the one giving that vague answer, you know it too. You’re standing in the same fog, just a few steps further up the hill, trying to sound more certain than you are.

Here’s where I sit in all this. I’m not a manager. I’m a Principal Designer, an IC. Part of my job is coaching other designers up the ladder. I’ve helped close to a dozen people make the jump from senior to lead over the last few years in my company.

Lately that part of the job has gotten harder. Purely because I’m less sure what I’m coaching them toward.

I started wondering if this was just my bubble. So I went looking, to see if other companies were stewing in the same fog, or if others were starting to clear it better.

Here’s what’s going on out there for most of us.

The room above you got smaller

Senior hiring is up. Figma’s 2026 research found 56% of hiring managers want more senior designers, against just 25% for junior roles.

What’s missing from that same data: any equivalent growth in Staff or principal hiring. Senior demand is real. The rung above it isn’t moving with it.

This isn’t a design-only problem. Tech promotion rates overall fell 42% between 2022 and 2025, per Gusto’s workforce data. And the rungs themselves are vanishing, not just the promotions onto them, middle management roles at public companies dropped 6.1% over the same window, and several major, profitable companies have spent this year cutting management layers on the record, while their earnings are strong.

Why nobody can give you a clean answer

Here’s the deeper problem underneath the obvious one: companies are rewriting what “senior” requires in real time, while still expecting people to perform against the old version of it.

Research from Designer Fund and Foundation Capital, surveying 900+ designers, found 50% of design leaders are now weighting AI fluency and systems thinking heavier than narrow craft skill. Leaders in that study described the designers they want as “orchestrators,” people who guide a whole process, not specialists who execute one piece of it well.

That’s a different job written under the same job title. Most companies haven’t finished writing it, let alone published it.

Design leaders — this next part is yours

If you’re a leader sitting on that unfinished draft, the silence feels safer than saying something half-formed. I get the instinct. Saying “I don’t know” out loud feels like admitting you’re not doing your job.

It’s the opposite. Your designers don’t expect you to have it solved. They expect you to be thinking about it as hard as they are. Silence reads as either you’ve stopped thinking about it, or you’re hiding something. Neither is true, probably, but that’s what it looks like from where they’re sitting.

If you can’t give clarity yet, say that, and mean it as a pause, not a permanent answer. Don’t dress up “I don’t know” as “you’re on track” just to keep the conversation comfortable. A designer who hears “we’re still figuring this out, give me a quarter” trusts you more than one who gets vague encouragement for the third review in a row and starts wondering if you’re ever going to tell them the truth.

You don’t need a finished framework. You need: “I don’t fully know what the next level requires yet. Here’s what I do know, and here’s when I’ll have more.”

Worth saying plainly to the designers reading this too: your leaders probably haven’t told you this, but a lot of them are just as lost in this as you are. Not because they’re bad at their jobs. Because the thing they’re supposed to be defining for you is still moving under their feet too. That doesn’t make the wait less frustrating. But it might make it feel less personal.

What to do about it

I don’t have a finished map either. Nobody does yet. But four things show up consistently enough, in the research and in what I’m seeing in my own coaching conversations, that I’m comfortable telling people to build toward them now.

Business fluency. Connect a design decision to a number the business cares about, revenue, retention, risk, without a translator. As AI lowers the cost of execution, craft alone gets more exposed. A clear line to outcomes doesn’t.

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In this article:

• Why “intent” is rarely the thing your NDA is protecting

• The percentage trick that tells the whole story without naming a single confidential figure

• What to say when even percentages are off the table

• What to do when you never had the data to begin with

You know the drill... blur the logo. Fake the client name. Password protect the case study like you’re running a speakeasy.

Fine. Standard. Nobody blinks at a redacted info line in the hiring process.

NDAs are a thorn in every designer’s side, and it is ridiculous... What’s a competitor going to do with your case study? What’s a shareholder going to do with “reduced checkout abandonment,” assuming they ever find it… which they won’t, because nobody outside your mom reads design portfolios for fun.

Still real legally though. Still your career on the line if you guess wrong. So you take it seriously and roll your eyes at the same time.

NDAs are mostly dumb. Your career isn’t.

So, you can nail the visual stuff, but what happens when someone asks, “So what change did your designs create?”

Are you allowed to say it saved the company $40 million? Can you say anything, or will legal march you straight to the guillotine?

It’s not as complicated as it feels at 11pm (still annoying though). Let’s get into it.

Lead with the goal, not the guess

State the intended impact IN your case study title. I’m serious…

Not “dashboard redesign.” Try: “Creating an Intuitive Dashboard for Financial Analysts to Reduce User Error”

Intent is rarely the thing your NDA is protecting. Check your terms, but most agreements don’t care that you wanted to fix something.

This buys you a complete sentence before you’ve shared a single protected detail. Everything after it, even the bits you can’t quantify, now reads as a finished thought instead of a redaction.

The percentage trick

You have a real number. No idea if you can say it.

Default to a percentage. Significance is relative. A percentage gives a hiring manager that without handing over anything specific.

20% could be 20 people or 20 million dollars. Nobody outside the company can tell. That’s the trick.

“Reduced checkout abandonment by 18%” is a complete sentence. It doesn’t need a dollar sign standing behind it to prove anything.

When even that’s too much

Some NDAs won’t let a percentage through either. Fallback that survives almost anything:

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Imagine you’re a surgeon; you arrive for your shift, and someone has already opened the patient.

They did their best. They moved fast. They had watched enough YouTube to feel confident. The incision is made. Some things went fine. Some things are now worse than they were before.

They hand you the scalpel and say: your turn.

That is the feeling. The dread. The responsibility for something you had no part in starting. The pressure to fix it without making a scene, because the patient is already open and the clock is running.

That is what a lot of designers are walking into right now.

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Hey, Miranda here 👋
If you’re wondering what’s Strategic Studio?? You might have missed my branding update over here. TL;DR - Same me, better content for you.

It was never clean

For real though… the PM/design relationship has always been messy. Designers feeling like order takers. PMs feeling like design is the thing that slows everything down. Both sides working around each other more than with each other.

I’ve sat in those rooms. I’ve watched a designer spend forty minutes defending a decision that should have been a five-minute conversation three weeks earlier. I’ve watched PMs ship something and brace for the design team’s reaction, having never thought to include them before anyone committed to anything.

The boundary between who owns the problem and who owns the solution has always been blurrier than the job descriptions suggest. Most teams muddled through. Begging, bartering, building goodwill on the side. Designers seen as precious. PMs seen as overbearing. Both tired of a dynamic nobody ever sat down to fix.

It worked, sort of, when moving fast still required enough time and effort that design had a natural window to get involved. When prototyping something took days, not forty minutes.

That window is gone.

Now everyone has a scalpel

A designer wrote to me recently. Their PM vibe-coded a feature straight to production. No design review. Live to customers.

She was asked to fix it.

This is not an isolated story. I hear versions of it weekly. The CEO prototyping in Replit and handing it over for a “cleanup.” The PM using Claude or Lovable to get to 80% and calling it done. The feature that is live before design was in the conversation.

And the part that makes it complicated: the PMs are not wrong to use the tools. The tools are fast. The pressure to ship is real. Shareholders want velocity. Leadership wants output. The person who questions that is the one who gets labelled a blocker.

So designers inherit it. They fix it. They absorb the debt. And leadership never sees the cost because design makes it look fine.

It’s never fine.

The bits that get skipped

AI-generated interfaces miss things that experienced designers catch by reflex.

Accessibility. Edge cases. Consistency with existing patterns. The interaction that works in isolation but breaks the mental model three screens later. The flow that confuses a first-time user in a way nobody tested because the PM who built it already understood the product.

None of that shows up in a prototype that took forty minutes. It shows up six months later in support tickets, in drop-off, in the slow erosion of a product that feels increasingly like it was designed by committee and assembled by algorithm.

The speed feels like a win. The debt is invisible until it is not.

And when designers try to say so, they get called difficult. Precious. Resistant.

The conversation that never happened

What most teams have never done….

Sat down, before a project, before a sprint, before anyone opened a tool, and agreed on who owns what.

When a PM prototypes something, does design get consulted before it goes live or after? When a feature ships from an AI tool, who is accountable for the outcome? When design and PM disagree, how does that conversation happen and who has the final call?

Most teams have never answered these questions. The answers exist as assumptions, and everyone’s assumptions are different.

And if you are a design leader reading this: the wildfire is burning because nobody drew the firebreak. This is not something individual designers should have to navigate laterally. It is a missing operating agreement that sits at the leadership level, and the longer it stays unwritten, the more expensive it gets.

Three things that help

Make the costs visible in terms that land

What to do when you’ve already been circumvented…

Let’s say the feature is already live. Or the prototype is already in front of stakeholders. You were not in the room.

Not “this diverges from our patterns.” Nobody outside of design cares about patterns.

Try:

“I want to make sure we’re not creating more work for ourselves down the line. Can we talk through what this means for the whole user experience before it goes further?”

If asked to fix it:

“I can fix this before launch, but that means pausing the other work we committed to this sprint. Which one takes priority?”

Tradeoffs, in the language of time and money and customer impact. Said asap. That is the version that gets heard.

Proactive quality control

If your PM is building in AI tools, your input into what they prompt shapes what comes out.

What interaction patterns does this need to follow? What accessibility requirements apply? What edge cases are being overlooked? What existing flows does this touch?

Get those answers into the build before they hit launch. Some design teams are formalising this as a short prompt checklist: design considerations for PMs to include in any AI build before it hits real users. A quality check, upstream. The goal being to shape what gets built, even if design can’t always be there to review it.

→ If you or your team has built anything like this, please share in the comments!

The ways of working conversation

Nobody wants to be the person who calls the meeting about how we work together. It feels like a waste of time when there is real work to do. It can feel passive aggressive if the relationship is already strained.

Have it anyway.

A fifteen-minute conversation with your PM about how you want to work together is one of the highest-leverage things a designer can do. Not a process document. Not a formal proposal. A genuine conversation about what works, what is not working, and what you both need to do good work.

Some things worth covering:

• When does design get looped in on new ideas, and how?

• If something gets built without design input, what happens next?

• What does each of you need from the other to move fast without creating messes?

It does not have to be formal. It can happen in a 1:1. It can happen over coffee. But flying by the seat of your pants with no shared understanding of how decisions get made lands everyone in the dirt eventually. The designers and PMs with the strongest working relationships are almost always the ones who had this conversation early, and revisit it when things change.

It is an uncomfortable conversation to start. It is a much more uncomfortable situation to keep living without it.

Fellow design leaders: another opportunity for you to investigate into this yourself. Talk with the PMs your designers work with, figure out where they are being included, where they are not, and propose an operational agreement so this isn’t left on the shoulders of your designers.

What good looks like

I was speaking with Candela M., Director of Design & Personalisation, over at Adidas recently. I asked her how her team was handling all of this. Her team has implemented a formal sign-off model: every craft, design included, signs off before anything ships. No exceptions.

That is not standard. Most companies will not get there, especially the ones moving at the pace I am describing.

But the underlying principle is worth taking into your next leadership conversation. The question to bring is not “design needs more control.” That framing is a losing argument.

That is a calmer conversation. It is specific. It lands differently with a CPO than “designers need a seat at the table” ever will.

I challenge you

This week, pick one.

If you have a PM you work with regularly: ask for fifteen minutes. Tell them you want to talk about how you work together, not a specific project. Just how you want to handle things when ideas move fast. See what comes up.

If you are already in the mess, a feature is live and you were not in it: before you fix it, name the cost out loud. One sentence, to your PM or your lead. Not a complaint. Just a tradeoff, said plainly. See how it lands.

Both of those conversations feel uncomfortable before you have them. They feel a lot better than inheriting another open patient.

WWW (Wild Wild West)

A lot of companies are shipping things designers are cringing over. That is just how the cards are stacked right now.

The shareholder pressure is real. The expectation that you can move at AI speed and maintain design quality is, in most teams, a fantasy. Something is getting sacrificed and it is usually the thing that takes longest to notice.

You cannot fix all of it. What you can do is make sure the cost is visible before the decision is made.

That is a harder job than it used to be. And it was already pretty f’ing hard. Anyone telling you otherwise has not been in the room recently.

- Miranda

But it’s time, and thanks to some input from you guys, I think it’s the right move for you and for me.

I’m changing the name. UX Survival Guide is becoming Strategic Studio.

It took me months because I was scared you’d read “new name” and assume it’s not for you anymore.

Make no mistake, I’m not done helping you survive. Survival is more urgent now than it’s ever been. The layoffs haven’t stopped, AI has everyone wondering if they’re next. I’m not walking away from that. 

➝ ➝ ➝ I’m doubling down on it.

What changed is what I think survival actually takes now.

The designers getting cut or stuck usually aren’t there because their design work is “bad”. They’re there because they’re seen as pure execution. And execution is the easiest thing in the building to cut, the work that gets fed to AI, offshored, or wiped out the second a budget tightens and someone needs a name on a list.

The ones with a better shot at staying safe, who get promoted while everyone else braces, are the ones who can show why. Why this problem and not the one everyone assumed. They tie their work to something real, the user it helped, the cost it avoided, and can name the change they created instead of pointing at a screen and hoping it speaks for itself. They walk into a room and the value comes with them, sometimes before anyone’s ready to hear it.

I’ve done this for thirteen years, watching all sorts of tools and technologies churn over. Vibe-coding a feature, spinning up agents, or detailing full flows in Figma, the actual change your work makes is the only thing that matters in the end.

That’s what Strategic Studio is built for. Keep you safe and help you grow, pointed at where the threat really lives now. If you’re in a scary spot, it’s about becoming harder to let go of. If you’re secure, the same skills take you from safe to senior. Survive, then thrive.

Here’s what’s next.

I’m taking you behind the scenes on all of it. The positioning I’m wrestling with (I’ll make you vote on a sentence I can’t get right), the two archetypes I’m building this for, the half-finished parts I’m unsure about. The same show-your-work stuff I’m about to tell you to do more of, so it felt fair to do it in the open myself.

One note, said once. If this sharper, more senior direction isn’t where you are right now, that’s genuinely okay, the unsubscribe link is right there and no hard feelings. But if you’ve ever felt the gap between how good your work is and how it’s landing, stick around. This is the thing I most want to get right.

More soon,

- Miranda

(If you have any questions/thoughts - drop them in the comments)

There’s a specific kind of frustration I’ve watched play out across teams more times than I can count.

A designer, usually a good one, is buried. Shipping work, hitting deadlines, responding to briefs. Doing exactly what’s being asked of them. And yet every performance review, every career conversation, they hear some version of the same thing:

“We’d love to see you operating more strategically. Having more product influence.”

And they have no idea what that actually means.

Neither does the person saying it, most of the time.

“Be more strategic” is not feedback. “Have more product influence” is not a plan. They’re symptoms of something neither side has named yet.

What’s actually happening

Most designers are caught in what I call the execution loop.

It goes like this…

A brief arrives. The designer executes it well. The team is happy with the output. Another brief arrives. The designer executes that one too. Brief, execution, delivery, repeat. Until at some point the designer looks up and realises they’ve been doing this for two years and nothing has changed.

The work is good. The impact is invisible. The career is stuck.

The part that makes it a loop: the better you are at execution, the harder it is to break out of it. The better you execute, the more briefs arrive. You’ve made yourself indispensable at the wrong level. You’ve quietly trained your team to see you as a design factory. And factories don’t get invited to strategy conversations. They don’t get product influence. They get more briefs.

That’s a positioning problem. And it compounds quietly, until it doesn’t.

Why designers stay stuck in it

Execution feels safe. You know what good looks like. You ship it. You get positive feedback. The loop is reinforcing. Every completed brief feels like progress, even when it isn’t.

Strategic contribution is invisible by default. When a designer asks the right question in a planning meeting and prevents three weeks of rework, that moment doesn’t make it into anyone’s notes. The avoided work doesn’t exist. The value evaporates the second it happens.

The ask is also vague. “Be more strategic” gives a designer nothing to work with. So most designers do what reasonable people do with vague feedback: they nod, go back to their desk, and execute the next brief slightly more thoughtfully. Nothing changes.

And if you’re a design leader reading this, this is where your team is right now. Not because they’re junior. Because the operating model you’ve built rewards delivery and makes a strategic contribution structurally impossible to see.

Which means less chance someone flags the wrong direction before the sprint starts. That’s not a soft skill. That’s weeks of rework that never happens, and product decisions that are sharper because design was in the room early.

What the loop looks like in a real room

Sprint planning. The PM has a brief. Everyone’s waiting to hear what’s being built this sprint.

The junior designer opens their notebook and waits.

The senior designer, the one who has broken out of the loop, asks a question before anyone leaves the room.

Something like:

Read more

We’re around the middle of the year.

Which means most designers are somewhere between:

“Yeah… I should probably know what I’ve contributed so far.”

and

“Please don’t make me open my performance doc yet.”

I get it.

Documenting your work is tedious.

It feels administrative.
It feels awkward.
It can feel a little show-pony-ish.

And if you’re not actively going for a promotion or raise, it’s tempting to think:

“I’ll deal with this later.”

But honestly?

In this market, I wouldn’t 😬

The design industry right now feels a bit like the Titanic.

Layoffs.
Frozen hiring.
AI pressure.
Teams shrinking.
Expectations somehow still going up.

And while documenting your impact might feel like the least glamorous thing on your to-do list…

It might also be your life raft.

Because when things get shaky, vague value gets overlooked fast.

Clear value is much harder to ignore.

This doesn’t mean turning every Slack message into a personal marketing campaign.

But it does mean making sure your work has a paper trail.

Because your manager may appreciate you.
Your team may love working with you.
Your work may genuinely matter.

But if nobody can clearly explain what changed because you were involved, you’re relying on memory, goodwill, and vibes.

I would not bet my career on that right now…

Mid-year is the perfect moment to capture the story

This is actually the best time to do this.

Not during full review panic in November when you’re scrolling six months of Slack messages trying to remember:

“What even shipped?”

Mid-year still gives you:
→ fresh context
→ visible patterns
→ recent feedback
→ time to adjust the second half of the year

👀 You can still spot gaps in what you’re showing.
👀 You can still notice if all your work looks execution-heavy.
👀 You can still ask for more ownership.
👀 You can still collect better evidence while people actually remember what happened.

Mid-year is your chance to catch the story before it turns into detective work.

Get an honest read on your portfolio from me: what’s coming through, what isn’t, and why it matters in hiring.

Check this out

Document the change, not the activity

This is where most designers accidentally weaken their own story.

They document tasks.
“Worked on onboarding improvements.”
“Created new flows.”
“Supported the launch.”
“Used AI for synthesis.”

Okay.

And?

None of that explains why the work mattered.

The stronger question is:

What changed because you were involved?

For example:
❌ “Worked on onboarding improvements.”
✅ “Improved onboarding flow by reducing decision points to help achieve our activation goal.”

Or:
❌ “Used AI to synthesize research.”
✅ “Used AI to speed up early synthesis, helping the team move into solution exploration faster while manually reviewing themes to preserve nuance.”

See the difference?

One describes activity.
The other explains impact.

When documenting your work, ask:

Read more

A lot of designers I speak to right now are doing everything they’re “supposed” to do.

Applying consistently.
Updating their portfolio.
Trying to stay relevant.

And still… nothing.

No responses.
No interviews.
Or getting deep into a process and then dropping.

I ran a poll on Instagram the other day and most designers said they’re currently applying for jobs.

So if you’re feeling stuck in this right now… you’re not alone.

I’m not going to tell you to “just keep going.”

Because the reality is:

The market is tough right now.
And it’s not always fair.

Fewer roles.
More competition.
Higher expectations.

You’re not imagining it.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do.

The shift designers are missing

Right now, the difference between getting traction and getting ignored isn’t more effort; it’s better signals.

Weak signal looks like:

• Generic portfolios

• Unclear positioning

• Case studies that focus on screens, not decisions

• Applying to everything and hoping something sticks

Strong signal looks like:

• Clear positioning

• Work that feels intentional

• Decision-making that’s visible

• A portfolio that makes it easy to understand where you fit

Most designers are putting in the effort.

But the signal isn’t landing.

Where things start to go wrong

The default response to a tough market is:

Apply more.
Do more.
Say yes to everything.

It feels productive.

But it spreads your signal thin.

You end up looking like:

👉 “a designer who can do a bit of everything”

Instead of:

👉 “a designer we know exactly where to place”

And in a market like this…

Clarity wins.

1. Get specific (even if your situation isn’t perfect)

You might need to take whatever pays right now.

I totally get that….

But your positioning still needs direction.

Not “product designer.”

More like:

• “I help B2B SaaS teams reduce operational friction”

• “I focus on growth and activation problems in early-stage products”

• “I design internal tools that improve team efficiency”

This makes you understandable.

Because if you don’t define what you’re good at…

Hiring managers will guess.

And they usually guess wrong.

2. Your portfolio needs to feel like you (not a template)

A lot of portfolios look the same right now.

Same structure.
Same sections.
Same language.

And when everything looks the same, nothing stands out.

This isn’t about making your portfolio flashier.

It’s about making it clearer.

That shows up in small ways:

• Case study titles that communicate impact

• Calling out tradeoffs you made

• Being explicit about your role and thinking

• Framing your work around problems, not deliverables

Your portfolio isn’t competing on just aesthetics.

It’s competing on clarity and conviction.

3. Tie your work to business impact (this is non-negotiable now)

This is the biggest shift I’m seeing.

If your work doesn’t clearly connect to something the business cares about…

It’s on to the next designer in the stack of applications

If you want your design portfolio reviewed by me to see what it’s signalling from a hiring manager’s POV.

Check this out

You want to connect your work to things like:

• Conversion

• Retention

• Efficiency

• Cost reduction

• Risk

Even if you don’t have perfect data.

For example:

❌ “We improved the onboarding flow”
✅ “We simplified onboarding to reduce drop-off and improve activation”

You’re explaining why your work mattered, not just what you did.

If this is the part you struggle with, it’s not a coincidence.

Most designers were never taught how to think this way.

That’s exactly what we practice inside Why Before UI — connecting your decisions to outcomes so your work actually lands the way you intend.

4. Show that you’re adapting (without overdoing AI)

You don’t need five AI-heavy case studies.

But you can’t ignore where things are going.

What matters more is showing awareness.

That can look like:

• Using AI to speed up research synthesis

• Exploring ideas faster

• Pressure-testing concepts

• Documenting decisions more clearly

You don’t need to be an expert.

But you do need to show you’re paying attention.

You’re not being judged on mastery.

You’re being judged on whether you’re adapting.

5. Network in a way that actually works

A lot of designers are trying to network right now.

But most of it looks like:

• “Are you hiring?”

• “Can you refer me?”

And it rarely works.

What does work is curiosity.

Instead of asking for something…

Ask to understand.

For example:

• “What makes someone successful in your team?”

• “What surprised you most about your role?”

• “What kind of problems are you actually solving day-to-day?”

These conversations do two things:

• They give you real insight

• They make people want to help you

6. Keep momentum (even if it’s not your ideal role)

If you’re in between roles right now, the biggest risk is stagnation.

That’s where things like:

• Freelance work

• Short-term contracts

• Helping startups

• Small paid or unpaid projects

Can actually help.

Not as a long-term plan.

But as a way to:

• Stay active

• Build new signals

• Keep your confidence up

This isn’t a step back.

It’s how you keep moving forward when the path isn’t linear.

I challenge you

Don’t try to fix everything at once.

This week, do three things:

1️⃣ Pick one role you actually want
2️⃣ Update:

• your headline

• one case study

• your intro (so it clearly showcases where you fit)

3️⃣ Reach out to one person in that space
→ ask a real question, not for a job

That’s it.

You don’t need to burnout, but you do need less randomness.

Final thought

The market is harder right now… and even if you do everything perfectly, there will always be factors out of your control…

But the designers I’m seeing who are getting traction aren’t just doing more.

They’re communicating more clearly.
Positioning themselves more intentionally.
And adapting faster than others.

They’re taking control of what they can and making sure they set themselves apart.

☝️ What’s your biggest challenge right now?

“I’m not sure if my portfolio is strong enough.”
➔ Chat with Miranda get a fast, honest read on your portfolio: what’s coming through, what isn’t, and why it matters from a hiring manager POV.

“I feel like I’m trying everything and still not landing interviews.”
➔ 1:1 Live Mentorship with me get a full breakdown of your resume & portfolio from a real hiring manager’s POV. You’ll walk away with clear action items to help improve your positioning.

Behind the scenes

I’ve spent over 20 hours (and I don’t even want to count how many tokens) figuring out a way to make myself “scalable”.

For the last three years, I’ve been obsessed with helping you get hired or level up in your design careers. Between the articles, the Notion templates, and the design challenges, I’ve tried to give you every tool in my kit.

But I’ve hit a wall. I don’t scale.

I get dozens of DMs every week asking for portfolio reviews and advice on different challenges. It kills me that I can’t have a 1-on-1 coffee chat with everyone. My advice is sitting in a static database, and you only see it if you happen to scroll to the right post at the right time.

So, I’ve decided to do something a little wild. I’m cloning myself...

I’m building a “Digital Twin” — a space where you can get my specific hiring manager logic, on-demand, 24/7. It’s not just a generic AI bot; it’s literally built on my 13+ years of industry knowledge plus my 3+ years of Notion data, content, and frameworks.

My MVP is already out in the wild, and you’ve already seen it here in this article, “Chat with Miranda”.

If you want to get more behind-the-scenes updates and get early access to different releases, just pop your name on this list.

A designer asked me recently:

“How do I handle it when everything feels urgent, and everyone needs something from me?”

If you’ve ever felt like:

• Every request is “high priority”

• Your to-do list grows faster than you can clear it

• You’re constantly context-switching

• You’re working longer hours just to keep up

You’re not alone.

And right now, it feels even more intense.

With AI speeding things up, there’s this growing expectation that:

👉 everything should be faster
👉 you should be able to do more
👉 turnaround should be almost instant

But here’s the part I want to be really clear about:

This isn’t new.

Design has always been one of the least understood roles in a team.

I’ve seen it across countless companies — and experienced it myself:

👉 being asked to “just make a quick update”
👉 being pulled into multiple projects at once
👉 being expected to move faster without any trade-offs

AI didn’t create this pressure.

It just made it louder.

And the default reaction most designers have is:

👉 Say yes
👉 Work faster
👉 Try to keep everyone happy

Which feels like the right thing to do.

But over time, it creates a much bigger problem.

The hidden cost of saying yes to everything

Saying yes feels like the safe move.

You’re being helpful.
You’re being collaborative.
You’re showing you care.

But over time, it creates a very specific perception:

👉 you’re the person who will take anything on
👉 you don’t push back
👉 you’ll figure it out

Which sounds great… until it isn’t.

Because now you’ve quietly trained your team to see you as:

👉 a design factory
👉 a ticket fulfiller
👉 someone who executes, not someone who decides

And once that becomes your role…

You don’t get less work.

You get more of the same kind of work.

Why this keeps happening

Most designers aren’t bad at prioritisation.

They’re just operating in a system where:

• They don’t own the roadmap

• Stakeholders don’t understand design effort

• Everything sounds important

• Pushing back feels risky

So instead of prioritising…

They absorb.

And then try to work faster.

Which is how you end up overwhelmed and under-recognised at the same time.

If you want your design portfolio reviewed by me to see what it’s signalling from a hiring manager’s POV.

Check this out

1. Stop hiding your capacity

If your workload only exists in your head, people will assume you have more room.

Always.

So instead of silently juggling everything, make it visible.

That can be as simple as:

• A weekly snapshot of what you’re working on

• A shared board of active work

• A quick message outlining your current focus

Example:

🔓 Coming up in the Paid Tier
How to make your workload visible without sounding difficult
How to anchor requests to real priorities (so everything isn’t “urgent”)
How to turn every “yes” into a clear trade-off
What to say when stakeholders push for “more” and “faster”
And how to have the conversation before burnout becomes the default

Read more

There’s a type of meeting I genuinely can’t stand.

The kind where the goal is:

“Let’s just talk it through.”

Open discussion.
No structure.
Everyone sharing opinions.

And somehow… you’re expected to walk out aligned.

I’ve never left one of those sessions feeling like anything meaningful changed.

Usually, what happens instead:

• The loudest voices dominate

• The conversation loops

• People leave with different interpretations of what was said

• And nothing actually moves forward

Which is why I don’t treat alignment sessions like discussions.

👉 I treat them like something I design.

What misalignment actually looks like (and how to spot it early)

Most teams don’t realise they’re misaligned until everyone’s beyond frustrated

But the signals show up much earlier.

Here’s what I look out for:

Work keeps getting reworked or questioned

• Designs keep getting revisited

• Decisions feel “unsettled”

• Stakeholders re-open conversations you thought were closed

This usually isn’t a design problem.

It’s a shared understanding problem.

New ideas constantly derail progress

You’re mid-way through execution and suddenly:

• “What if we also explored this?”

• “Have we thought about doing it this way instead?”

Individually, these ideas might be valid.

But collectively, they signal:

👉 there’s no clear agreement on what matters most right now

Teams are solving different versions of the problem

• Design is focused on usability

• Product is focused on growth

• Engineering is focused on feasibility

All valid lenses.

But if they’re not anchored to the same goal, you get fragmented solutions.

1. Set a clear intention (not just a topic)

“Align on onboarding” is not a goal.

It’s a vague container for opinions.

Before I run any session, I make the intention explicit:

• What decision are we trying to move forward?

• What should be clearer after this session than before?

For example:

• ❌ “Discuss onboarding improvements”

• ✅ “Agree on the top 2 onboarding improvements to prioritise this quarter”

This does two things:

• It creates direction for the session

• It gives you a clear signal of whether the session actually worked

If you can’t define what “better aligned” looks like, you won’t get there.

2. Reconfirm the goal (don’t assume it’s still aligned)

Even if a team was aligned before… things drift.

• New stakeholder conversations happen

• Priorities shift quietly

• Different interpretations creep in

So I always resurface the goal:

“Before we jump in — are we still aligned that this is what we’re trying to achieve?”

If the goal isn’t clear or agreed on…

Nothing else in the session will matter.

And if it’s never been clearly defined?

Slow down and create that alignment first.

👉 If this is something you’re trying to get better at, I’ve put together a set of practical frameworks and session structures inside The Facilitator’s Handbook.

It’s essentially a collection of:

• Alignment session formats you can run straight away

• Ways to get teams aligned on goals when they’re unclear

• Exercises to surface priorities, tradeoffs, and shared direction

Because knowing you need alignment is one thing.

Actually knowing how to run it without it turning into another “let’s just talk” meeting… is another.

👉 You can explore it here:
https://www.uxsurvival.guide/templates/workshop-template

3. Create a shared understanding (this is where most sessions fail)

The biggest mistake I see:

People jump straight into opinions.

Without shared context.

Which means everyone is reacting based on:

• Different data

• Different assumptions

• Different mental models

So before we discuss anything, I align on what we know.

I’ll walk the group through:

• Key data points

• Relevant user insights

• Constraints

• Business context

All framed around the goal.

Not as a data dump, but as:

“Here’s what matters for the decision we’re about to make.”

Because this is the reality:

Most alignment sessions fail because the facilitator assumes everyone has the same information and understanding

4. Make interpretation visible (not just opinions)

Once everyone has the same inputs, I don’t open the floor immediately.

🔓 Coming up in the Paid Tier

• How to structure interpretation so it leads to clear, shared priorities

• The simplest ways to run collective prioritisation (without it getting political)

• How to keep teams aligned after the session — not just during it

• A practical way to handle new ideas without derailing focus

• The early signals that alignment is slipping (and what to do next)

Read more

A designer wrote to me recently and said:

“My CEO is bringing me designs he made in Replit…
and our PM is pushing code straight to users.”

Then they asked the question a lot of designers are quietly thinking right now:

“What am I supposed to do in this situation?”

This moment is happening across many companies.

Tools like Replit, Lovable, and AI code generators mean anyone can spin up a working interface in minutes.

Founders.
PMs.
Engineers.

And increasingly, those prototypes are showing up in front of designers with a simple request:

“Can you make this work?”

Or worse:

“It’s already live… can you fix it?”

It can feel chaotic.
It can feel frustrating.
And for some designers, it can feel threatening.

But here’s what designers need to let sink in…

Designers won’t stay useful if the response is:
“Designers own design.”

That battle is already over.

The tools have changed.

More people will generate interfaces.

The question now is:
What role do designers play when that happens?

Designers who want to remain valuable in this environment should do three things…

1. Make the Tradeoffs Visible

When ideas start arriving faster than teams can properly design them, something always gets sacrificed.

Consistency.
Usability.
Accessibility.
Long-term system health.

👉 But the mistake many designers make is silently absorbing that work.

You end up fixing things.
Cleaning things up.
Making them “less bad.”

And leadership never sees the cost.

Instead, make the tradeoffs explicit.

For example:

“I can help clean this up before launch, but that means pausing the work happening on this other feature we planned this sprint.”

Or:

“If we ship this quickly, the experience will diverge from existing patterns. We can revisit alignment later, but it will create design & tech debt.”

This helps them see the real cost of speed without blocking progress.

When ad-hoc work becomes invisible, it quietly consumes the entire design function.

And suddenly designers look slow… when they’re actually just cleaning up chaos.

Strategic designers make the tradeoffs visible so everyone can make more informed decisions.

2. Enable Instead of Gatekeep

Here’s another reality designers are grappling with:
You’re not going to stop people from designing.

Not with AI tools.
Not with code generation.
Not with scrappy founders trying ideas.

Trying to protect design as a gatekeeping function will backfire.

Instead, think about how you can raise the quality of what others produce.

For example:

Create lightweight guardrails like:

• Design principles/guidelines for your product
• Simple UX quality checklists
• Prompt templates for generating better UX ✨

You’re not expecting a PM or CEO to become a trained designer.

But you can help them pressure-test their ideas before they land in front of you or users.

For example, a simple prompt framework might ask:
What user problem does this solve?
What existing pattern does this build on?
What could confuse someone seeing this for the first time?
What would break if we scaled this feature?

This kind of thinking dramatically improves the ideas people bring forward.

Instead of being the design police, you become the person helping the team make smarter decisions.

And that’s a much more durable role.

3. Expand Your Value Beyond Execution

Let’s address the insecurity a lot of designers are feeling right now.

If PMs and CEOs can generate UI…
What happens to designers?

The uncomfortable answer is:
Designers who only contribute visual execution will feel pressure.

But designers who contribute judgment and direction become more valuable.

Because tools can generate screens.

They can’t easily:
• identify the right problem to solve
• navigate stakeholder tension
• connect design decisions to business impact
• anticipate downstream product consequences
• decide when something should not be built

That kind of thinking is what teams actually need more of.

Which raises an important question for designers:
Can you clearly explain the value your work creates?

Not just the interface.
But the outcome.

For example:
• Did your work reduce support volume?
• Did it improve conversion?
• Did it remove operational friction for internal teams?
• Did it prevent the company from building the wrong thing?

If the answer is yes, but the connection isn’t visible, that’s where designers get overlooked.

One of the biggest shifts designers need to make right now is learning how to connect their decisions to business outcomes.

Because the more tools make execution easier…

The more valuable good decision-making becomes.

This is exactly the skill we practice inside Why Before UI.

It’s a strategic design workout where designers learn how to:
• frame the real problem before jumping into UI
• connect design decisions to user and business impact
• surface tradeoffs clearly in product discussions
• explain why a solution makes sense — even when the data isn’t perfect

So when ideas start flying around the room — whether they came from a PM, a CEO, or an AI tool — you’re the person who can step back and say:

“Let’s make sure we’re solving the right problem first.”

👉 If you want to strengthen that skill, you can learn more about Why Before UI here.

The Bigger Picture

Right now we’re in an awkward transition moment.

Tools are enabling people to move faster than teams can absorb.

Interfaces are getting generated before problems are fully understood.

And design teams are often the ones asked to clean things up.

This won’t stabilize overnight.

But the designers who thrive in this environment will:
• make tradeoffs visible
• enable better thinking across the team
• expand their value beyond interface execution

Those are the signals that keep designers in the room when decisions matter.

I challenge you

This week, try one small shift.

When someone brings you an AI-generated design or prototype:

Instead of reacting to the interface…

Ask one question about the decision behind it.

For example:

“What problem are we trying to solve with this?”

or

“Is this more critical than ongoing work?”

You might be surprised how often that question redirects the conversation.

☝️ What’s your biggest challenge right now?

“I’m expected to execute quickly, but struggle to explain the impact of my work.”
➔ Why Before UI helps designers connect design decisions to business outcomes and explain why their solutions matter.

“My team has too many ideas but no clear direction.”
➔ The Strategic Facilitator’s Handbook gives you practical activities to align teams and move from opinions to decisions.

“I want to think more strategically, not just produce screens.”
➔ The Strategic Designers Guild is a practice ground for developing judgment, influence, and strategic communication.

Any time a hiring manager, including myself, reviews a portfolio, we’re not just looking for clean UI shots.

We’re scanning for judgment.

A designer’s value isn’t just in the pixels.
It’s the thinking and reasoning behind them.

And before you assume this means “add more” ❌ it doesn’t.

You do not need:

• more projects

• longer case studies

• multi-page essays

A case study isn’t a full-featured. It’s the movie trailer.

Your portfolio’s job is to:

• tick the boxes recruiters scan for

• and create enough intrigue for a hiring manager to say, “I want this person in the room.”

This is about emphasis, not volume.

Small shifts.
Clear signals.
Intentional framing.

Here are a few changes that dramatically elevate perception without turning your portfolio into a novel.

1. Change Your Case Study Titles From What to Why

Most portfolios still lead with titles like:

• “Mobile App Redesign”

• “Dashboard UX”

• “Fitness Platform”

That tells me nothing about how you think.

Strategic designers use titles to frame the problem or decision, not the artifact.

Try instead:

• “Reducing drop-off by clarifying onboarding decisions”

• “Reframing a growth problem disguised as a UI issue”

• “Aligning three teams around a single user journey”

This does three things:

• It shows you think in terms of outcomes, not screens

• It signals you understand the real problem behind the work

• It demonstrates awareness of business impact, not just interface improvement

That’s what separates strong execution from strategic contribution.

2. Make Tradeoffs Visible (Even Small Ones)

Most portfolios put full emphasis on the final solution.

Strategic portfolios show judgment.

Add in a mention of:

• What we didn’t pursue and why

• What we intentionally deprioritized

• Where constraints forced a compromise

Even a single sentence helps:

“We chose clarity over flexibility here because support data showed confusion was the bigger risk.”

That’s a strategy because it shows decision-making under constraints.

☝️ Notice what we’re doing here

We’re not adding paragraphs.

We’re adding clarity.

One visible tradeoff.
One explicit tension.
One sentence explaining why a decision was reasonable.

That’s enough.

Does this feel familiar? 👇

“I know my work is solid… but I don’t know if my portfolio actually reads as strategic.”

You’ve stared at it too long.
You’ve made super clear mock-ups.
You’ve added your process.

But you don’t know if you’re just coming off as “an executor.”

That’s exactly why I created the Strategic Designer Portfolio Audit.

It’s a structured review framework that helps you:

• assess whether your case studies signal judgment or just execution

• identify where thinking is implied but not visible

• spot weak titles, missing tensions, and unclear positioning

• refine emphasis without rewriting everything

👉 Get the Strategic Designer Portfolio Audit →

🔓 Coming up in the Paid Tier

How to:

• Rework existing artifacts so they signal judgment

• Add system-level context without inflating your role

• Show evidence responsibly when metrics are incomplete

• Clarify impact and reasoning without turning your case study into an essay

Read more

A designer asked me recently:

“How do I influence cross-functional teams without formal authority; especially when I’m new?”

And I think this question shows up for a lot of designers, even experienced ones.

Because somewhere along the way, many designers internalize this quiet belief:

My job is to support, not to shape.

So you hesitate.

You wait to be invited.
You keep your head down and “just do the design.”
You hope your work will speak for itself.

Let’s talk about why that instinct is understandable, but also why it holds so many designers back.

Support vs partnership

Most designers aren’t afraid of influence.

They’re afraid of overstepping.

• “Is this my place to say something?”

• “Am I annoying people by pushing here?”

• “Should I just wait until I’m asked?”

Especially when:

• product owns the roadmap

• engineering owns feasibility

• design is framed as execution

It’s easy to default into a supporting role.

But here’s the thing I’ve learned over and over again:

Teams don’t need designers who wait.
They need designers who help them make the right calls.

Influence comes from building trust, and trust is built through consistency.

Here is my own story of helping leadership make the right call on priorities:

Influence starts with initiative, not permission

Influence doesn’t come from asserting opinions louder.

It comes from doing the groundwork.

That shows up as:

• pulling scattered inputs into a clear problem statement

• noticing when assumptions are driving decisions

• turning fuzzy discussions into something tangible

• helping teams see tradeoffs, not just options

This isn’t about pushing your ideas harder.

It’s about creating clarity in moments of ambiguity.

The strategic shortcut for building influence

Designers rarely get to practice influencing outside of high-stakes situations.

But that’s exactly why I built The Strategic Designers Guild.

The Guild is a practice ground for influence — a place where you can:

• pressure-test how you frame problems

• practice articulating tradeoffs without overexplaining

• get feedback on how you show up in strategic conversations

• build confidence through reps, not theory

No titles required.
Just consistent practice with designers who get it — and direct access to me when you need extra support.

👉 The Strategic Designers Guild is for designers who want to stop waiting for authority and start earning influence.

🔓 Coming up for paid members
How to influence by creating clarity when things feel messy, and rallying people around the right problem before decisions are made.

Read more

I want to tell you a story about the time I questioned a product decision…
and it got me flown to another country to talk to users.

At the time, I was very new to the team.
I hadn’t designed a single thing for this product yet.
And I had zero experience doing anything remotely like what followed.

But I had just walked out of a meeting where leadership laid out the direction for the next year.

And something felt off.

Not in a dramatic, red-flag way.
Just a quiet, uncomfortable huh… feeling I couldn’t shake.

When I asked why this was the direction we were taking —
or how we knew it would actually work —

no one could really answer.

We already had a solution.

The problem was…
no one could explain why it was the right one.

The more I looked into it, the stronger my hunch became that we were about to head in the wrong direction.

And the risk wasn’t small.

We were talking about months of work.
Multiple teams.
And a lot of money.

This is the kind of confidence you build through practice, not titles.
Inside The Strategic Designers Guild, designers get a safe space to pressure-test thinking, practice challenging assumptions, and get direct feedback from me — before the stakes are high at work.

👉 Learn more about the Guild →

Read more

Your VP/CEO uses the product for the first time in a while.
Something feels off. Confusing. Inconsistent. Harder than it should be.

And who do they come to first?

UX.

I’ve seen this play out countless times.

They don’t point fingers at:
Product strategy.
Prioritization.
The roadmap decisions that led us here.

Nope….

👉 Design.

Not because design caused the problem — but because design is where the cracks become visible.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth:

What most teams call “design debt” is usually strategy debt showing up in the interface.

Let’s talk about why.

Design debt doesn’t start in Figma

Design debt isn’t just:

• inconsistent components

• slightly off interactions

• visual weirdness teams “mean to clean up later”

Those are symptoms.

Design debt usually starts upstream — when:

• teams optimize locally instead of holistically

• short-term wins override long-term coherence

• decisions are made without a shared experience strategy

One small inconsistency doesn’t feel dangerous.

But if you work in a large organization, that inconsistency compounds.

One team ships a workaround.
Another interprets it differently.
A third builds on top of it.

Over time, the product stops feeling intentional — and starts feeling unpredictable.

That’s not a design problem.

That’s a strategy problem that never got resolved.

A quick example

Let’s say one feature optimizes hard for click-through.

It performs well in isolation.

But it introduces:

• a new interaction pattern

• different expectations

• a behavior that doesn’t exist elsewhere in the product

Now users hesitate in adjacent flows because the system no longer behaves consistently.

Click-through goes up.
Completion elsewhere goes down.

Was the feature successful?

Depends on what level you’re looking at.

The strategic shortcut for making design debt actionable

Most designers feel design debt long before they can explain it.

The challenge isn’t noticing it.
It’s articulating why it matters beyond aesthetics.

That’s exactly the muscle Why Before UI helps you build.

It trains you to:

• step back from the feature

• question how decisions fit into the broader system

• explain tradeoffs in business terms, not opinions

Because design debt only gets addressed when it’s framed as a risk to strategy, not a request for polish.

👉 Join the Why Before UI Challenge →

Spotting design debt is easy.
Knowing what to do after you spot it is where most teams stall.

Why design debt compounds (especially in big orgs)

In large organizations, design debt doesn’t just accumulate.

It multiplies.

Why?

• Multiple teams ship in parallel

• Context gets lost between roadmaps

• Patterns diverge without anyone explicitly choosing to diverge

What started as a single exception becomes a precedent.

Soon, no one knows what “good” looks like anymore — only what exists.

And eventually, leadership feels it:

• “Why does this behave differently here?”

• “Why does this feel harder than it should?”

By the time it reaches that level, cleanup is expensive.

What more strategic designers do differently

Strategic designers don’t just point out inconsistencies.

They ask:

• “Where does this diverge from existing patterns — and why?”

• “Is this a temporary learning, or something we’re committing to?”

• “What does this mean for the rest of the experience?”

They zoom out from their feature and consider:

• the system

• adjacent flows

• downstream impact

Design debt becomes visible when someone connects the dots.

How to push back without becoming ‘that designer’

This is where many designers freeze.

You don’t want to block progress.
You don’t want to sound pedantic.
You don’t want to be labeled “anti-shipping.”

So instead of saying:

“This creates design debt.”

Try framing it as:

• “This introduces a new pattern — are we comfortable expanding it elsewhere?”

• “If we learn X from this, do we plan to standardize or roll it back?”

• “What problem does this solve locally, and what problem might it create globally?”

You’re not saying no.

You’re asking the team to be intentional.

Reframing design debt so it actually gets addressed

Design debt gets ignored when it’s framed as:

• cleanup

• consistency

• visual polish

It gets addressed when it’s framed as:

• increased cognitive load for users

• higher development cost over time

• slower iteration due to fragmented systems

• risk to trust and predictability

One-off decisions don’t stay one-off.

Document how they:

• affect other flows

• change user expectations

• increase complexity downstream

That’s when leadership listens.

🚀 I challenge you

This week:

1. Identify one “small inconsistency” in your product.

2. Ask where else it shows up — or could show up.

3. Write one sentence connecting it to a broader experience or business risk.

4. Bring that framing into your next conversation.

You’re not advocating for perfection.

You’re advocating for coherence.

If you’re consistently flagging experience risk or preventing design debt, the Performance Kit helps you document that invisible work — so it actually counts in reviews and promotions.

Final thought

Design debt isn’t about messy screens.

It’s about unmade decisions.

And when those decisions stack up, the product pays for it — in confusion, inefficiency, and lost trust.

Strategic designers don’t just clean up debt.

They prevent it by helping teams choose intentionally.

That’s where real influence lives.

☝️ What’s your biggest challenge right now?

• “I see experience issues, but struggle to explain why they matter.”
  ➔ Why Before UI helps you articulate tradeoffs and system-level impact clearly.

• “I want to prevent design debt, not just react to it.”
  ➔ The Facilitator’s Handbook — frameworks for leading alignment conversations before decisions fragment.

• “My impact feels invisible over time.”
  ➔ The Performance Kit — track strategic contributions that don’t ship as screens.

Let me guess.

You know user research matters.
You want to validate your ideas.
But in your org?

There’s no research team.
No budget.
No time.
No access.

So you design anyway — hoping you’re right.

UX is a guessing game.

A lot designers are doing “UX” without users — not because they don’t care, but because their clients/company doesn’t support them.

👉 You told me yourself in my reader survey

And waiting for permission to do research usually means waiting forever.

So let’s talk about how designers actually collect insight when research isn’t part of the process.

First: reframe what “research” means

If your bar for research is:
• usability labs
• formal studies
• perfect sample sizes

You’ll never start.

But insight doesn’t only come from official research programs.

It comes from signals.

Your job isn’t to prove something beyond doubt — it’s to reduce uncertainty enough to make better decisions.

The strategic shortcut for working without research

When you don’t have users, data, or a research team, the real challenge isn’t insight.

It’s decision confidence.

That’s exactly what Why Before UI is designed to build.

It helps you practice:

• framing problems before solutions

• working with incomplete inputs

• explaining why a decision is reasonable — not perfect

Because in low-maturity orgs, strategy isn’t about certainty.
It’s about judgment.

👉 Join the Why Before UI Challenge →

4 low-effort ways to get user insight (without a research team)

These are things designers do all the time, myself included, in low-maturity orgs — they just don’t always label them as research.

1. Mine existing data

Support tickets. Sales notes. App store reviews. Internal docs.
Patterns live there — even if no one’s connected the dots yet.

You’re not looking for perfection.
You’re looking for repetition.

2. Talk to people closest to users

Support, sales, ops.

Ask one simple question:

“What problem do you see users struggle with the most right now?”

If three people say the same thing?
That’s a signal.

🔓 Coming up in the Paid Tier

• 2 additional ways to gather meaningful insight without users or a research team

• How to pressure-test ideas and expose assumptions before you ship

• How to create lightweight feedback loops inside the product itself

• How to connect small signals into credible evidence (without over-claiming)

• The judgment framework senior designers use to move forward responsibly under uncertainty

Read more