“You can’t prove your value to someone whose business value relies on not seeing it,” and other inspirational meanderings by Wachter-Boettcher about the position of UX and design in product development, where designers’ livelihood and mental well-being gets threatened by late-stage capitalism.
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Some great concepts in this article. Fantastic.
It’s time to let our organizations shoulder that pain.
That’s something Melanie Seibert, a UX manager, learned to do—despite deep fears that saying “no” would hurt her career:
The biggest issue for me was…confronting the fear that someone might say that you’re not doing your job: “This is what I hired you for. I had the expectation that you were going to cover eight products, and you’re not doing that.” That never happened.
Read that again: that never happened. The risk was a lot bigger in her head than it turned out to be in reality.
And further down, but in the same section:
It’s also what Michaela Hackner, a global head of UX ops, started doing with her boss:
We’ve published our 2023 commitments, and we update those every quarter. And so if my boss ultimately says, “Hey, I need your team member to do this,” I’ll say: “Take a look at this list. Which of these things do you not want us to do?”
Both of these are awesome pieces of advice. The article became somewhat less mind-blowing as it went on and I skimmed at the end. But the first section calls on people to revolutionize their attitudes. Great stuff.
This may be the best article I’ve read all year and its story of UI and the pointlessness of trying to convince someone who never valued you in the first place.