Episode #863
Your UX team is set up for the wrong job
I spent a good chunk of my career insisting that proper UX work should only be done by proper UX people, and I told myself that was about protecting quality, when honestly a fair amount of it was about protecting my own job description. I would sit in a meeting, watch a product owner sketch a screen on a whiteboard, and feel a small internal wince, as if they had wandered into my kitchen and started rearranging the crockery. It felt professional at the time. It was territorial, and it has not aged well. These days I find myself telling clients something that would have horrified younger me. If you want better digital products, the answer probably isn't sending more work through your UX team. It's changing what you employ them to do. Everybody is designing now, whether you sanctioned it or not You have almost certainly seen this happening inside your own organization. Somebody without design in their job title describes an idea to an AI tool and comes back a few hours later with a clickable prototype, realistic content, passable copy, and a flow that mostly hangs together. Developers are generating interface options before the ticket is even refined. Marketers are building and testing their own landing pages. Product owners are turning a rough thought into something demonstrable over a lunch break. Some of that work is genuinely good. Some of it is a small mountain of plausible looking rubbish that nobody has the expertise to spot. All of it is happening whether the design team blesses it or not, and it happens fast, which means it usually arrives before anyone thinks to involve them. Cutting the design team is the obvious response and the expensive one I understand the temptation. The team is expensive, the tooling has made production cheap, and somebody senior is asking what the return on all that research actually is. So the headcount that leaves doesn't get replaced, the budget line gets trimmed, and the design team's seat at the table quietly becomes an invitation to comment on decisions after they have been made. What you lose in that trade is judgment, and it shows up about two quarters later. Every team invents its own version of the same pattern, so the product starts to feel like it was assembled from three different companies. Accessibility problems accumulate because generated interfaces look fine and fail quietly. Decisions get made on assumption rather than evidence, so you build things nobody wanted and only find out after launch. Rework becomes the largest hidden line in your delivery costs, and nobody attributes it to the design cut that caused it. The organizations getting this right aren't the ones with the biggest design teams. They are the ones who moved their design people upstream, away from producing every screen and toward setting the conditions in which everybody else produces decent ones. What that structure actually looks like The version of this role that earns its keep looks less like a traditional designer and more like a conductor . Rather than routing all design work through a small team and watching a queue form, you fund that team to build the tools, standards, and guidance everyone else needs. Quality gets protected through what you hand people, rather than through gatekeeping that colleagues will route around anyway. In practice that means investing in a handful of assets. A design system with real usage guidance**, so a developer building a screen at 4pm on a Friday makes a reasonable decision without asking permission. Playbooks for the work people keep repeating**, like a landing page playbook that walks a marketer through structure, evidence, and calls to action without them inventing it from scratch each time. A research repository anybody can query**, tagged and maintained, so the research you already paid for keeps earning its money long after the readout deck has been forgotten. Functional personas that stakeholders can interrogate**, built around what customers are trying to get done rather than their age and job title, and useful enough to settle an argument in a meeting. Standards for briefing AI well , because the difference between useful output and confident nonsense sits almost entirely in the brief, and your design people are better placed than anyone to teach that. Alongside those assets, the team offers services rather than delivery. Open office hours for anyone about to build something, quick audits of work in progress, coaching for the team that keeps getting it wrong, training for the people who want to get it right. They still take on the genuinely hard, high risk design problems, but they stop being the only route to a wireframe. What has to change on your side None of this survives contact with the existing performance conversation, because most design teams are still measured on throughput. If you judge them on how many screens and tickets they got through, they will keep behaving like a production line and the queue will reappear within a month. Measure adoption of the design system instead, along with reuse of existing research, and the quality of what non-designers are shipping without help. The hiring mix shifts too. You need fewer people whose main strength is producing polished interfaces, and more who can think about systems, standards, research operations, and how to influence colleagues who don't report to them. Give them the authority to set standards that hold across teams, and get them into decisions early enough to shape what gets built rather than tidy it afterward. Somewhere sensible to start Ask whoever runs design for you what people keep coming to them for, week after week. Not what they think colleagues should want, the requests that genuinely keep landing. Then fund turning one of those into something the rest of the business can use without them. One playbook, one documented pattern, one persona people can question. See what it does to the queue, and do the next one. The uncomfortable part is that a team working this way looks less busy for a while, and busy has been our proxy for valuable for about two decades. That freed up time is the whole point, because it's where the strategic work finally happens. There is considerably more to it than I can fit in an email, which is why I have put together a free course on exactly this. Fourteen short lessons on shifting from doing the work to directing it, with the workshop slides thrown in. You can sign up here , and it's worth forwarding to whoever leads design for you. If you think I've got any of this wrong, hit reply and tell me, because I'm still working out how much of it I have.
