On UX Leadership

Why we should focus more on UX leadership.

“Designers need to distinguish essential, important, and nice to have. Engineers need to quantify what ‘hard’ means.”

“There should be large red text on every survey creation tool: the answer to ‘Will you use this product?’ is a lie.”

“Time spent clearly defining the problem is worthwhile. Time spent admiring the complexity of the problem is not.”

“In product & UX, unskilled people with the right values & priorities often make better decisions than skilled people with the wrong ones.”

“It’s important that design leaders see making progress as success, rather than seeing incomplete Nirvana as failure.”

“Poor leaders blame their teams for failure. Good leaders start with: what could I have done better to help them succeed?”

“It’s not about whether your organization values ‘design.’ It’s about whether your organization truly values humans.”

“Don’t be data-driven. Be data-informed. Metrics should never be in charge because they have no moral compass.”

“Until we measure what we value, we will over-value what we measure.”

“The ability to break down a complex project into manageable chunks is a hugely underrated professional skill. Strange that so few people hire and evaluate for it.”

“Conversations go better when you make sure you understand the other person’s point of view before you argue with something they’re not saying.”

“Conversations go better when you make sure you understand the other person’s point of view before you argue with something they’re not saying.”

“A design is not an answer. It’s a hypothesis. Forgetting this leads to arrogance. Failing to communicate it leads to disappointed stakeholders.”

“If you want to predict future user behavior, focus on deeply understanding current behavior and motivations instead of asking users to predict what they’ll do with a product they’ve never seen.”