Ever feel caught up in the UX sales pipeline? The designer’s job is to “sell” a solution to their manager. The manager will only buy into a design that they can, in turn, sell to their boss. Eventually the organization tries to (literally) sell it to the customer. It may or may not succeed.
A better solution calls for centering UX as an organization-wide decision-making tool and a re-alignment of the decision-making hierarchy:
A comprehensive UX process calls for the entire organization to pivot around user experience. It is not the sole domain of design or UX.
It is worth asking this tough question: In your organization, are you selling to the customer, or to the next person up the chain of decision making? Are you playing a game of siloed, one-way, hot potato?
Making decisions about the business direction outside of this process forces the design and product teams to reverse engineer the brief. It puts managers into a false dichotomy of limited decisions. And it inevitably leaves executives holding that hot potato — the result of a whole chain of decision — at the end of the line!
Instead, centering the customer experience ensures that the one voice that determines your bottom line is empowered and heard, when it can have the most impact.
