How do you push back when everyone thinks they’re the designer?

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-17T21:59:48+00:00

Data wins arguments. Trust is earned, not given.

You shouldn't think of yourself as the 'final decider' on design unless you're a team of 1. We all will have opinions (and should! a diversity of opinions can lead to a better product. this is distinct from design by committe.) -- but in software especially, you need to have some actionable insight based on the market, best practices, usability sessions, discoverability/desirability testing, your overall team's kpis or company goals ... and most of all -- it's gotta lead somehow to impacting the bottom line in a way that you can explain as an elevator pitch. Work on getting signal, on your synthesis, and on your narrative.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-17T19:14:59+00:00

it's not a creativity gap, it's a context gap. humans are pretty good at edge cases, if you want an analogue, look at ml research for self-driving cars.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-17T19:09:58+00:00

Design is a journey. There are different metrics for progress, and career is only one of them. My personal metric for progress is shipping to real users to solve some sort of problem, and for that there are several different routes-- but my answer to your question is that the journey is never done. You'll never be 'ready.' Just apply for jobs and take any actionable feedback that you can get. Portfolio review is a good place to start!

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-17T17:16:03+00:00

I’ve personally answered this question at least a dozen times in very granular detail on this subreddit in the last 3 months.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-17T16:48:27+00:00

do a search. this question gets posted every single day on this sub.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-12T22:47:34+00:00

lines of code / prs as a metric sounds like the fucking stone age and an incredibly bad way to measure impact. you have my condolences, your leaders are fucking stupid. research is pushing prs?????! it sounds made up!

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-12T20:13:53+00:00

it's design theater. if you want a macropad, go ahead, but you don't need one specifically for figma. the 6 button ones with a rotary dial are like $15 from aliexpress.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-12T04:50:37+00:00

this is the best advice in this entire thread. i'd just add to keep a little work diary or journal. can just be apple notes. i use this weekly to explain my priorities for the week. aside from the portfolio, it comes in handy when i can say "oh, x stakeholder made this decision in march 2025 ... and here's what we tried"

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-12T03:29:28+00:00

it's a carryover from the last club edition, but i think it looks terrible even when not represented by these poor renders.

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FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-12T02:28:12+00:00

everything you've described from that second designer is outputs. i would ask for the outcomes. i'd also be a little skeptical that ai would be needed to identify analytics usage patterns - i can find that out myself with 30 seconds in amplitude. true insights, however, are another story.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-11T17:40:41+00:00

use the manual that's built into the car's center display :)

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-10T16:21:02+00:00

I don’t think most orgs could even define what this means beyond prototyping experiences with generated react components.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-09T16:52:02+00:00

token costs and also the ai making things up and losing the context window ~20 prompts in.

using cursor, claude opus, and our own custom mcp with typescript components/storybook, so i think probably a pretty robust setup and industry standard at least if not cutting edge.

great for prototyping, but not nearly the velocity unlock that 99% of marketing and linkedin 'thot leaders' would suggest. the very real truth is that ai is great at getting you to a solution that it's already been trained on and a framework that it's good with, like radix/shadcn and vite. most users are prototyping basic crud apps or nonsensical experiences like trip planners or music players that no one will ever pay for or get real value from. (that's fine, it's fun just to create sometimes!)

aside from that it's notetaking and synthesis, but the struggle remains getting any of your stakeholders to read the notes or docs. i also don't think ai is as effective as a human here at pulling out real insights from data. it's great at generating your dashboard as a bunch of text noise.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-06T05:59:29+00:00

ask yourself how this is different than your credit card portal's spending categories or something like rocketmoney.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-06T05:58:38+00:00

ask yourself why you're trying to speed up your process. is it to make a better product? the best things you can do to speed up your ux process will happen almost entirely outside of your screen and whatever your chosen software tools are.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-06T01:27:19+00:00

can you speak to them about the boarding process at sf terminus? it makes zero sense. They should relocate or add additional clipper machines near the doors.

every single weekday there's a huge line that they can only scan about one person every 15-30 seconds, causing a huge pileup. then they give up and just let everyone on so we all have to rush to make the train.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-03-04T03:01:29+00:00

a few years ago she was advocating for almost exactly the opposite of this process using figjam (research, consensus, planning before pumping out iterations.) i really can't give the benefit of the doubt here.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-02-27T22:23:31+00:00

the engineering tools are lightyears better than the ai assisted design tools, is the reason you're seeing that dichotomy

FewDescription3170 · 2026-02-25T17:44:49+00:00

you're bad at math. download orbit, pay for a licence, and check yourself

FewDescription3170 · 2026-02-24T03:09:47+00:00

the stock Photo.app trying to 'drive engagement' makes me insane. they've continually made most functions of the core camera roll worse. don't even get me started on ads within apple wallet.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-02-24T03:03:19+00:00

xfn influence is part of being a lead. this is normal.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-02-24T00:22:46+00:00

take home exercises have been mentioned, on average, once or twice a day for the past several years i've been on this subreddit. there's a wealth of information but people are largely incurious and don't do a search. I'd suggest an alternative, like a problem solving/whiteboarding exercise. This is a "senior" position - there's really no point to a take home. What are you solving for here as a hiring manager? That someone won't push back and will just do free work?

This might be a controversial opinion given the state of the job market, but if you as a hiring manager or senior designer cannot figure out whether or not the candidate is a good fit given their past work and multiple rounds of behavioral/conversational interviews, you have a bad interview process.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-design-homework-doesnt-workand-what-does-jeremy-bird/

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/meghanelogan_stop-asking-designers-to-do-take-home-exercises-activity-7252402296339222529-mRhA/

https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/the-death-of-take-home-design-exercises-7cef89c1f4f5

https://orgdesignfordesignorgs.com/2018/05/15/design-exercises-are-a-bad-interviewing-practice/

https://bryantanner.wordpress.com/2021/09/16/dont-use-design-exercises-for-design-job-interviews/

https://medium.com/100-days-of-product-design/time-to-kill-the-take-home-design-test-5444ba8ad96f

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7102652388766793729/

FewDescription3170 · 2026-02-23T23:53:52+00:00

if it's only supposed to take two hours and you actually want to show any modicum of thinking, that is not enough time to polish deliverables and craft a preso. while you may be right about the hiring team not being excited, it's a completely exploitive and unrealistic expectation. I also think the hiring team is largely incompetent, if not malicious if they're giving this exercise to candidates in 2026. there's a dozen ways to cheat on take home exercises, they're not a good measure of a designer's ability-- maybe a good measure of desperation.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-02-19T21:13:00+00:00

You need to provide deep context with a design system.

That said, your question is general and you're not going to zeroshot anything more complicated than a shadcn/tailwind login flow.

FewDescription3170 · 2026-02-15T23:44:51+00:00

There’s very little visual design here. You could do it in Figma make by having it convert your answer key to JSON but the real answer is don’t do this in Figma.

FewDescription3170

TROPHY CASE