Hey friend,
A quick life update before we get into it.
I’ve been heads down teaching the Claude Code AI Product & Design Velocity course.
I also celebrated my friend Vida’s book launch. Soft Power. A room full of brilliant people, a couch, and me telling an unscripted story about Bruce Lee and learning to be like water. More on that another time. But go get the book.
And quietly, in the background, I’ve been sitting with a calling: Title jail.
The idea that most of us wrap our entire identity around what we do and what we’re called. Senior / Lead / Head of X …The moment the title disappears, so does the sense of self.
I’ve been training myself to escape it.
True freedom, I’m realising, is when you no longer need to hold on to what others see you as.
But that’s a longer letter for another day.
The skill nobody taught us in design school.
Something I’ve noticed teaching over 200 designers through my courses
They are brilliant.
Thoughtful. Strategic. Deeply skilled.
They came to the course because they’ve noticed how important it is to talk about their work in a way that makes executives care.
Not because they’re bad communicators.
Because nobody ever taught them the translation.
The reason designers work gets backlogged first isn’t because design isn’t valuable.
It’s because of where we sit in the org.
A salesperson closes a deal. The money hits the account. The link is direct. A marketing campaign runs. Downloads go up. Clear cause and effect.
Design ships a feature.
Something improves. Maybe conversion. Maybe retention. Maybe nothing measurable yet.
But who gets credit? The PM who owned the strategy. Who gets cut when budgets tighten? The designer.
It’s not personal. It’s structural.
The further you are from a clear financial outcome, the harder your value is to defend.
Design sits 4 steps from the C-suite conversation. User researchers sit further.
And when a CFO has to choose between cutting the sales team or cutting design? That math is brutally simple for them.
There are 4 steps between your design work and the thing the business actually cares about.
→ What you built → How it changed customer behavior → What that did to the business metrics → How that moved the financial outcome
Most designers nail step 1.
“We built a design system.”
Cool. And?
Almost nobody connects all the way through. And that’s exactly where the PM steps in and takes the narrative. Not because they did more work. Because they speak that language fluently and we don’t.
Early in my career I thought making myself smaller would work.
If my ask is small enough, maybe they’ll say yes.
“It’s just a small usability issue. Low effort.”
“Can we just tighten the navigation? Nothing major.”
“Can we just clean up the empty states before we launch?”
Every time. Deprioritised. Ignored. Not right now.
Here’s what I learned the hard way.
Small asks don’t feel safe to executives. They feel forgettable.
If the benefit isn’t obvious, the cost always wins.
The designers who get resourced, get heard, get their work shipped. They don’t make themselves smaller. They make the value impossible to ignore.
“The redesign reduced cognitive load.”
Crickets in the boardroom.
Not because the work wasn’t good. Because nobody at that table knows what to do with that sentence.
Design has a language problem, not a value problem.
We were trained to talk about craft. Hierarchy. Flow. Friction. Clarity.
The C-suite was trained to talk about money. Revenue. Retention. Cost. Growth.
Neither side is wrong.
But only one of them is in the minority. And it’s us.
“This flow change increased checkout completion by 14%.”
Same work. Different sentence. Completely different conversation.
Take a project you’re currently working on.
Walk it through the 4 steps out loud.
What did you build.
How will it change what users do.
What business metric does that move.
How does that connect to revenue or cost.
You don’t need perfect data. A clear hypothesis is enough to start.
That’s the translation.
And once you learn it, you can’t unlearn it.
Until next time,
Jac x
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