#17 Your design is good. Now get it through the room.

There’s a moment I still think about from early in my career.

I was working on a project where the stakeholder had been heavily involved from the start, opinionated, present, the kind of person who had ideas about everything. One afternoon, before COVID when we all still shared an open space, he walked in unannounced, went straight to our developer’s desk, and handed him a sketch on a paper napkin: a mockup. His mockup. For my project.

He didn’t look at me once.

I was a junior designer, an introvert, and at the time I didn’t have the language or the confidence to say anything. I just froze in disbelief. It wasn’t only about the design being bypassed (*cough* mysoginy *cough cough*), but I made a decision somewhere in that period: if I was going to keep working in this field, I needed to get better at communicating my work. Not because I wanted to become a public speaker. Because I never wanted to feel like that again.

That shift changed a lot: I got more deliberate about how I explained my choices; I started learning how to handle difficult rooms; and I eventually did end up doing talks at design events, which my younger self would have found almost impossible.

But here’s what I want to say to anyone reading this who works in B2B or enterprise environments: the screens are (often) not the hard part.

I see this pattern a lot in mentoring and among peers: a designer lands a role at a SaaS company, a fintech, an enterprise product team. They’re good at their craft. They know how to run a discovery, structure a flow, put together a solid prototype. And then they hit a wall. Not a design problem, but a people problem. A stakeholder who asks for the wrong thing. A developer who rebuilds the design without telling anyone. A presentation that goes sideways in front of a room of people who don’t speak design.

Nobody prepares you for this: UX courses teach you the process, the portfolio tutorials teach you the output, but what you learn to do in a difficult meeting, you mostly learn alone. And usually through trial and error, usually after something goes wrong.

This is the gap I’ve been thinking about literally for years, and it’s the reason I designed this workshop.

B2B UX: Getting Your Design Through the Room is a 90-minute interactive workshop I’m running with Uxcel on July 7th at 6pm CEST. It’s built around three real scenarios, the kind that come up again and again in B2B contexts:

• The demo surprise: when the handoff falls apart

• The stakeholder pushing for the wrong solution: you suspect the request is masking a different need, but you don’t know how to surface it

• The stakeholder who critiques everything: the feedback session where nothing survives

For each one, we’ll work through what’s actually happening and what you can do about it. How to involve developers and PMs early enough to matter, how to go upstream from a bad request to the real problem, how to respond to pushback using UX patterns, benchmarks, and business goals rather than just defending your taste.

You’ll leave with a practical template you can use immediately, and a framework that covers the full arc from kickoff to delivery.

This is for junior and mid-level designers working in (or moving toward) B2B or enterprise. If you’re a senior looking for strategic leadership content, this probably isn’t the right fit. If you’re someone who feels like the design part is going fine but the everything-else part keeps getting in the way, this is for you.

B2B and enterprise design is one of the areas that seems to be holding up better than most right now. It’s also one of the least represented in online design content, which means most of us figure it out the hard way.

I’ve spent 8 years in this context. This workshop is the summary of what I wish someone had told me earlier.

Tickets are $150 (or $100 for Uxcel Pro members). Readers of this newsletter get $25 off with the code MARIAB2B25 at checkout!

👉 Grab your spot here — only 40 seats available.

📚 Mentorship Mastery If you’re thinking about becoming a mentor yourself, or want to understand what good mentorship looks like from the inside, I recommend checking out the Design Mentorship Mastery course on Uxcel — it’s a great resource for anyone who wants to approach mentoring the right way.

💬 Work with me 1:1 I still have a few open spots for mentorship on MentorCruise. If you’re looking for a one-off portfolio and CV review instead, you can book one under “Sessions”.