At my first workplace, when I was the first and only UX person at my job, I pitched my boss on running usability tests. He refused and said something along the lines of:
”We don’t want to disturb our clients”
I remember the frustration of that moment, because I hadn’t found a way to make him see why it mattered: a better product would translate to better adoption, retention and less trouble for the support team, but I wasn’t able to convey the message.
At the same company, a senior staff member once literally told me “I am the user,” while being nothing close to one. Looking back, that place was not ideal to say the least, but it’s a good example of what happens when research (or more broadly, design thinking) isn’t part of the culture at all: people equate their own opinion with actual data because nobody’s ever shown them the difference.
This is common in old fashioned B2B/enterprise environments, where:
The product sells enough that they don’t see the need in improving what’s already there;
Budgets are tight;
Design is seen only as making pretty things;
Stakeholders have an old fashioned approach where they are used to deciding based on gut feeling or seniority
And the idea of “wasting” a client’s time on an interview sounds absurd to someone who’s never seen what it uncovers.
If you’re in this situation, waiting for permission to arrive isn’t a strategy. You need small, low-risk ways to get research done anyway, and a way to pitch it that doesn’t require anyone to change their mind about UX in general.
One of the best examples I’ve seen came from a former boss and mentor of mine. The company had a business problem: a feature almost nobody was using. Instead of proposing a research phase that would slow things down, he suggested:
small UX fixes to the flow, that could be implemented right away;
running interviews in parallel to understand the deeper issue.
Important to note, he got to the meeting with a detailed enough plan of how the research would go. The result? The stakeholders approved!
To get the interviews started, he got sales involved through their own manager to find willing customers, and we ended up interviewing close to 20 users. That’s not a number you get from cold outreach: it came from having the right ally inside the company opening doors for you.
Sales and customer support are often the easiest way in when nobody will approve a formal research budget. In a small company I worked at, this felt easy: informal conversations turned into listening in on customer calls, and at one point I was handling onboarding myself, which meant I was the first person users emailed when something didn’t work. While this didn’t fit the UX job title, I found that you end up hearing what people need without having to schedule anything.
If you want this to become a habit rather than a one-off, ask sales who your most engaged, “veteran” clients are. Then, organize short interviews/user tests (with the help and presence of your sales colleagues, and with your stakeholders in the loop).
Laura Klein talks about this in her Agile UX course: building a small pool of “beta testers” helps you find problems you might have missed. Once that pool exists, you don’t need to fight for access every time you have a question: you already have people who are happy to talk to you.
When there’s no access to real users at all, interviewing colleagues who share a similar role to your end users can still surface something useful, though I’d treat it as a stopgap rather than a substitute.
A couple of things make all of this smoother:
Spend time building relationships: just a simple chat with the marketing lead in the break room once landed me an internal design sprint workshop.
Go through a warm contact rather than reaching out cold: some people don’t respond well to being summoned out of nowhere, and being mindful of company politics saves you from burning a relationship before it starts.
Find out what matters to the business: avoid design jargon and speak the business’ language to make them understand the ROI of research.
When it comes to recruiting, it’s also worth having something to offer participants, and it doesn’t need to be expensive: free credits worked in my case, but a small extra service, a call with the team, or even an Amazon gift card can be enough. Find whatever’s low-effort or low-budget and offer it.
Start with more open-minded stakeholders: getting a stakeholder to approve any of this usually comes down to who you pitch first. Recently, I successfully pitched usability tests in a project where the stakeholder was someone who was already fairly open-minded to our design activities rather than trying to convince the most skeptical person in the room. The idea was that if it goes well with them, word spreads on its own. What made it an easy yes was framing the activity as low-effort on their end, and tying it to something they already cared about: catching problems before development, so we weren’t building the wrong thing and finding out later. If you’re stuck in an environment where research isn’t valued yet, start with whoever’s easiest to bring on board rather than the person most resistant to the idea. One approved activity is easier to point to than an argument about why research matters in the first place.
Have you tried other things that worked well? Or is there something specific you’re still struggling with? I’d love to know!
👩🏻🏫 I’ll be speaking at Push UX in Munich this fall! I’ll be running one of the breakout sessions on how to deal with stakeholders. Got a stakeholder situation? I'd love your input!
📚 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 have a couple of open spots for mentorship on MentorCruise. If you’re looking for a one-off call or portfolio and CV review instead, you can book one under “Sessions.”
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