We Meticulously Design Everything But Ourselves

It’s time for us to change if we want to build great products.

Our customers will never see our org chart, but I promise you, they’ll feel it.

We are incredibly passionate about delivering exceptional customer experiences. We map user journeys with forensic detail. We craft personas with deep empathy and debate the affordance of a button, the clarity of a label, and the emotional impact of an animation. We write the perfect tickets and apply rigorous, human-centered design processes to digital interfaces.

We’ve gotten so good at product! 🎉 Go us!

Then we walk into a meeting, and we forget to apply any of that thinking to ourselves.

Every single person you work with has an experience of you. Product managers, engineers, designers, marketers, leaders, and stakeholders. They are your users, experiencing you every day.

What is that experience like? By the end of this article, I hope to convince you that it’s the most important thing that matters right now.

Let’s uncover why.

How do you present information?

When you share something in Slack, do you drop a link, or do you provide context, state the goal, and clarify the kind of feedback you need? When you speak in a meeting, is your message clear, concise, and accessible? Or is it full of jargon, condescension, and assumptions?

Are you easy to work with?

When an engineer comes to you with a technical constraint, is your initial reaction collaborative problem-solving or defensive frustration? Can people give you critical feedback without fearing a negative emotional response? Is there a clear and predictable way to engage with you to get a good outcome?

What is your emotional design?

How do people feel after interacting with you? Do they feel energized, seen, and respected? Or do they feel drained, anxious, or dismissed?

These feelings don’t just dissipate into the ether. They get encoded directly into the work.

An energized engineer writes better, more thoughtful code. A product manager who feels seen champions the customer with more passion. A respected designer pushes for a more elegant solution and advocates for the customer. But a drained team that can’t work together settles for “good enough.”

And it shows in the product.

Customers will feel the ghost of our unresolved arguments in every broken flow, and the warmth of our trust in each intuitive detail. The reason this matters so much has nothing to do with process diagrams. A poorly designed team experience will slowly grind you down.

Have you ever felt that pit in your stomach on a Sunday night? That feeling comes from this. The burnout you feel comes from this. But we don’t have a burnout problem; we have a “working with difficult people” problem. The work isn’t killing us. The emotional labor of navigating egos is.

We tell ourselves our job is to solve customer problems. But day to day, we spend so much of our lives just trying to navigate the people we work with. Mastering how you show up for your team determines everything. You either go home feeling energized by a challenge you all solved together, or you close your laptop feeling completely drained.

One path leads to a long, happy career. The other leads to you wanting out.

For years, we’ve looked to UX maturity models to guide our growth.

These models from groups like Nielsen Norman, Interaction Design Foundation, Jared Spool, and others are invaluable. They provide a ladder to climb, from organizations where UX is an afterthought to ones where it is deeply integrated into strategy. They teach us to systematize research, build design systems, and secure executive buy-in.

They measure processes and outcomes.

But they have a glaring blind spot.

They measure the machinery of UX, but not the spirit. They can tell you if you are doing user research, but not if the team is doing it with genuine curiosity or just checking a box. They can tell you if you have a design system, but not if the team using it collaborates with joy or hates working together.

The invisible tensions, unspoken frustrations, and subtle power dynamics are the dark matter of product development. They have immense gravity. They pull and warp the final product in ways our neat process diagrams never predict. The seams of a dysfunctional team will always show in the final user interface. A disjointed product is the artifact of a disjointed team.

Most product roadmaps are documents of political compromise, not a strategic, collaborative vision. They show who won the most arguments, not what’s best for the customer.

This matters more than ever.

Because… AI is being shoved down our throats. There is a palpable, choking anxiety in our industry, a fear that AI will automate our jobs away. That it will take over wireframing, generate user flows, write product requirements documents, conduct research, and synthesize it, and more.

And you know what? It will. It will do a lot of that, and it will do it faster than any of us can.

AI will become the ultimate tool for executing the “what.” It’ll generate a hundred variations of a screen and summarize a thousand user reviews. It’ll write boilerplate code and build the shell of the product that is quite functional and usable.

But what can it not do?

• AI can’t have an intuitive conversation with a frustrated engineer to find a creative technical solution.

• Nor can it feel the hesitation in a product manager’s voice and ask the gentle, probing question that uncovers a hidden personal matter.

• It can’t create psychological safety in a design critique.

• Or kindly mentor a junior employee.

AI, for all the hype and progress it brings, cannot navigate the delicate, complex, and beautiful mess of human collaboration. AI will automate the mechanical parts of our jobs, forcing us to double down on the one thing it cannot replicate.

Humanity.

Our value as product practitioners will not be in our ability to push the perfect pixels but in our ability to facilitate understanding, build consensus, ask profound questions, resolve human conflict, inspire a team, and inform a product with a point of view.

AI can’t give a product its “soul”; that’s up to us… You and me. The messy, beautiful, broken, intelligent, fragmented, and insanely talented humans working together to build amazing things. Our value will be directly proportional to the quality of our “UX of You.”

Can we just be honest about what this AI moment means for our jobs?

Any of us can now use a tool to generate a dozen decent screens in under a minute. Our technical skill with software is quickly becoming the baseline, the absolute minimum entry fee.

So, what’s left for us to do?

Well, spoiler alert. We have the part that the machine can’t touch. The human part. The ability to walk into a tense room and help everyone find safety together. The patience to mentor a junior colleague and the empathy to hear the hesitation in someone’s voice and ask, “Are you doing okay?”

AI will never be able to do that. And these skills to connect, persuade, and create safety for others become the thing that protects your value. These skills are why someone will want you, a human, on their team and not just a better suite of AI tools. Without it, you are competing against the machine. With it, you are leading the people who use the machine.

You have to choose which one you want to be.

Teams that master this will thrive. They will use AI as a powerful tool to amplify their human collaboration. They will build products that feel cohesive, thoughtful, and deeply human, because the process that created them was exactly that.

Teams that ignore “The UX of You” in their maturity scales and see themselves merely as operators of an AI-powered machine will build products that reflect it. Soulless, generic, and disjointed. Functional, perhaps, but forgettable.

The market will be flooded with these AI-generated “good enough” slop-products, and the only way to stand out will be to create something truly exceptional. That level of quality only comes from an exceptional team experience.

Stop worrying about whether AI will take your job. Start worrying about whether you’re the person on the team that AI gets called in to replace.

Here’s how you do it.

It’s time we add a “relational” layer to UX maturity models.

Your company doesn’t have a product problem. It likely has a series of unresolved conversations that are masquerading as a product problem. We need to start designing and measuring our own experiences with the same rigor we apply to our products. We need to add a new dimension to our maturity models — The Relational Layer.

I’m not talking about forced fun or team-building exercises. This is about being intentional and applying our product skills to ourselves. The same way we think about a customer’s journey through an app, we can think about our team’s journey through a project.

Here is what that maturity model could look like, not as a replacement, but as a crucial, parallel track to existing UX maturity models.

Level 1: Unaware

• How it looks on a team: Interactions between team members are ad-hoc and often reactive. Blame is common when things go wrong. Feedback is unstructured and frequently feels personal. Meetings are draining. Individuals optimize for their own success or survival.

• How it shows up in the product: The product feels inconsistent. Features feel bolted on. The customer can sense the different “authors” of the experience. The org chart is visible in the UI.

Level 2: Aware

• How it looks on a team: Individuals begin to recognize that the way they interact matters. Someone might say, “I think we need to communicate better.” There are pockets of good collaboration, usually driven by specific individuals with high emotional intelligence.

• How it shows up in the product: Some parts of the product are great, while others are messy. The experience is a rollercoaster. A beautifully designed flow might lead to a dead-end error state that feels like an afterthought.

Level 3: Intentional

• How it looks on a team: The team starts designing its interactions. They establish “rules of engagement” for meetings. They create a template for giving design feedback that separates the person from the work. They explicitly discuss communication styles. The “UX of You” is a topic in retrospectives.

• How it shows up in the product: The product becomes more cohesive. There is a sense of a guiding hand. The core user journeys are smooth and well-considered. The rough edges start to disappear.

Level 4: Managed

• How it looks on a team: The team actively manages its relational health. Psychological safety is a priority. Peer feedback is a structured, encouraged, regular practice, focusing on both the work and the collaboration. The team can have difficult conversations productively and emerge stronger.

• How it shows up in the product: The product feels polished and trustworthy. It anticipates user needs. It handles edge cases and errors with grace. The customer feels cared for because the team that built it cared for each other.

Level 5: Innate

• How it looks on a team: This is the ideal state. Collaboration is fluid, intuitive, and energizing. Trust is implicit. Empathy for each other is as high as empathy for the user. The team operates from a place of shared purpose and mutual respect. The “UX of You” is no longer a process; it is simply who they are.

• How it shows up in the product: The product is a joy to use. It has a distinct and positive personality. It is more than just a functional product. What the customer holds in their hand feels delightful. It feels like it was made by people who loved their work, and that feeling is contagious.

How to start designing “your” UX.

When you look back on your career one day, what do you want the story to be about? Will you talk about the specific interfaces you designed, or will you talk about the teams you were a part of and how you changed people’s lives?

Do you want to be remembered as a master of your favorite tool, or as the person who helped everyone around them do the best work of their lives?

When we get this right, the work itself feels different. The struggle becomes creative, not destructive. The job becomes a joy again. We end up building great products with teams that people feel lucky to have been a part of.

This might feel cheesy and abstract, but this simple change will create a profound impact on your life. It begins with you, today. You already have the skills. You are a product professional. Apply the skills you already have to design how you want to be experienced by others. Amazing things will follow in your life and career.

1. Conduct a user interview (with a teammate). Take a trusted colleague out for lunch. Ask them: “What is it like working with me? When do you feel most energized when we collaborate? When do you feel frustrated? What is one thing I could do to make our work together easier?” Then, just listen. Don’t get defensive. Get curious. You have just received invaluable user feedback.

2. Prototype a new interaction. Before your next meeting, state your intentions clearly at the top. Say something like, “My goal for this meeting is to validate the overall flow for user onboarding. I am not focused on visual polish right now. Please focus your feedback there. I want this to be a conversation, so please jump in.” You have just set the affordances for the interaction.

3. Think about your personal information architecture. Look at your last ten messages in Slack. Are they clear? Do they provide enough context for someone to act? Or do they create more questions than answers? A little bit of upfront effort in how you communicate can save your team hours of confusion.

4. Acknowledge the emotional layer. The next time you feel that friction on a project, pause. Name the feeling, even just to yourself. Is it anxiety? Frustration? Confusion? Then, consider its source. Is it about the design, or is it about a communication breakdown? Acknowledging the emotion is the first step toward designing a better emotional outcome.

This is the additional layer our industry needs.

The most valuable, human, and most durable thing we will ever design is the experience of creating with each other. That feeling of psychological safety, shared purpose, and genuine care is the secret ingredient that the machines will never have.

I am not perfect at this. None of us is. It is a continuous practice. Being a great product builder is not just about mastering our tools or understanding cognitive biases. That is the table stakes now. Being a great practitioner is about mastering yourself and seeing every interaction as a product problem. Every conversation, critique, and every collaboration is a product you are putting into your team’s world.

The next generation of truly legendary products will not be built by the teams with the fanciest tools or the most rigid processes. They will be built by the teams who master how they’re experienced by others on the team. They will be built by people who understand that the most important thing we design is the human experience of creation itself.

Design that well, and the products we build for the world will have a reason to exist. It’s how we avoid AI slop. It’s how we improve lives. These products we put out into the world will have a little piece of our best selves inside them.

❤️

Are you looking to stand out and improve how others experience you? I teach soft skills that get you hired and promoted. Connect with nearly 5,000 others on my Medium page, or add me on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X.

I can’t wait to help you design the UX of YOU!