 How do you build a UX culture in a company that doesn't value UX? What if you're the only designer? What about if you want to get promoted in the same company? How would you do it? Okay, what's up? I didn't press record on this video, but I did record Zoom, so bear with me. Hi, I'm Chris. Previously, the head of design and now founder of UX Playbook. Today, I'll be speaking to one of my mentees about her two struggles. UX is not valued in her company and how to get promoted. I'll share tactics that I've used and a step-by-step process. Now let's jump on the call. So your title is a senior product designer, but you're just doing a lot more, right? You think you deserve the lead role as you also are the only designer. So you're doing things like designing, user research, design ops, road mapping, okay, our presentations, just everything that you should be doing and more. And that's the argument. Also, because your company is dev or engineering focused, they don't really have a clear career path for a designer like yourself. And also the excuse of, because we're quite flat, authority doesn't matter and title doesn't matter, but we know that in career it kind of matters if you're playing this game. If you have a lead role, it'll be much easier to jump into another lead role versus if you have a senior role today and you're trying to apply for a lead role tomorrow, it's going to be much harder for you to kind of get your foot in the door anywhere else, right? So it does matter in this sense. And of course, a lead holds much more weight in meetings with customers, with clients and with juniors as well, right? Like that's kind of how they think of it. The first thing is if I was to reframe what you said, which is how do I pitch that I'm lead role material? I think that's the first thing we need to tackle. And I would encourage you to build a brag sheet of accomplishments at work. And what does this mean and how do you do it? A brag sheet of accomplishments is basically all the things that you accomplished throughout the last six months. Really simple. It could be over a year, over two years, depends how long you stay in the company. So how do you do this? You record this on a living document, so like Google Docs or whatever. And you basically document the accomplishment and wins that are super important to you throughout the year, but also super important to the team, the impact that you made. And you would actually use this as the baseline of presenting your case during performance reviews or whenever that happens, right? Why do you do this? Because you want to be sure that when you have these conversations about salary, about title, about what you're worth to the company, that you're really sure that you can provide some quick examples that actually make sense. Because a lot of people don't do this in their career. And this is bad because we all suffer from recency bias, which means if you did something one month ago, I might remember. But if you did something six months ago, I've almost completely forgotten about. But maybe the thing six months ago was way more important and really helped the team. So this is why we record it for ourselves, but also we then formulate that into something that we can present. Also, I'm not a big fan of waiting for performance reviews. Some companies have it every six months, some have it one year, some have it every two years. I think that is BS. So for me, I would say I like to at least do it every six months, given if my brag sheet is good enough, and I can actually fight for the case of renegotiating salary. So you should be the one asking for performance reviews. You should be the one ready to pitch why you deserve this role. Not anybody else because you should be the one valuing yourself over everybody else. If your manager values you more, then I would argue that you need some more self-love. But anyway, previously I did it in a one or two-slide format and I put things like cultural contribution, design ops contribution, project work contribution and other achievements. Those are like four main categories. You can have your own categories. These are really up to you. So you could basically write down all your accomplishments and then affinity diagram it and just categorize them and be like, okay, these are the things. Basically it's just to help them digest the information a lot easier. And also you can see like, oh, clearly I love this cultural aspect of building companies and building teams and I've done a lot for that. So there's different pros and cons that you can come up with while affinity diagramming. So that's one way of doing it. And then the other way, which I forgot to mention, before you come into this, let's just say pitch meeting of I deserve more, here's the evidence. You can also do something that's really well used in the industry of products, like digital products or any products really you buy online, which is reviews, right? People look at reviews all the time about everything. Why are you not asking people to review yourself? We call this at work, 360 feedback, right? And it could be the main three people you work with or five people. And it's really just to be like, hey, I've worked with you for six months now. I would love if you could just write a few things about what you enjoyed working with me. So basically you should make it really simple for people. So here are the three questions I would ask. What do I do well? What could be improved? And what's your ideal scenario with working with me? Right? And those three questions could just be one line each, right? It could be a survey and it could be these people that... And then you take that and you really just give up a quote and be like, look, I've worked with this square master, he said this, I worked with the PO, he said this, and I've worked with another dev and he said this. And this is the backup for all the contributions, right? So you can kind of align them with the contributions you made or the biggest one or the biggest theme that you come up with. And then that feedback could either relate to that or relate to different sections of your brag sheet, if you will. So yeah, 360 feedback is super important. I have this on my portfolio as well. So then you can like add that to your portfolio. You can use LinkedIn recommendations that you've previously gone, whatever, that will help you kind of move the ball forward. But if you're pitching it to your specific company, then it will be the people in that company that's worked with you, okay? And then the last thing is about goals. So I've wrote a lot about things on goals, I even have a six step process, but really the goals, whether it's your career or in the job environment, really needs to reflect what you want to do. So it always comes back to the point of introspection. First is like, what values do I have? Like what do I care about? Whether it's mastery, like I want to be the best designer ever, or whether it's like helping others, right? And whatever the value you think is most rewarding and why you do what you do, then from the values you break it down into motivations, right? So maybe if you want to be the best designer, why do you want to be the best designer, right? That's one of the values of mastery. Maybe you love learning complex items and teaching others. Maybe you just really have this knack for understanding things. Maybe you really like the tools that you use, whatever the value is. So you can really break down the value into motivations. It takes a bit of work if you haven't done it before, but you can kind of dream up of these ideas. And then from there, you have a really good baseline of like, okay, well, if this is what I value and this is what motivates me, the goals could stem from there quite easily. And these are not just arbitrary goals that your company sets you, improve revenue by X percent. These would actually be the goals that you care about, right? And then from then on, of course, if you know OKRs, you say, all right, so the objective is to do this goal. Let's just say you've picked a goal of like getting to lead position within the next three months, then you're going to have to have key results to measure that, right? Like how are you going to do it? You're going to have multiple reviews with your manager. You are going to build your bracket sheet. You are going to chop up these things in different ways. If you were to pitch your manager about getting a raise, here's what you do first, right? From senior to lead. Okay, so the first thing you'll do is build a bracket sheet. You want to list out all your accomplishments, what you did, not why you did it, but like why it's important. Why does it move the needle? Then after you have that, you want to kind of do this infinity diagram. And really, this is just for your personal benefit, but also it makes it easier to read. Like the major themes that you've contributed to, whether it's culture, design ops, project work, other achievements, whatever these things are, right? Then you have this, then it's time to kind of put this into a presentable format, right? And this will be just a slide format, something you can send someone and they can understand really well. Remember, you want to cut down these sort of bracket sheet accomplishments into like super easy to understand, half a sentence type bullet points, basically. And then you want to gather some 360 feedback, three questions you ask. When you work with me, what did I do well? What can be improved? What is your ideal scenario when working with me? So you grab that, you then concise that down and put that into the slide, right? So maybe you have one, two or three slides, right? So the first slide could be your contributions, aggregated in themes. The second slide and the third slide could be just feedback you got from your team. So that is your pitch, but from what you've said, there's also a bunch of things that you want to do to improve the UX organization within your company, right? So you say, hey, this is what I've done, okay? And then now you say, this is my ask. You say, you know, this is what I would do. I want to bring people in the process. I want to train people, right? I think design is super important and I'm going to move the needle forward, right? Because you don't just want to say, here's what I've done, give me a raise. You want to say, no, I can do way more than what I've done and this is what I want to do. And then you lay out the plan of how you want to spread UX throughout the organization, you know, that you want to hire, right? Actually, it should be this. Brecksheet, step one and 360 feedback. Step two is what you want to do, like what your ideal sort of recommendations are for the organization, where you want to take it, right? And then the third, the last is your ask. So he should walk out of that conversation and be like, I know exactly what she was. She was two more people and she wants to spend 50% of the time on projects, 50% on other. Maybe that's not a reality for you, but it could be a conversation that you have to kind of negotiate what that ask is, right? But you should have a clear ask. So those are really the three steps. That's how I would formulate it. And where you start the conversation about your workload and the impact it has, you know, long term on your health at the company, that's really up to you. I think it could go at the end in terms of before you ask, you give him the reality of today, right? You say, hey, man, I'm so burnt out. This is crazy, but I want to do all this stuff that I just mentioned. Here's my presentation to you. Here's what I'm going to do. Here's what you need to do for me. So I don't feel like this, plus I can help the organization do that, all that stuff that we just mentioned. So that would be kind of a four-step process or three-ish step, a 3.5-step process. Yeah. So let's recap it in three simple steps. The first one is rag sheet, what I've done and what have people said about my good work, right? That's the first one. Then the second step is recommendations, what I'm going to do for you, right, and the company. Then the third one is my ask, the reality of today and what I need from you as the manager. And then with those three steps, I think that is your strategy to kind of one, get a raise, two, get more resources, three, actually tell him you're not happy and that he can help if he wants to. And then four is kind of just to be like, you know, I'm doing a lot of work, right? You better kind of give me some recognition for this work. Maybe five would be, here's the vision I have for this team. So you're showing a more strategic and leadership side of yourself, right? It's not just about you. It's about what's good for the company, what's good for the team, what's good for the product. So there's actually quite a few beneficial things that are just made up on the spot. Pretty good, right? And that's it. If you're interested in UX mentorship, let's jump on a call. Link in the description. Or, or, or, hit the big red button. Here, I think. Anyway. Okay, bye.