About this episode
In today’s episode, I’m going to perhaps work myself out of some consulting engagements, but hey, that’s ok! True consulting is about service—not PPT decks with strategies and tiers of people attached to rate cards. Specifically today, I decided to reframe a topic and approach it from the opposite/negative side. So, instead of telling you when the right time is to get UX design help for your enterprise SAAS analytics or AI product(s), today I’m going to tell you when you should NOT get help!
Reframing this was really fun and made me think a lot as I recorded the episode. Some of these reasons aren’t necessarily representative of what I believe, but rather what I’ve heard from clients and prospects over 25 years—what they believe. For each of these, I’m also giving a counterargument, so hopefully, you get both sides of the coin.
Finally, analytical thinkers, especially data product managers it seems, often want to quantify all forms of value they produce in hard monetary units—and so in this episode, I’m also going to talk about other forms of value that products can create that are worth paying for—and how mushy things like “feelings” might just come into play ;-) Ready?
Highlights/ Skip to:
(1:52) Going for short, easy wins
(4:29) When you think you have good design sense/taste
(7:09) The impending changes coming with GenAI
(11:27) Concerns about "dumbing down" or oversimplifying technical analytics solutions that need to be powerful and flexible
(15:36) Agile and process FTW?
(18:59) UX design for and with platform products
(21:14) The risk of involving designers who don’t understand data, analytics, AI, or your complex domain considerations
(30:09) Designing after the ML models have been trained—and it’s too late to go back
(34:59) Not tapping professional design help when your user base is small , and you have routine access and exposure to them
(40:01) Explaining the value of UX design investments to your stakeholders when you don’t 100% control the budget or decisions
Quotes from Today’s Episode
“It is true that most impactful design often creates more product and engineering work because humans are messy. While there sometimes are these magic, small GUI-type changes that have big impact downstream, the big picture value of UX can be lost if you’re simply assigning low-level GUI improvement tasks and hoping to see a big product win. It always comes back to the game you’re playing inside your team: are you working to produce UX and busin
