Don’t assume your new boss “doesn’t care” about what you do

Be careful about the emotional baggage you bring with you on the next leg of your career journey

A designer on LinkedIn asked me this question recently, and I thought it would be valuable to share our exchange out to others who may find themselves in a similar situation (names, locations, and pronouns redacted).

“What do you do when your boss doesn’t care about the research, like personas and user surveys, and also things like flows and wireframes?”

No, this isn’t the designer who asked me the question. Stock photo by ahmad gunnaivi on Unsplash

ME: Is this question hypothetical or is this your current situation?

DESIGNER: My current situation. My boss is having me design screens that were literally thrown together by <redacted> and ship a product in 3 weeks. No research. No personas. No low fi wires. No user journeys. They spent a ton of money over X months and <redacted> did a horrible job, my boss says so.

ME: So if your boss supposedly said <redacted> did a horrible job, that tells me that <pronoun> potentially does care about the things you mentioned. And let me try and level-set, here: where does the situation you just described land between “fact” and “feeling”? I would say that if X months were spent on this, I suspect that the current screens weren’t simply “thrown together”.

DESIGNER: ok yeah, my boss does care, but <pronoun> wants us to just rework the screens we have…

ME: Totally get it. I suspect that it’s because they spent money. They made an investment and they want to get something for it, even if it’s “horrible”. Let me compile a few thoughts and questions that would be good to ask your boss, if for no other reason than it may help give you some context on the situation.

This is what I shared with the designer offline (again, sanitized/redacted, and also mildly edited for clarity/context):

Hey <designername>, thanks again for your question. There’s a lot to unpack here so I’ll try to be brief:

First, I’ll suggest that you try to reflect and reframe your POV on the current situation. Your boss hired YOU, and is asking for…