Every time we teach our course Product and UX: Building Partnerships for Better Outcomes, we ask students the same question at the start of class: what's your number one problem right now? Last year we collected about 150 answers. After mapping them, the results were remarkably consistent across a few major themes.
Roughly half of the feedback pointed to the same category of challenge: alignment. Not design quality. Not research methods. Alignment — getting people on the same page and shaping what actually gets built.
Designers Are Doing the Connective-Tissue Work, and No One Taught Them How
The single most common theme was about facilitating alignment between people. Designers and researchers described themselves as the "glue" on their teams — the ones bridging engineering, product, marketing, and leadership — while feeling like they had no real playbook for it. They're navigating misaligned workflows, distributed teams spread across time zones, fuzzy definitions of success, and communication breakdowns between disciplines. They're doing organizational work, essentially, without organizational tools.
One student said their biggest problem was that the UX team was “still figuring out when is the best time to bring in UX people, and getting our developers used to working with the UX people.” Another said they were struggling with “getting involved early enough to provide the right collaboration model and educating about all the different types of ways we contribute.” Many felt they needed not only to do their work but also explain what UX is and how to collaborate effectively with designers and researchers on the team.
Close behind that was the theme of roadmap influence. Nearly two dozen notes specifically mentioned the need to make strategic cases, to shape priorities by connecting user needs to business outcomes, not just to execute on someone else's decisions. Designers and researchers don't want to be the last stop before launch. They want to be consulted early, and they want to be listened to.
One example of this struggle was expressed by a designer who struggled with “getting product teams' buy-in to act on research and strategy by the design team vs. their own planned improvements and roadmap.” Another designer said their biggest challenge was “having product have a user-driven product roadmap based on discovery research, prioritized to work with the limited UX resources we have.”
Role Confusion and Invisible Value
Two more high-priority themes rounded out the top of the pile. First, designers and researchers are unclear on where their authority ends and the product manager’s authority begins. They need clarity on who decides what, and how to navigate that without damaging the relationship.
One student expressed their challenge as “making sure UX is included and that PMs & POs [product owners] understand what UX does.” Another explained how they struggle “educating a low-maturity company about what I do / can do. Many think I'm a visual designer.”
Second, many feel like they can't translate design work into the language their stakeholders actually care about. They know the work is valuable. They just can't always prove it.
As one student put it, many were having difficulty “distilling ideas and initiatives to real tangible requirements and deliverables.”
Sometimes the problem wasn’t that they couldn’t translate the work, but that they didn’t have enough time or the ability to focus. A student said they frequently have trouble, “understanding what projects are upcoming early enough to effectively grasp the problem and create a research plan.”
The Medium-Priority Pile Is Worth Your Attention Too
A cluster of related challenges showed up with enough frequency to take seriously:
- collaborating with PMs without ceding expertise to opinion
- balancing quality against speed
- getting pulled in proactively rather than reactively
- staying outcome-focused rather than output-focused
- pushing back against structural deprioritization of UX
- navigating the shift to product trio models (manager–designer–software engineer)
What's striking about this list is how little of it is about craft. These aren't designers asking for better wireframing techniques or more user-research frameworks. They're asking for help operating inside complex organizations — influencing, navigating, communicating, and advocating. That's a different kind of skill.
How Do We Solve These Problems?
There’s no single, simple fix for these issues. We all want a magic wand, but mostly what we have is a lot of conversations with our colleagues across the company and a toolbox of different approaches that have worked in the past.
That’s why the course includes things like how to establish a team charter to educate colleagues about UX’s role. It also covers frameworks for difficult conversations with teammates and templates for navigating who does what.
Luckily, naming the problem is already half the battle. When designers recognize that their biggest challenges are organizational rather than craft-based, they can stop blaming themselves for not being "good enough" at design and start building the skills that will actually matter — facilitation, influence, strategic communication, and relationship-building. These aren't soft skills in any dismissive sense. They're the hardest skills to learn because no one puts them in a job description or teaches them in design school.
