No matter where you are in your career—just starting out or nearing retirement—we all aspire to be more than we are.
I consider myself very good at UX. But I realized that trading hours for dollars was a problem.
Employers don't want expansive strategies from UX. They don't want extra from you. They want you to stay in your corner and push pixels. Once I got outside of that world, I grew faster and gained more knowledge in, out, and around UX than I ever had at a company. I became the expert I knew I could be. I also became very in demand.
But I'm one person. There are others out there as capable—even more capable—than me. But I can't scale myself to work more hours in a day. There's a ceiling, even in consulting, just like in employment. No way to overcome that.
Unless you systemize.
As head of UX at various organizations, I ran into a lot of problems. Many were unsolved—not just by me, but across the industry. No one knew what to do.
A consultancy firm could be hired to spend hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, diving into a problem to find a solution that's already stale by the time it's delivered.
So with expanded knowledge, more experience, and technical curiosity, I set out to solve problems I'd encountered on my own. Initially for myself. Then I expanded to productize those solutions for others.
Not every problem is solvable. There are limitations to everything. But many problems can be solved, and when you break them down, they're not that difficult.
I've built multiple products following this path: being frustrated about something, finding no viable solution, diving into how to solve it, researching, testing, solving, then productizing for others.
It's a repeatable process. A lot of the time, people see the result and think "Why didn't I think of that? That's so simple."
Usually they are simple solutions—even to complex problems. Not always, but often.
So how do you systemize something?
Start with the problem and expected outcome. Document it fully.
Example: I want to understand design trends and patterns objectively to move my designs in the proper direction. Expected outcome: actionable data showing trends and usage across top sites, without opinion.
Identify what can be automated versus what requires human judgment.
In the design data case, a computer does far better at objectively analyzing something and giving hard facts than a human. Humans bring biases and personal preferences into the mix. For other problems it's flipped—a computer can't provide true user empathy to a UX solution. A human needs to be involved.
Build the infrastructure to execute.
Whether that's a team of people doing their part, servers, templates, AI, whatever. Sort out what's needed and how everything strings together for the required output.
You might be thinking: well duh, this is common knowledge. You're not telling me anything new.
Here's what most people miss or get wrong—speaking from firsthand experience:
You will pivot. Multiple times. Don't get married to your first idea. Let it evolve. If you run into critical data or a process that requires a 180, explore it. Don't fight it. The likelihood of a better outcome is there. Being stubborn and rigid usually leads to worse results.
You might build something and find out you were wrong. The thing you thought was a solution wasn't actually a solution at all. All that work for... nothing, basically. Chalk it up to a learning experience and move on.
"If you build it, they will come" is a pipe dream. That doesn't happen. You have to distribute whatever you built. You could have the only solution to a problem, but if no one can find it, it doesn't matter. You must be able to "sell" your product—not necessarily exchanging money, but getting it in front of people who will adopt it.
Here's something I've learned about consulting and teaching:
When I teach basic UX concepts, I feel like I'm cheating people by charging for such low-level insights. It feels so simple—like everyone should know this—because I've lived it for decades.
But others have never experienced one minute of what I do daily. They don't want to be a UX expert. They don't want to deal with the problem anymore. They want what you have: the solution or your knowledge.
Embrace that.
Realizing this cycle has led me to multiple products that are running or being systemized. I still consult, but on my terms, with clients I want to work with.
The irony: productizing things made me a better consultant. I see things very differently now, having gone through the process and learned the hard lessons.
If you want to work with me on something you think will change your life or others'—reach out. I'd love to talk.