One of the least talked about parts of this job is how much energy goes into just getting people to remember why the role matters.

It's rarely because people don't value design. Most of the time they're moving fast and trying to help. But somewhere in that speed, design quietly becomes optional, and you shift from someone people build with to someone they forget to loop in.

That's really the core of it, design isn't the layer you add at the end. It's the strategy that connects what users need with what the product is trying to solve, the bridge between the two. The same applies when the foundation, the architecture, the backend, gets built first without user experience part of that conversation. If it doesn't hold up for how people actually move through the product, you end up rebuilding it later, which costs more than including design from the start.

So a real part of the work becomes invisible advocacy. Reminding people what the role actually covers, re-earning a seat that was already yours, making sure you're not the thing people work around when they're short on time.

That part is exhausting in a way that's hard to put into a case study. It's not the design work itself that wears you down, it's having to keep proving it still matters.