Designers are skipping steps of the process in a rush for faster outputs. But the contest that really matters is the race towards stakeholder alignment. Designers are both uniquely vulnerable to losing this race and uniquely positioned to win it.
For several years, Design has been in survival mode. In a post-ZIRP economy where investment is driven by fear, the question of “the ROI of design” has returned from the grave with slightly different wording. Today’s managers don’t just want results — they want results fast, and they want to know how UX is going to help them do that.
As the lines between Design and Product continue to blur, one camp of designers has hewed to a line that is familiar to any product manager: that the value of design is not in the race to fastest outputs, but in the marathon towards valuable outcomes. But Product has been escaping the build trap for nearly a decade, and is no closer to making its way out.
Other designers have accepted the challenge, and doubled down on shortening their design process. On the surface, this calculus makes sense: if today “value” means “velocity” then the best way for us to demonstrate value is to hock outputs out the door as quickly as requests come in. If “ship to learn” is real then the faster we can ship, the faster we will learn.
But somehow, the learning has also failed to materialize. Despite what our analytics and user feedback tell us, those requests from upstream never seem to take that data into account. “Build, measure, learn” inevitably remains at “build, build, build.”
The reason this keeps happening is that the feedback loop is broken. It’s being intercepted at its most critical point by one character — a character we’ll call the Fastest Gun in the West.
The Fastest Gun in the West is the hero of his own story — and wants to be the hero of everyone else’s, too.
The “Fastest Gun in the West” problem
“Impactful design decisions are typically made well above the level of product teams” — Charles Lambdin
The name comes from the analogous phenomenon on Stack Overflow: the design of the system artificially inflates the salience of the first answer posted, disproportionate to its quality. A better answer posted late is buried under a worse one that has simply had more time to accrue votes.
There are Fastest Guns in product orgs, as well. But rather than compete for internet points, they race for control of the narrative that frames how the business defines its priorities. The commonly-applied mechanisms of annual and quarterly planning only compound the natural anchoring bias of the first idea on the table.
What makes its way down the planning funnel is neither the most achievable output or the most impactful anticipated outcome, but the minimum viable alignment of the decision-makers involved.
At a glance, this problem resembles the classic Waterfall BRD. But the situations couldn’t be more different. In fact, Fastest Guns often use the vocabulary of agility and design thinking to paper over complexity and delay hard decisions. Rather than resolving disagreements, the Fastest Gun covers them with a cloud of deliberate ambiguity. He knows that the cloud can’t last forever, but it doesn’t need to — it’s only there until the idea takes root as “the thing we are committed to doing” and is embedded in the roadmap.
This is where the Fastest Gun in the West becomes a UX-specific problem. When the goal is to rush the idea from concept to backlogs as quickly as possible, user research is not just an unnecessary time sink — it’s a serious threat. The Fastest Gun will eagerly attack the idea of research, cultivating a sense of urgency, and claiming that it “takes too long” and we can defer learning about the problem until after we ship.
When designers accept this framing under the pressure of “proving their value”, they play right into the Fastest Gun’s hands.
Potemkin Design
“Leaders want the payoff of experimentation but without the cost of any dead ends.” — Scott Berkun
The Fastest Gun’s path to success relies entirely on creating a perception of a fait accompli — that the scrutiny of refinement is not necessary because it has already been completed. The fastest way to do that is to produce outputs that appear indistinguishable from the outputs of a real design process. Rather than do the work, they simply forge the receipts — populating persona and JTBD templates with their own assumptions or LLM-generated drivel.
The one thing they can’t do on their own is produce high-fidelity mockups. The Fastest Gun is utterly dependent on designers to provide legitimacy to their vision, and will put tremendous pressure on design orgs to sacrifice every scrap scrutiny and process at the altar of “velocity” and skip directly to this stage.
But the deadline UX is rushed towards is not for getting working software into the hands of a user. It’s to lock in the Fastest Gun’s assumptions, drowning stakeholders with trivial detail to avoid pushback on the flimsy premise underneath.
A UX design practice that gives in to this working relationship may have a seat at the table, but will have nothing valuable to say.
Party in the front, business-as-usual in the back
Design positioned in this way also takes on the entire risk when the idea underperforms the Fastest Gun’s lofty promises. This is because — without the decision-making feedback loops of the design process — UX becomes entirely a delivery function. And if the vision is sound (after all, the stakeholders signed off on it) then the problems must be with implementation details.
This is where the promise of “ship to learn” falls apart. The delivery team indeed learns something from building the product, but the decisions impacted by those learnings are not actually made in the delivery phase. The relationship between the delivery team and the Fastest Gun is not a feedback loop; choices are made based on horse-trading and internal marketing long before anyone on the ground has a say about them.
Fighting fire with design
“You can be efficient or effective. When it comes to innovation, choose effective.” — Christina Wodtke
This is why design’s appeals to quality have fallen on deaf ears — in this influence system, quality is entirely besides the point. The fact that we care about quality and the Fastest Gun in the West does not is precisely what makes them the fastest.
The answer is not to try and compete on velocity. No matter how many steps we cut from the design process, we will never be faster than someone who shoots from the hip. Instead, we need to engage stakeholders on a higher level — illuminate the target faster, to show how badly their shots are missing the mark.
A rational framing of how what we are doing rolls up to what we want to achieve is critical if we hope to be able to say “no” to low-quality ideas.
Optimizing time to high fidelity mockups is the wrong strategy because mockups are not the appropriate tool for this. They are a tool for solutions — and at this point, you have not even framed the problem.
To beat the Fastest Gun, designers need to engage stakeholders at the level of the mental model — the desired customer behavior change, the outcomes achieved by meeting their needs, and how they impact the business. A UI mockup doesn’t carry any of that information, because the UI is not the product. It cannot tell you whether or not its premise is valid.
The lower the fidelity, the fewer distractions from the core value proposition.
But low-fidelity tools can; they are designed for that purpose. The customer goal and problem, as well as the implications of the proposed solution framing, can be captured in a scenario storyboard or PRFAQ at the right level of fidelity to invite refinement rather than avoid it. These artifacts give enough clarity for a stakeholder to say “no, this would not be a meaningful impact” and create permission to avoid a dead end and choose another direction.
If we have done our jobs right then by the time the Fastest Gun in the West tries to shoot, stakeholders will be able to see that he has missed.
The fastest gun in UX: Why your team is telling the wrong story was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
