Early in my career, I was confident about the wrong thing.
I believed that if a company had a UX team, then UX must already be understood, supported, and structurally embedded. I assumed that designers on the org chart meant there was shared agreement about process, authority, and value.
That belief wasn’t grounded in reality.
But I spent years trying to force it into existence.
What followed looked like what most people would call UX evangelism. Proving value by any metric that would listen. User metrics. Business metrics. Conversion data. Research decks and case studies. I assumed that if the evidence was strong enough, minds would change.
They rarely did, at least not in the rooms that mattered.
Slowly and painfully, I learned that most key stakeholders had already made their decisions long before any UX work showed up. When UX aligned with their gut, it was treated as validation. When it did not, it was treated as “misunderstanding the business.” Change, when it happened at all, was incremental and usually aligned with biases that already existed.
Evangelism didn’t fail because the data was weak.
It failed because it arrived after authority had already hardened.
That realization cracked my belief about how change actually happens.