Discussions

ssww

Your team can love the work and still have no idea why it matters to the company. In UX, especially at large companies, teams are usually great at understanding the customer. The problem. The why behind the feature sitting in front of them. What's harder is connecting that work back up to the actual company strategy. Big company initiatives live at thirty thousand feet. The feature you're shipping lives on the ground. And there's no CEO in the room to ask "why this, why now." I think that gap is on leadership to close. Explaining the why clearly enough that it's believable, not just repeated. But it's also on every leader in the chain, and every individual contributor, to have the confidence to ask when something doesn't connect. Faking understanding at any level just pushes the confusion downstream. Here's the harder part though: what happens when a leader asks up the chain and still doesn't get a clean answer? I don't think the move is to fake total certainty. I also don't think it's to throw your own leadership under the bus. The best leaders I've seen can say, honestly, "this part's still fuzzy, and I'm working on it," without turning that into blame. That's a different kind of trust building than having all the answers. Curious how others have handled this, especially at scale. How do you keep your team believing in the mission when the why doesn't always make it all the way down to you either?