Table of Contents
- The UX industry loved design thinking. Then IDEO laid off half their staff
- UX portfolios killed design thinking's reputation (not IDEO)
- UX Designers are over-relying on frameworks
- The honest answer to who gets a seat at the table in the UX industry
- Why UX leadership is the blindspot of every UX career path
- UX industry isn't broken, we just need to stop pretending
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The UX industry loved design thinking. Then IDEO laid off half their staff
When IDEO — the firm that popularised design thinking — went from roughly $300 million in annual revenue to around $100 million, cut 25% of their workforce, and closed offices in Munich and Tokyo, the internet declared design thinking dead.
IDEO didn't invent design thinking. They packaged and sold it. The underlying approach — research, define, ideate, prototype, test — is just how good UX designers think. It doesn't live or die with any single firm.
The real problem isn't design thinking. It's what the UX industry did to it.
In a recent livestream, Chris (founder of UX Playbook) and Laura Baker, Global Design Director at Fearless — someone who has been in-house, consultant, IC, and leader — got into exactly that. Just honest takes on where the UX industry gets it wrong.
Let's get into it.
👉 The insight in this blog traces back to a thoughtful conversation with Laura — here’s the full livestream:
UX portfolios killed design thinking's reputation (not IDEO)
Walk through a hundred junior UX designer portfolios and you'll see the same thing. Same diamond. Same process diagram. Same bullet points. Same neat, linear journey from problem to solution like nothing ever went sideways.
It doesn't reflect reality. It reflects a bootcamp curriculum.
Laura put it plainly:
"Their entire course is geared to giving you a cookie cutter portfolio at the end of it — it's not necessarily about teaching you design."
Bootcamps have one job: get you hired. Their ROI is your first job, not your long-term development as a UX designer. So they teach you what passes the initial portfolio screen. And what passes the screen is a tidy design thinking framework, documented step by step.
Laura shared a story about interviewing a junior designer who presented three tiers of wireframes — low, mid, and high fidelity — as part of their case study. She asked: why did you do the mid-fidelity?
Blank face. "But it's part of the process."
That's the problem. Designers following a framework they don't understand, producing outputs they can't defend, in service of ticking a box.
UX Designers are over-relying on frameworks
Here's something that comes up a lot when working with junior and mid-level UX designers: they know the framework perfectly and have almost no instinct for when to abandon it.
Laura described it using a Japanese logic puzzle called Hanjie. You start with a blank grid, no idea what picture you're building. You make your first move, then your second, and you trust yourself to figure out the rest as it unfolds.
"You should never know what the end looks like when you start a project — and if you know what the end looks like, why the hell are you doing the project in the first place?"
That kind of comfort with ambiguity takes time to build. And frameworks don't teach it, they delay it.
Where frameworks do earn their place is in consistency at scale. When you've got a team of designers spread across different clients or different parts of a product, a shared methodology gives everyone a common language. Laura's own company, Fearless, leans into this heavily during onboarding — not to restrict designers, but to align them.
The goal isn't to throw frameworks out. The goal is to use them with intention, not out of reflex.
👉 5 UX Design Frameworks Every Designer Should Master in 2026:
The honest answer to who gets a seat at the table in the UX industry
The in-house vs. consultant debate is one of the most persistent in UX career path conversations.
- Which one gives you more influence?
- Which one actually moves the needle on how design is valued in an organisation?
Laura's take was sharp, and probably not what you want to hear if you're in-house.
"By the very nature of putting a designer into a cross-functional squad, you are basically trapping them in tactical work — and then you can't complain when people say, 'Why don't we have a seat at the table?'"
This is the dirty secret of how most product teams are structured. You put a UX designer in a squad with engineers and a product manager. The squad exists to ship. The designer's job, whether they like it or not, becomes supporting that ship cycle. Research takes a back seat. Strategy never makes it to the agenda. And two years later, that designer is wondering why they're not being invited into the important conversations.
Consultants, meanwhile, come in with a limited timeline, a defined objective, and the freedom that comes with not having to navigate years of internal politics. They can push harder. They can say the uncomfortable thing. They're not worried about next quarter's performance review.
Laura described it as a spectrum — from "play it safe" to "get fired" — and noted that consultants are generally more willing to sit at the riskier end of that dial. That's where influence lives.
For in-house UX designers: the lesson isn't to quit and go freelance. It's to define your remit upfront, before you get quietly filed under "tactical."
Set expectations with your manager in the first month:
- What are you here to do?
- What does success look like beyond shipping features?
If you don't have that conversation, someone else will define your role for you.
Why UX leadership is the blindspot of every UX career path
There are hundreds of Figma courses. Dozens of design systems courses. A whole industry of UX education built around hard skills and tools. And almost nothing for the first-time design manager trying to figure out how not to be terrible at their job.
The gap is real. Laura noticed it from her own experience:
"Most people just look at the leaders above them, take the good bits, take the bad bits, and then mold the leader they want to be off the back of that."
Laura identified something most first-time UX leaders get wrong: they spend almost all their energy looking down — supporting their team, solving problems, managing output — and very little time looking up and sideways. Managing your peers. Managing your stakeholders. Having the conversations that determine whether design gets a seat at the table.
This is why so many talented individual contributors become mediocre managers. They do the visible part well and miss the invisible part entirely.
The market isn't going to solve this gap anytime soon. Companies expect to provide leadership training and rarely budget for it.
So if you're on a UX career path that eventually leads to leadership, you have to be intentional about it yourself. Find mentors who've been through it. Ask uncomfortable questions. Watch what the leaders above you do when you're not in the room — not just when they're supporting you.
Build a high-performing UX team.
Get the UX Management Playbook — a guide for first-time managers to build healthier, happier design teams.
UX industry isn't broken, we just need to stop pretending
The UX industry has a habit of creating rules, then treating those rules like sacred objects. Design thinking became a checklist. Portfolios became vanity projects. Frameworks became safety blankets. And somewhere along the way, designers started optimising for the appearance of doing good work instead of doing it.
- The junior UX designer who can narrate every step of the design thinking process but can't explain why they made a specific design decision is a product of that culture. Not a bad designer. A badly taught one.
- The mid-level UX designer who's been in a squad for two years doing clean, well-executed tactical work and wonders why they're never in the strategy conversation — they didn't fail at design. The structure they were put in failed them.
- The senior designer who delays launching their portfolio for six months because it's not quite perfect yet — they're not lazy or untalented. They're caught in a perfectionist trap the industry quietly encourages.
What moves a UX design career forward? Understand the problem before you pick up a tool. Present your work before you're ready. Build relationships with the engineers and PMs who make decisions. Set your expectations upfront so no one else defines your role for you.
And if you're a leader, look up and sideways as much as you look down. Do the thinking. Do the work. Build the career on real substance. Everything else is noise.
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