Great summary. I’m in the same boat. I’m the lone UX designer in both my old and current company. I’m lucky in both cases that, my managers understand the importance of user experience design, so I can reach them for assistance. It’s important to realize and use this support whenever needed, it helps us to get our voice out to the team.

A story from my side:

Since I’m the lone designer, I basically get involved in all our product related design work. In one of the recent projects, before I got involved in designing backend system for one of our products, I was surprised to find out from a weekly meeting that the engineers have drawn out wireframes on their own. I felt frustrated about not knowing about this — although it was understandable, because at that time, I was heavily working on something else. One important note, our product team has very startup like environment, so engineers try to work things out as fast as they can.

I reviewed their wireframes. It was obvious that they approached the system design from a very engineering perspective, resulting in a design that won’t be able to scale to the next level of complexity.

I reached out to my manager, who is also the product manager on that project. I talked about my thoughts on those wireframes and the necessity of approaching it in a more user friendly way. We reached an agreement that they needed to be reworked. Even though I haven’t done system designs on such a large scale, he let me learn, research and explore design options using a UX designer’s way. He also helped me communicate with the engineering team to temporarily pause the project. I really appreciated this.

After four weeks of work, I’ve gained great knowledge both from user types, work flows, enough understanding of technology, and put together a design concept that have been validated with multiple scenarios and has the capability to scale. I did a presentation on all my findings with the entire project team. It helped me prove that I am a confident designer, expert in what I do and earned more trust from the engineering team.