Carving my way into Product Design & Research at a B2B centric company

What it took to break from the watermall engineering model. A case study.

When I joined the company, my initial role was to design tools and features that were used by backend and frontend engineers. The app, however, was already being shaped in a particular way — everything was designed by engineers for engineering users. By that, I mean it was built with minimal consideration for user experience, empathy, or ease of use. The focus was primarily on functionality, with little regard for how people interacted with it.

The challenge was clear: the existing design practices were utilitarian, serving a purely functional purpose. My task was to carve out a space for user experience design and research in a company that had been thriving without much formal UX involvement. This case study outlines how I took on this challenge, faced resistance, and eventually helped transform the way we approached design and research in a B2B context. It was a journey of persistence, small wins, and gradual cultural change.

Early roadblocks: Facing resistance to UX Research

As I began pushing for more user-centered research, I encountered significant pushback. There was a recurring sentiment among the team that UX was an unnecessary delay…