September 5, 2025
I’ve never worked on a large UX team, but I’ve always had at least one other designer I could speak to, bounce ideas off of, and generally collaborate with. But 6 months ago, that changed. At first, it was a joke. In meetings, people would call out that I “owned everything,” and for a while, that was okay. I was gung ho about it — I could handle whatever they threw at me. But as the weeks went on, that cocky confidence turned into a quiet anxiety — could I manage owning everything?
At EverDriven, I thought “owning everything” meant overseeing UX research, wireframing, mock-ups, prototyping, and our design system. But I came to understand it meant so much more: beyond my role as a designer, I now had to manage the “team’s” relationship with Marketing and other groups, educating stakeholders, and more. Any decision regarding a design stopped at my desk, which was equal parts thrilling and terrifying. Some days, I found myself jumping from work on one of our newer initiatives to auditing our mobile workflows, to evaluating the accessibility of our legacy products. It was dizzying.
The context switching — or, more accurately, my struggle to prioritize — was only one of the challenges I faced in the beginning. A lack of team members meant I no longer had people who could critique or validate from a design perspective. I had no backup. I became busy enough that I had to put projects, like the accessibility audit, on hold in favor of projects with more pressing deadlines, such as mock-ups for a new product. In some ways, I felt I was failing the company because I couldn’t do it all.
With a bit of help from Product leadership, I started finding ways to prioritize better: I created a rough roadmap for the next 6 months, I started integrating AI to lift some of the load, and I worked to communicate my priorities with the rest of the Product team. As things got less hectic, I began to realize I was in a unique position — I was a subject matter expert on the entire ecosystem. I knew how to speak to Product, Marketing, Engineering, and even Executives. And I started gaining the confidence to speak up for my team. I worked with our QA leadership to establish a solid design review process. I was confident knowing the new design system I built could aid in communicating design ideas to engineers, thereby reducing development time. I cultivated skills I didn’t think I wanted or needed, and I developed them faster because the situation threw me into the deep end.
If you find yourself acting as a UX team of 1, it’s possible to survive! It starts by recognizing you’re not alone. In addition to my colleagues, I speak to my mentor regularly, as well as a community of designers I’ve built over the years (bootcamp classmates, former coworkers, etc.). I make sure I prioritize my work, business needs first, so I’m never overwhelmed. I’ve started using additional tools, like AI, to streamline the creation of process documents. And the processes I develop are lightweight, designed for small teams. I’m still a perfectionist when it comes to designs (and I probably will never outgrow that), but I’m designing more iteratively, so perfection doesn’t have to be delivered right away. I’ve learned to let go of some things so that I can maintain my sanity.
Six months later, I can joke about “owning everything” again. I’ve learned that I can handle working as a UX team of 1, even if I’d prefer to have a team to lean on. I know I’m not alone - I have a community I can reach for when I’m overwhelmed, and I have the confidence to speak out when I need to reprioritize my work. The past 6 months have been an intense learning experience, but I know now I can handle what the job throws at me.
