Talk to another designer, manager, engineer, or PM and you can get into the weeds. Converse about UX improvements, UI enhancements, research study outcomes—everyone listens and is interested.
Talk like that to an executive and they'll cut you off telling you to get to the point.
It's not that they don't care. They just want the meat, and they want it upfront—not a story in front of it. They don't understand what UX does, so speaking to them like you would a peer doesn't work. They don't care to know the details, just like they don't care which function an engineer used to make something work.
If they didn't care about UX, you wouldn't be working there.
They're busy. They have more on their mind than you can imagine. They want to know what problems you're having that they can help solve, what outcomes you're delivering, how you're moving the needle on things they care about.
It may seem harsh and dry, but that's reality. They're time-poor and have 100 other people to deal with in the next two hours before everyone checks out for the day.
If you've spent a lot of time preparing a presentation for executives only for them to be ho-hum about it, don't be surprised or hurt.
They like pretty pictures like anyone else, but those don't tell them what they really care about. Wireframes? Forget it. Don't bother. Journey maps, research decks? Forget it. You need executive summaries for all of that.
Email them the full report so it can sit in their inbox unread—but at least you can say you gave it to them when they ask.
What matters to C-suite people is very different from standard UX concerns.
They want to know how your UX work affected a change. Specifically, changes to metrics they care about. What are the OKRs at their level? Tie your outcomes to those and they'll care.
Even better: if you can show correlation or causation to revenue improvement or cost reduction, they'll immediately understand. If you knocked it out of the park and can show concrete data that your work improved revenue by 5%, you can ask for that extra headcount and you're likely to get it.
Knowing what they care about is key.
At one startup, leadership cared about MAUs—monthly active users. To me it was a vanity metric, but that was what they were measuring against. Fine. Improving MAUs is easy with UX tweaks.
I didn't need to show everything we did. I just had to show the uptick and demonstrate how UX changes caused that improvement. They were ecstatic.
Find what leadership is trying to solve, improve, or reduce. That's where you focus your efforts.
Don't come out of left field with some random ask because it would look cool or move a metric they don't care about. If you can tie those cool things to their metrics, even better.
Learn how to correlate things. Find the angle that moves your UX needle forward while delivering what the executive wants. That's where you're golden—UX advances and the company sees you as valuable.
When an executive asks if you can affect some metric or improve something, the answer is almost always yes.
Turn those asks into wins. Win favor with executives and they'll remove obstacles for UX.
Do this repeatedly before asking for something large. Think of it like a bank account: you have to make a bunch of deposits, even small ones, before you can withdraw a large amount. You need to build up your account with leadership before asking for something big.
If you go in first thing and ask for something huge, you better deliver something massive. They'll put interest on your ask, so be prepared.
What you really want is to make a connection with leadership.
They're people just like you. They're stressed just like you. Being there for them, making their lives easier—that's the best thing you can do.
A manager once told me the secret to being a great employee: make your manager's life easier. He wasn't wrong. He was spot on.
Doing that wins favor. They come to trust you more. They become willing to do you favors and help you along the way. If you want to get ahead, build bridges and make connections.
People care about metrics, but people also care about people. Figure out who you're dealing with and leverage that angle.
You can't make an executive learn or care about UX as much as you do.
But you can translate what you do into something they care about.
Make their lives easier.