Stop Talking UX. Start Talking Money.
The redesign was finished, and when the time came to present it, I barely showed it.
The project was the software a company used to hire people. We had tracked how the recruiting team moved through it, step by step, found the tasks that were costing them a lot of time, and fixed those with ordinary usability and design work.
What I put in front of the people who held the budget was the hours the team would get back, and what those hours were worth to the company.
Nobody ever hired a UX consultant because they wanted better wireframes. They hired one because they wanted to make more money, or to stop losing money they were already spending. Those are the only two reasons a company spends anything. Everything else is decoration.
So the advice writes itself. Stop describing your process, start describing the money. Put a number on it.
The advice is right. It is also where most people stop, and stopping there is what makes it fail.
The number is the easy part
Every artifact you produce has a business translation waiting for it. A user flow is a conversion funnel. An interface pattern is a support cost. A design system is engineering time. A research finding is a revenue opportunity, or a bullet somebody just dodged.
Making that translation is a skill, and the arithmetic is the easy half of it: how the company makes money, what it costs to win a customer, what it costs when one leaves. Yes, this means spreadsheets.
The hard half is getting anyone to hand those numbers over, and if you tried this and it stalled, that is where it stalled. It was not a failure of arithmetic.
Do that and you will get a hearing you did not get before. You will also, if you are not careful, start lying.
I know, because I have done it. I have promised a number in a meeting and never gone back to see whether it turned out to be true.
The objection that happens to be right
You cannot know that a new checkout will cut abandonment by a fifth. You have not built it. Nobody has used it. The honest answer to “what will this be worth” is that you do not know, and any figure you give is a guess wearing a suit.
That objection is right. It is why so many business cases are worthless, and why the people who read them have learned to quietly halve every number inside. A forecast nobody ever checks is not an argument. It is a rumor with a decimal point.
The wrong conclusion is to retreat back to process, where at least you are not making anything up.
Say the number, then go back and look
The move is not to avoid the number. The move is to own it.
Say it out loud, in the room, in front of the people who will remember. Write down what you expect, by when, and how it will be measured. Then put a date in the calendar to come back and report what actually happened, including the times you were wrong by a mile.
Sometimes you will not be able to isolate the effect at all, because four other things shipped in the same quarter. Say that at the start, not when the result turns out inconvenient.
Almost nobody comes back. That is exactly why coming back is worth so much.
The first time you come back and say “I was wrong, here is by how much, and here is what I misread”, something shifts in the room. You stop being the person with the optimistic deck. You become the person whose numbers mean something, because they have been checked by you before anyone else had to.
That is easier for me to write than for most people to do, because I am usually the one who leaves. A consultant who admits a bad forecast loses a meeting. Someone in a UX role with real responsibility, in a company that is still deciding whether that role should exist at all, hands an argument to people who were looking for one.
So start smaller than feels impressive. I started small, and I got a bloody nose more than once. A track record is built out of small checked claims, not one brave one, and there is no shortcut to the confidence that lets you make them.
A forecast costs nothing to make. A correction costs something, and that is what makes it worth listening to.
None of this makes the first number any more accurate. It makes the person saying it worth believing the next time, which is a different thing, and the more useful one.
Nobody can price your work for you
This is the part I wanted to write down, and it is not a design problem. It is what happens to any function that produces something the business cannot price on its own.
Security, research, infrastructure, data, all of them hit the same wall. The work is real, the value is real, and the people holding the budget have no way to compare it against the thing they could buy instead. Translating into money is what makes the comparison possible at all. That is the entry ticket, and it is worth having.
But the translation only buys the first meeting. What buys the seat is coming back. Influence is not a forecast, it is a track record, and a track record only exists if somebody keeps score.
What is the last number you put in front of a decision maker, and did anyone ever go back and look at what actually happened? I would like to know how you handle this today. A figure in a deck and nothing after it? A dashboard nobody opens? Or something you genuinely keep score with?