Secondary education in Ireland. Edtech for students navigating career paths. High school and college design classrooms. Kids streaming. Fitness and wellness. Marketing and creative direction. Freight analytics. Consumer streaming. Fintech. Supply chain. Healthcare telemedicine.
Ten industries. Two and a half decades. More product decisions than I can accurately count.
The quality of the work was never determined by the quality of the designers.
It was determined by whether design had earned enough trust to make hard calls stick.
I have been in rooms where that trust existed. You can feel it. A product leader pushes back on a direction, and the design leader holds the position, explains the reasoning, and the room moves. Not because the designer won an argument. Because the relationship had enough depth to survive disagreement. The work that came out of those rooms was better. Consistently. Across every domain I have ever worked in.
I have been in rooms where that trust was absent. Those rooms feel different. Every design decision becomes a negotiation. Every strong recommendation gets softened before it reaches the people who need to hear it. The team starts optimizing for what will be approved rather than what will actually work. The work degrades slowly, and nobody can point to the moment it started.
The difference was never the brief. It was never the budget. It was never the talent.
It was trust.
And trust does not come with the job title. It gets built, or it does not, and everything downstream depends on which happens.
I built that trust with students who had no professional reason to give it to me — teenagers sitting in a classroom deciding whether design was worth their time. I built it with parents and counselors using psychometric tools to help young people map their future against their actual strengths and passions.
I built it with freight brokers who needed to make a margin call in thirty seconds and could not afford a screen that slowed them down. I built it with physicians delivering care through a chat interface, where the cost of a wrong design decision was not a bad review but a patient who did not get the care they needed.
Every one of those environments required something different. The trust dynamic was identical.
Influence in design is not given. It is not granted by an org chart, a job posting, or a seat in a leadership meeting. It is built slowly, through decisions that prove your judgment, through relationships that survive hard conversations, through outcomes that make the people around you believe that when design pushes back, it is worth listening to.
That is the only thing that has ever mattered. In every room I have ever been in. Across ten industries and more than two decades of work.
The domains change. The trust requirement does not.