Challenges of being an In-house UX Design Team of one.
In my career as a UX Designer I had the chance to work both as an external Consultant or Freelancer as well as an In-house Designer.

These are some of my hard-learned lessons of my experience of being an in-house Designer. And I say “hard-learned” because I didn’t had anyone giving me some tips, neither did I thought this would have such a different set of challenges.

As an In-House UX Designer

You will touch on way less projects. Most probably you will be full-time on just one product or a family of products.

You will be confined to one Industry. Unless you work for a global corporation with multiple divisions active in different Industry segments and you give support across those divisions.

You will spend more time on engaging with other people to support you on your goals, then actually hands-on Designing.

A big chunk of your time will also be spent on internal processes, such as appraisal programs, internal training, corporate meetings and town-halls, and many other that are typical of large organizations.

Doing User Research is very difficult and you will spend time at first explaining why you need to do Research in the real world, and after that you will spend even more time at planning and preparing that activity.

You will have to do more education on UX and how to be human-centric to people around you.

Get ready to have a boss who doesn’t quite get what is UX Design, Design Thinking, etc. Be patient, humble and transparent about the steps that the process encompasses and what goals you expect to achieve on each of those steps.

Being the only Designer on your organization

As you are lonely on your position, your views, opinions and decisions will be challenged more often and easily. Others don’t see anyone else saying the same thing or deciding the same way as you.

Because of this you will always be in disadvantage, as you will be compared to peers with other functions: Engineers, Marketers, Finance, etc. Most of them will claim to have worked with UX Designers in the past, but when you dig a bit more you find out they weren’t UX Designers, at all. With some exceptions, of course.

You don’t find a Designer/creative culture around you, and you will have to make an effort to fit in the existing culture. You’re on your own, pal!

The last one

I know I’ll raise some discussions, but I thought I’d put it here nevertheless if career opportunities for different positions, or a leadership position is what you’re looking for.
['Bruno De Oliveira Júlio']
['In House Design', 'Consultant', 'UX', 'Organizational Culture', 'Freelancing']