Looking for Advice
Hi, I’m currently the only UX Designer (not senior) for a business unit at a company in the industrial automation space, and honestly I’ve been struggling with how work gets handed to me from my PM/PO (same person).
Usually when the PM/PO and devs decide something needs design, all I get is basically, “we need designs for this". There’s rarely any actual requirements, workflows, feature definitions, or even clarity around what’s supposed to be built. So most of the time I end up having to research the feature myself just to understand what it even is.
A lot of times I have to dig through DevOps tickets or the Wiki to see if the developers documented anything. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. If it’s a brand new feature and nothing’s documented, then I have to come up with all the discovery questions myself and meet with the PM/PO just to get basic context. Even after that, things still feel super ambiguous, so I end up needing more follow-up conversations about scope, behavior, edge cases, etc.
The biggest issue with this process is that important use cases don’t come up until dev has already started building. Then suddenly developers are waiting on me for answers or direction, and the PM/PO acts like it’s my fault those cases weren’t considered earlier. But from my side, I’m already trying to think through as many scenarios as possible with very little information to start from.
What also makes this hard it’s a highly technical industrial automation product tied to hardware that ships globally. I don’t have an electrical engineering background, so there’s only so much domain knowledge I can magically figure out on my own. I already spend a ton of time researching before asking questions because that’s kind of the culture, and honestly my PM/PO prefers when I come in already having done all the homework.
On top of all that, I’m also the lead designer on another project and managing an intern, so I’m getting stretched really thin. The constant ambiguity and having to basically help define product requirements while also doing UX work is starting to burn me out.
My manager is nice person, but they’re not really strong from a management/problem-solving standpoint, so I honestly don’t even bother escalating most of this because nothing really changes.
I’m mostly curious if this is normal for other UX designers, especially in technical B2B environments?