If you are having a rough time in the industry right now, you are not alone.

I keep hearing the same two stories.

People applying for job after job and hearing nothing back.

Freelancers and agency owners finding that work is not arriving the way it used to.

It is tempting to blame the economy, AI, or whatever headline is currently doing the rounds. Sometimes those things are genuinely part of the story.

However, one factor we can control is whether people outside our immediate team know who we are, what we are good at, and what we care about.

Most opportunities come through people.

Clients often hire because somebody they trust says, “Talk to them.” Hiring managers do the same thing, tending to hire via friends of friends.

Even if you are not looking for a new job or chasing new clients, your reputation still matters. It shapes your credibility in the role you are in right now.

If colleagues can see that you are respected outside your organization, and they see you sharing your expertise in public (even quietly), it tends to raise your internal credibility too.

That does not mean you need to become an internet personality. It means you want to be findable and referable.

When people hear “build your personal brand,” they often picture loud self-promotion, forced networking, and a never-ending content treadmill.

No wonder it makes so many people feel uncomfortable.

A lot of the resistance comes from perfectly reasonable places:

• Self-promotion feels awkward.
• Networking can feel fake.
• Impostor syndrome whispers that you have nothing to offer.

Fortunately, there is a gentler route. You can build a reputation by being useful, consistently.

That can look like:

• Posting thoughtful experiences and ideas on social networks, and then sticking around to engage with the responses.
• Helping organize a local meetup.
• Chipping in regularly in Slack groups, forums, or Discord communities.
• Being active on LinkedIn by commenting thoughtfully on other people’s posts, and occasionally having a quiet chat in DMs.

The point is not volume. The point is being present.

If you have ever thought that, welcome to the club.

A simple reframe helps.

Instead of trying to share “best practice,” share experience.

You can write things like:

• “In a client meeting this week, we ran into this problem. Here is how we handled it.”
• “We tried this approach and it did not work. Here is what we would do differently next time.”
• “A stakeholder pushed back on research. This argument helped.”

Nobody can reasonably attack you for reporting what happened and what you learned. You are not claiming to be the all-knowing oracle of UX. You are just being a person doing the work.

In fact, the stuff you struggle with can be just as useful as the stuff you have mastered. People are often far kinder than your brain predicts, especially when you share what you learned the hard way.

A lot of what I share online comes straight out of conversations.

Like most people, I record many meetings. Then I grab the transcript and ask an AI tool to identify a few themes that might make useful posts.

It is surprising how often a “boring meeting” contains an insight that would help somebody else.

If you do this, be sensible about confidentiality. Strip out client details. Keep it focused on the pattern, not the organization.

There is another benefit that gets overlooked.

When you share an idea, even one that is half-formed, you are forced to clarify what you mean, find the edges of your thinking, and learn faster because you are teaching.

Writing is basically thinking with friction. It is annoying, but it works.

AI makes it easy to get answers.

That is useful, but there is a risk. If all we do is consume, we slowly lose the community spirit that made the early web so valuable.

So if you want a simple goal for 2026, try being a little less of a spectator and a little more of a participant.

Well, here we are. The UX Strategy and Leadership course has wrapped up, and I am officially putting down my digital pen until January 8th.

I know. Try not to weep. 😭

Before I disappear into a haze of mince pies and questionable Christmas jumpers, I wanted to take a moment to say thank you. Genuinely. You read what I write, you tolerate my rambling, and some of you have been doing this for years. That means more to me than I usually let on.

I hope your Christmas is wonderful. I hope you get some proper time off. And I really hope the next few days of "urgent" requests, last-minute deadlines, and "can we just squeeze this in before the holidays?" meetings don't completely crush your soul before you get there.

You deserve a break. Go take one.

Traditionally, this is the part where I'd offer you some sort of Christmas freebie. A template, a checklist, maybe a festive PDF with snowflakes on it.

But I'm not going to do that.

Instead, I have a favor to ask. I know, I know. The audacity!

You've followed my work, read my articles, listened to my podcast, and taken my advice on UX and conversion optimization. Hopefully it has helped. Well, now the bill has come due! After all, I have never asked for anything in return. Well, except for buying my books, attending my workshops, and hiring me for projects. BUT, other than that I have never asked for anything! 😜

If you have appreciated what I've shared over the years, I'm hoping you might support something that matters deeply to my wife, Catherine, and me.

My wife and I both work with a small UK charity called Hope of Bethesda, which supports a school doing education work in rural Tamil Nadu, India. A few years ago, we traveled out to visit the school ourselves.

It's amazing what they're doing with nearly nothing. They are giving quality education in one of the poorest parts of India. Education that helps everybody, but especially the girls.

Girls often don't get the same level of education as boys in rural India, and without that education they often end up getting married very young and facing a life of domestic work.

But this community-led school changes all of that, allowing girls to go on to further education and successful careers.

The school has grown to around 400 students who travel from miles around because it provides the best education available in the region.

Donations support:

• Education from early childhood through college. Many students are supported from age 4 through 19+. Right now, 10 girls are in college.
• Safe accommodation during term time. For many girls, this provides not just education but a stable place to live so they can attend and thrive.
• Holistic support. Academic learning, extracurricular activities, and well-being support that other schools don't provide.

And it goes beyond immediate education. A child born to a mother who can read (which is not as common as you might think in rural India) is 50% more likely to live beyond age five. Education doesn't just change one life. It changes entire communities for generations.

Hope of Bethesda is tiny. There's no fundraising team, no advertising budget, no government support, and no major donors. The charity is completely reliant on individual supporters like you.

Your donation isn't a drop in the ocean. For a charity this size, one person's giving genuinely makes all the difference.

Look, you've been generous with your time and attention over the years, reading what I write and listening to what I say. If my work has helped you in any way, and if you have room in your Christmas giving, I'd be grateful if you'd consider supporting Hope of Bethesda.

There's no minimum. Give what feels right to you.

Whether that's £10 or £100, your support will help provide education, safety, and opportunity to girls who would otherwise have none of these things.

Donate Now Via Stripe

or learn more about Hope of Bethesda

Thank you for even considering this.

Your willingness to support something that matters to my family means more than I can say. Whether you're able to give this Christmas or not, I'm grateful for your continued support of my work and for being part of this community.

Have a wonderful Christmas. Rest up. Eat too much. And I'll see you on January 8th, ready to dive back in.

And so we've reached the end of the course on UX leadership and strategy (but not the end of my emails), and I want to leave you with some final thoughts and encouragement for the journey ahead.

Being a design leader within an organization is challenging, and you will find yourself coming up against many roadblocks and difficulties along the way. I want to leave you with a quote from Winston Churchill that I absolutely love: "Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."

As you look forward and begin to work out how you're going to define your role within the organization and how you're going to begin to shift the culture to be more user-centric, I would very much encourage you to keep that quote in mind. Why? Because making these kinds of big organizational changes is a marathon, not a sprint. You won't transform your company's approach to UX overnight. There will be setbacks, resistance, and moments when you feel like you're not making progress. But if you maintain your enthusiasm through those failures and keep pushing forward, you will gradually see change take hold.

Let me give you a quick recap of what we've covered in this course.

Start by taking control of your role. Define your vision of what user experience is within the organization and what the role of your team is. Don't allow others to define that for you.

Step back from day-to-day implementation work as much as you possibly can so that you can have a bigger impact across the organization on more digital projects. Do this by becoming an advisor, a consultant, but more importantly, somebody who provides resources, education, and tools for other people to use.

Work at building relationships with your colleagues across the organization, teaching them and empowering them to start adopting user experience best practices themselves and to become UX practitioners. Ultimately, it all comes back to that well-known phrase: don't give a man a fish, but teach him how to fish. If you teach people how to do UX, they're going to be much more successful over the long term and in many more projects than if you just do it for them.

Spend some time working on culture hacking, changing the organization as a whole. I'll be honest with you, that's going to be the hardest part of all of this and probably the one that you come to slightly later, once you've built some momentum. But certainly look at promoting yourself within the organization so that people are aware of what you do and your impact. Think about those guerrilla marketing tactics that I taught you about earlier in the course.

If you do all of that, you will be heading in the right direction. However, everything that I've talked about in this course will have to be translated for your organization and your circumstances. Not all of it will apply, and don't feel that you have to do things the way that I've taught you. You need to find your own way, but I hope that the things I've shared here will at least point you in the right direction.

If you're a freelancer or agency working with client organizations, these principles apply to you too. Your challenge is helping your clients build internal UX capability without making yourself redundant.

Focus on being the guide who teaches their team to fish rather than the person who catches all the fish for them. Position your engagements as building capability, not just delivering outputs. Create documentation, run workshops, and leave behind tools and resources that empower their teams after you've gone.

Because the clients who learn from you become your best advocates and bring you back for bigger, more strategic work.

Finally, I would encourage you to reach out to me anytime, and I mean this. You might be reading this years after I've produced it, but still feel free to reach out. Just hit reply to this email and I'll get back to you. I'm happy to answer any questions that you have because I know how difficult it can be being a UX design lead in organizations today.

Although this is the end of the course, it's not the end of what I have to share. You will continue to receive emails on everything from conversion optimization, user experience design, UX leadership, user research, and the role of AI in our jobs.

Thank you very much for sticking with me right to the end. It is hugely appreciated and I hope you found it useful.