Beyond UX Design

Ever notice an idea gets a cold reception the moment it comes from another team? That’s Not Invented Here. This week I dig into why our brains treat “not ours” as “not good,” what it cost teams I worked on at GE, and how to catch it early.
When your team says an outside idea “won’t work for us,” are you evaluating the idea, or just the team it came from?
Not Invented Here is the tendency to reject or undervalue ideas, tools, and research that come from outside your own team, while overvaluing the stuff you built yourselves. The catch is that it never announces itself. It feels like you have standards, or you know your users, when really the source of the idea is doing the evaluating for you in the background. The term goes back to a 1982 study by Ralph Katz and Thomas Allen at MIT, who tracked fifty R&D groups and found that the longer a team stayed together, the less it talked to the outside sources it most needed to hear from. Performance slid as a result. Later work from David Antons and Frank Piller reframed it as an attitude rather than a behavior, a standing negative feeling toward anything labeled “external,” whether that label comes from a different company, department, discipline, or just a different job title.
On product teams, this shows up everywhere once you start looking. Engineers’ UX suggestions get waved off because usability is “our lane.” Agency research gets its methodology questioned the second it contradicts the team’s assumptions, while a single hallway conversation gets treated as solid evidence. Ten squads rebuild nearly the same component ten different ways because the shared version doesn’t quite work for us, and then nobody trusts the design system anymore.
If your team has ever quietly shelved a good finding because it came from the wrong people, this one’s for you. Give it a listen.

Topics:
• 00:00 - The reflex that rejects an idea before you've even looked at it
• 03:00 - The GE story: a mandate to adopt one design system called Cirrus
• 04:00 - Every team pushes back with the same "that won't work for us"
• 05:00 - Defining not invented here and the 1982 Katz and Allen study
• 06:00 - Why long-tenured teams stop talking outward, and the shift from behavior to attitude
• 07:00 - Why your brain does it: ownership, effort, identity, and the IKEA effect connection
• 08:00 - The measurable cost, and Spolsky's defense of building in-house
• 09:00 - How the bias hides behind "our context is different"
• 10:00 - How it hits research and design systems, and where the IKEA effect sneaks in
• 11:00 - Engineering rewrites, competitor patterns, and acquired teams
• 12:00 - Turning the bias around with "proudly found elsewhere"
• 13:00 - Separate the source from the substance, and watch your team's own boundaries
• 14:00 - Give ownership before adoption, and treat build versus adopt as a real decision
• 15:00 - Audit your outside input, and back to the Cirrus lesson
—
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A late-night DM from a listener named Chris asked me something I couldn’t answer: did I lose my identity as a designer? My team just went one hundred percent Cursor, no more Figma. This season, I figure out what AI actually changes about the work, and what it never touched.
When the tool that defined your job for a decade disappears overnight, what part of “designer” actually leaves with it?
This is the first solo season in the history of Beyond UX Design. No guests, no interviews, just me working through one question that landed in my DMs late one night from Chris, a listener I’ve known for years. He asked whether I felt like I’d lost my identity as a designer after my team dropped Figma and went fully into Cursor. My gut said no. Thirty seconds later, I realized I didn’t actually know. That question became this whole season.
Episode one is about the world right before the change, back when Figma was just how we worked. I walk through what a normal design process looked like on my team, and then I get honest about something we don’t talk about enough: how much of “being a good designer” got quietly measured by tool fluency. Named layers, auto layout, clean files. None of that is capital-D design, but it stood in for it because it was the thing we could see, screenshot, and post about on LinkedIn
I also take on a good question from the original LinkedIn thread that inspired this. If you could always design and build in code, why is this suddenly a big deal now? My answer comes down to opportunity cost, and it reframes what AI actually changed. Spoiler: it wasn’t the ability to code. It was the time. If any of this sounds familiar, whether your team already made the switch or you can feel it coming, hit play and come along for the season.
Topics:
• 00:00 – The DM from Chris: “Do you feel as if you lost your identity as a designer?”
• 02:40 – The late-night LinkedIn message
• 03:20 – Why the identity question never crossed my mind
• 04:10 – 127 comments, and why they were almost all tactical
• 05:30 – This isn’t just a designer problem: PMs and engineers too
• 06:00 – What “normal” looked like: the old design-to-handoff process
• 07:30 – How designers quietly ranked each other on tool fluency
• 09:20 – Why tool skills got mistaken for design skills for a decade
• 10:40 – Derek’s challenge: “We could always design in code, so why now?”
• 11:20 – My front-end dev origin story and why it doesn’t settle the debate
• 12:50 – The real answer: opportunity cost, not ability
• 13:50 – What AI actually changed: collapsing the time to do both
• 14:40 – Were there warning signs? The pilots I read as experiments
• 16:00 – The real danger isn’t replacement, it’s belief
• 16:30 – What survives so far: research, flows, judgment, taste
• 17:10 – What still gets me, and a look ahead to episode two
—
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We remember what we learned but lose track of where it came from. I dig into source confusion, the memory quirk that quietly decides who gets credit on your team, whose research gets remembered, and why the person who repeats an idea usually beats the person who had it.
Have you ever watched your idea come out of someone else’s mouth twenty minutes later and get all the applause you didn’t?
Source confusion is the reason your team’s history gets rewritten without anyone meaning to do it. We hold onto what we learn and quietly lose the note about where it came from. Back in 1993, researchers Marcia Johnson, Shahin Hashtroudi, and Steven Lindsay laid this out as the source monitoring framework: memories don’t come with a tag saying where they originated. Every time you recall something, your brain rebuilds the source on the spot using clues like how vivid it feels or whether you remember thinking it through. And because the source gets rebuilt instead of retrieved, it can get rebuilt wrong. An idea you worked hard on feels like yours whether it was or not, and an idea that arrived easily in conversation leaves fewer clues behind, which makes it easy to lose track of who actually said it first.
On a design team, this quietly reshapes who gets credit, and credit is the whole game. It decides who gets trusted with the next big project, who gets promoted, and whose voice carries weight in the next planning meeting. The person who develops ideas out loud and in writing piles up credit, while the person who seeds an idea quietly and moves on gets absorbed into someone else’s story. The good news is that this is predictable, and predictable things you can plan around. In this episode, I get into how to work with it: attribute out loud and in writing, capture ideas before the room talks, keep decision logs with names on them, and build your own paper trail because your org isn’t going to do it for you. Give it a listen and see where source confusion might be quietly rewriting your team’s history.Topics:
• 00:37 - Why it isn’t stealing
• 02:27 - Flipping the scene around: how you fall for this too
• 03:24 - What source confusion actually is
• 04:04 - The memory-as-filing-cabinet myth and the source monitoring framework
• 04:40 - How your brain rebuilds a source from clues instead of retrieving it
• 05:45 - The Brown and Murphy round-robin experiment and cryptomnesia
• 06:55 - Schacter’s seven sins of memory: these are side effects, not bugs
• 07:15 - How credit gets absorbed in critiques and research
• 08:12 - How this quietly shapes who gets promoted
• 08:45 - Using it to your advantage: be the last confident voice in the room
• 09:15 - The defensive move: stop relying on anyone’s memory
• 09:38 - Why your boss won’t track credit for you
• 09:55 - What to actually do about it
• 10:20 - Write ideas down before the room talks
• 10:50 - Attribute out loud and in writing
• 11:20 - Make your own contributions and leave a paper trail
• 11:50 - Check the origin story before performance reviews
—
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At the end of April, my design team dropped Figma. As of May first, we've been one hundred percent in Cursor. Then a friend asked me if I'd lost my identity as a designer, and I couldn't answer him. This season, eight solo episodes, is my answer. Starts September 08.
If the tool that defined your career disappeared tomorrow, what part of being a designer would actually be left?
This season is different. No guests, no interviews. Just me, telling you exactly what happened when my team lost the tool that, for a decade, basically defined what it meant to be a designer. At the end of April, our Figma license got cut. It wasn't our decision. By May first, we were doing everything in Cursor, and I've been sorting through what that means ever since.
The whole thing kicked off with a DM from Chris, a longtime listener and a friend, who asked me a question I couldn't answer: do you feel as if you lost your identity as a designer? My first reaction was no, obviously not. My second reaction was that I didn't actually know. Across eight episodes, I'm going to work through it out loud. The day the call came down. What we traded away and what came back. Whether I lost something or just lost the story where the answer was easy. What's still mine when the robot does the pixel pushing. The economics nobody wants to say out loud. And the question that worries me most: if judgment is what survives, and judgment gets built by the exact work that's disappearing, who comes after us?
I'm not selling a tool, and I'm not selling a course. I'm a design lead who's actually living this, and I've got a lot to say. If your team has made this switch, or you can feel it coming, this season is for you. Follow the show so the first episode lands in your feed on September 08.
—
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Whoever puts the first number, the first draft, or the first design in front of the team quietly decides where everyone else ends up. This week I dig into why anchoring bias steers our estimates, redesigns, and negotiations more than we realize, and what we can do about it.
Ever set out to redesign a feature and ended up with the same product wearing a fresh coat of paint?
There’s a good chance you got anchored before the work even started.Anchoring bias is the tendency to lean too heavily on the first piece of information we encounter when making a decision. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman named it back in 1974, and the effect is stubborn. Their famous Wheel of Fortune study showed that even a totally random number could pull people’s estimates toward it. Later research on experienced judges and real estate agents found the same pattern, even when the professionals swore the anchor hadn’t influenced them at all. That denial is a big part of what makes this one so tricky.
On product teams, this shows up constantly. The first draft of a PRD sets the frame every reviewer edits around. The old design becomes the gravity for the new one, and a supposed redesign quietly turns into a reskin. The first estimate in a planning meeting drags everybody else’s numbers toward it.
This week, on the Cognition Catalog, I walk through where anchoring comes from, why willpower and expertise barely help, and a handful of specific moves you can make to keep the first thing seen from automatically becoming the thing that wins. Give it a listen and let me know if you’ve caught yourself getting anchored lately.
Topics:
• 3:00 The Two-Week Estimate Trap
• 4:45 What Is the Anchoring Effect?
• 5:20 The Wheel of Fortune Experiment
• 6:20 Why We Stop Adjusting Too Soon• 7:15 Even Experienced Judges Get Anchored
• 8:10 The Real Estate Study• 9:00 How First Drafts Frame Everything
• 9:35 Why Redesigns Turn Into Reskins
• 9:55 The Status Quo Is an Anchor Nobody Chose
• 10:30 Using Anchoring on Purpose
• 11:25 Why Willpower Doesn’t Fix It
• 12:00 Five Things to Try With Your Team
• 14:30 The Bottom Line
—
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