Beyond UX Design

Cat Lo spent 20 years learning that execution excellence can actually hold you back. After burning out at Amazon doing beautiful work that nobody noticed, she distilled her hard-won lessons into five tenets, a framework that helped her shape billion-dollar opportunities and drive $218 million in impact.
What if the very thing that made you a great designer is the reason you’re being left out of the decisions that matter most?
Cat Lo’s career has taken a path most designers don’t follow, starting with a bus ticket to New York City and no job waiting, through agency work, entrepreneurship, and eventually to Amazon, where she designs how millions of new products find their first customers. She didn’t take the traditional route from corporate to “I need freedom.” She went the other direction, deliberately. And that choice gave her a perspective on craft, scale, and influence that’s pretty hard to find in most design conversations.
In this episode, Cat breaks down why execution excellence, the thing that gets you hired and earns you trust, can quietly become a trap. The better you get at delivering, the more delivery lands on your plate. And the more delivery on your plate, the less you’re involved in deciding what gets built in the first place. The result is a framework of five tenets she uses every day: find the smallest testable truth, let customer data be the tiebreaker, ship to learn rather than waiting for perfection, align on the problem, not the solution, and look for the invisible problems nobody else is paying attention to.
Cat also walks us through a real example from her work at Amazon — a $7.8 billion market opportunity hiding in plain sight that most people had written off as not important enough to solve. It’s a masterclass in how individual contributors without direct authority can still shape strategy, build conviction, and make work impossible to ignore. If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing great work that just isn’t landing, this one is for you. Go give it a listen.
Topics:
• 03:27 - Cat’s Origin story: a bus ticket, $20, and no job waiting in New York City.
• 05:08 - Career arc: fine arts → art director → entrepreneurship → Amazon.
• 07:41 - Your skills are knobs, not switches. Learn when to turn each one up or down.
• 10:07 - Every company speaks a different design language; you have to learn to speak theirs.
• 14:17 - How to handle vague direction: match your response to the altitude of the ask.
• 18:00 - Tenet 1: find the smallest testable truth before going wide.
• 25:52 - Tenet 2: customer truth is the only real tiebreaker when opinions are flying.
• 30:36 -Tenet 3: achievable now beats perfect later. Ship to learn, not to finish.
• 37:33 - Tenet 4: alignment means agreeing on the problem, not the solution.
• 41:00 - The brand name generator story and the $7.8B opportunity nobody was solving.
• 48:00 - Tenet 5: look around the corner for the invisible problems no one’s been assigned.
• 53:15 - How to build influence without authority: state your opinion clearly and stay flexible.
• 01:04:05 - Where to find Cat: faangforcorporate.com.
Helpful Links:
• Connect with Cat on LinkedIn
• Subscribe to FAANG Boss

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We've built our careers on case studies, portfolios, and success stories, but what if we're only ever seeing a fraction of the full picture? This week, we dig into survivorship bias and how it quietly shapes the decisions your product team makes every day.
What if every case study and "here's how we did it" success story you've ever learned from was missing the most important part of the story?
Every startup founder story sounds the same. Crazy idea. Doubters everywhere. Bet on themselves. Changed everything. It's a great narrative, but it's a narrative written entirely by the people who made it through. For every founder who ignored the critics and won, thousands did the exact same thing and quietly disappeared. It may sound like pessimism, but that's the math we've been ignoring.
This week's Cognition Catalog episode breaks down survivorship bias: why we instinctively focus on the outcomes we can see while the failures stay invisible. It shows up everywhere; in the startup mythology we've absorbed, in the portfolios we scroll through on LinkedIn, and in the way product teams anchor their planning on the projects that shipped rather than the ones that got quietly shelved.
The good news is that this isn't a bias you're stuck with. There are practical ways to build better habits into how your team makes decisions, and it starts by asking a different question. Give this one a listen if you've ever wondered why your career feels like it doesn't quite measure up to everyone else's highlight reel.
Topics:
• 00:00 - The startup founder myth and why we only hear from the survivors.
• 01:23 - Welcome to the Cognition Catalog.
• 02:45 - The small business failure numbers that most people never talk about.
• 04:23 - What survivorship bias actually is and why it matters.
• 04:35 - Why portfolio case studies only show the work that succeeded.
• 05:35 - Why your career probably looks worse than everyone else's, and why that's an illusion.• 08:16 - How the college dropout mythology turns exceptions into templates.
• 08:40 - How survivorship bias quietly shapes product team decisions.
• 09:02 - Why your active user research is a filtered sample.
• 09:28 - How survivorship bias shows up in team culture.
• 10:09 - Five practical ways to fight survivorship bias on your team.
• 12:11 - The one question you should always be asking about success stories.
—

Thanks for listening!
We hope you dug today’s episode. If you liked what you heard, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts! And if you really enjoyed today’s episode, why don’t you leave a five-star review? Or tell some friends! It will help us out a ton.
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• ⁠Get a FREE audiobook AND support the show⁠
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• ⁠Subscribe on Apple Podcasts⁠
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AI is making it easier than ever to run research, but faster doesn't always mean better. In this episode, we dig into what it really means to democratize research responsibly, and why your team probably needs a charter before someone does something they can't take back.
Your team is already running research without you. So the real question is: are you going to help them do it well, or just hope for the best?
Ned Dwyer is the co-founder and CEO of Great Question, an all-in-one UX research platform built to bring research to everyone in an organization. Not just the people with "researcher" in their title. He's spent years thinking about how teams can democratize access to customer insights without turning research into a free-for-all, and his talk at UX Con is what first put him on my radar.
In this conversation, we dig into one of the more divisive topics in our industry right now: research democratization. Ned makes a pretty compelling case that it's not the all-or-nothing argument a lot of people make it out to be. It's a spectrum, and where your organization should land on that spectrum depends on who you're researching, what decisions are being made, and how much risk is on the table. We also get into AI's role in all of this, from AI-moderated interviews to synthesized insights, and where teams tend to get themselves into trouble when they hand over too much to the machine without any real governance in place.
The thing I found most useful in this conversation is Ned's concept of a democratization charter, a practical framework for defining who should be doing what kind of research, with which populations, and under what guardrails. It's something I honestly hadn't thought much about before meeting Ned, and I think it's one of the most actionable ideas we've talked about on the show. If your team is already using AI research tools (and let's be honest, they probably are), this conversation is worth your time.
Topics:
• 01:45 - Ned's origin story and why he built Great Question
• 04:10 - The pressure to move fast, and what gets lost when speed wins
• 06:11 - The 80/20 rule: how to use AI without publishing slop
• 09:45 - Democratization is a spectrum, not a binary
• 12:35 - Where guardrails matter most: vulnerable populations and one-way-door decisions
• 13:12 - The case for a democratization charter
• 19:00 - AI moderation demystified: closer to a talking survey than a human interviewer
• 23:00 - Ned's GoDaddy confession: how rogue research goes wrong
• 27:00 - Participant fatigue and insight overload: the new risks AI introduces
• 31:45 - Rogue research will happen regardless... your job is to make it safer
• 43:28 - The Will Smith spaghetti analogy and where AI tools are headed
—
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Have you ever walked out of a usability session completely confident in your findings, only to ship something that quietly missed the mark?
What if the signal was there the whole time, and your brain just decided it wasn't worth logging?
This week on the Cognition Catalog, we tackle The Expectation Bias. This bias shapes what you notice before you've even decided what to think about it. Your brain has already generated a prediction before the first participant clicks a button or a teammate presents their work, and that prediction quietly shapes what registers as a signal and what gets explained away before you've made a single conscious decision about what any of it actually means.
We get into the science behind why this happens, and trace the research back to psychologist Robert Rosenthal's work in the early 1960s. His experiments, including the landmark Pygmalion in the Classroom study with Lenore Jacobson, showed that expectations don't just color our perceptions; they can actually change outcomes. That's a sobering thought when you consider how many design decisions are built on research we assumed was neutral.
We also dig into where this plays out on real teams: in usability sessions where hesitations get logged as "minor," in design reviews where leadership-championed features get a generous read while quietly doubted projects get interrogated at every turn, and in how we evaluate colleagues whose reputations have already done the evaluating for us. If any of that sounds familiar, this episode offers five concrete habits to help you catch the filter before it's already done its job. Give it a listen.
Topics:
• 00:00 - Perception is prediction
• 02:04 - A UX research cautionary tale
• 03:23 - Defining expectation bias
• 03:42 - Prediction errors explained
• 04:31 - Pygmalion effect origins
• 06:03 - Expectation vs confirmation
• 06:30 - How it warps team decisions
• 08:31 - Habits to reduce bias
• 10:47 - Wrap up and next steps
—
Thanks for listening! We hope you dug today’s episode. If you liked what you heard, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts! And if you really enjoyed today’s episode, why don’t you leave a five-star review? Or tell some friends! It will help us out a ton.
If you haven’t already, sign up for our email list. We won’t spam you. Pinky swear.
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What does it actually take to be the first, or only, designer or researcher on a team? Spoiler: it’s not just about doing great work. This week, we get into the unglamorous, under-discussed side of the solo role: building systems, managing up, and earning trust before you’ve even shipped anything.
What happens when you’re really good at the craft, but nobody around you understands what you do, why it matters, or how to support you?
Julian Della Mattia has spent his career doing one of the hardest things in UX: showing up first. As a researcher who has repeatedly been the founding or solo practitioner inside organizations, Julian has learned, mostly the hard way, that being great at research is only a fraction of the actual job. He’s also the host of Finders to Builders, a podcast built specifically for researchers navigating this exact challenge.
In this conversation, we dig into what Julian calls the “finder to builder” mindset shift: moving from someone who just surfaces insights to someone who builds the infrastructure, earns the trust, and creates the conditions for research (and design) to actually matter inside an organization. We talk about how to manage up when your manager doesn’t fully understand your work, how to know when your efforts are starting to gain traction, and what the invisible job description of a solo or founding designer really looks like.
If you’ve ever landed a solo design or research role and felt the gap between what you prepared for and what the job actually demanded, this one’s for you. Julian brings a grounded, practical perspective that goes well beyond frameworks, because, as he puts it, in this context, frameworks rarely fly out of the box. Hit play.
Helpful Links:
• Connect with Julian on LinkedIn
• Follow Julian’s Substack
• Finders to Builders Podcast
Topics:
• 02:25 – Meet Julian Della Mattia
• 03:48 – From PM to first researcher
• 06:06 – Agency advice for juniors
• 10:54 – Accidental in-house research role
• 14:28 – Finder to builder mindset
• 18:51 – Time triage and playmaker mode
• 24:53 – Invisible work and org dynamics
• 27:49 – Managing up and selling research
• 32:23 – Signals and metrics that it’s working
• 36:48 – Measuring research impact
• 38:35 – Skip the framework trap
• 39:02 – Managing up tactics
• 40:16 – Aligning with business goals
• 43:37 – Just ask your boss
• 44:43 – When to start hiring
• 46:32 – Recap and teamwork
• 48:37 – Parting advice for firsts
• 60:39 – Where to find Julian
—
Thanks for listening! We hope you dug today’s episode. If you liked what you heard, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts! And if you really enjoyed today’s episode, why don’t you leave a five-star review? Or tell some friends! It will help us out a ton.
If you haven’t already, sign up for our email list. We won’t spam you. Pinky swear.
• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Get a FREE audiobook AND support the show⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support the show on Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Check out show transcripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Check out our website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe on Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
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