Most UX professionals know the principle "you are not the user." It's the first thing you learn: get out of your own head, test your assumptions, listen to real people. Katja Busch has spent 30 years teaching that principle and adding a second half that rarely makes it onto the syllabus: you are not the business either.
UX professionals who learn to frame their work in business language (risk reduction, cost, efficiency) get invited to decisions earlier. They protect their designs from taste-based feedback. And they tend to survive budget pressure better than those who don't. This post is a practical guide to making that shift, at any stage of your career.
This post is based on my conversation with Katja Busch in Episode 75 of UX Heroes. Listen to the full episode (in German): Spotify | Apple Podcasts
Key takeaways
- Applying an Empathy Map to internal stakeholders gets you invited to more decisions. The same tool that reveals user needs reveals what your product owner, CTO, or marketing director actually cares about. Most designers have never tried it. (12:42)
- 70 to 90 percent of startups fail because they never ask whether their idea solves a real market problem. User testing done early directly addresses this risk. Framing it this way makes the case for UX without ever mentioning the word "UX." (22:56)
- Business stakeholders make decisions based on risk, cost, and efficiency metrics. UX professionals who speak this language move from being "the design tool" to being a strategic partner. The shift requires learning maybe three new vocabulary words. (23:01)
- Starting a design presentation with the business problem produces a fundamentally different conversation. "Support costs rose 25 percent last quarter" is a better opening slide than a wireframe. Stakeholders hear the context they need to evaluate the work. (29:50)
- Junior designers can run user research on their own role. Asking stakeholders directly what they expect from you and what problems need solving is the fastest way to become relevant — and it's exactly the skill you're already supposed to have. (40:45)
"You are not the user" only gets you halfway
The principle "you are not the user" is the foundation of UX work. It's the reminder to get out of your own assumptions and test against reality. But Katja Busch argues there is a second half that most design education never teaches: you are not the business. UX professionals who only optimise for user needs, without understanding how the business creates value and how decisions actually get made, do good work that doesn't get implemented.
The problem is structural. Designers are trained to empathise with users. They are rarely trained to empathise with their CFO, product director, or the head of customer support who is staring at a 25 percent increase in ticket volume. Those people have different mental models, different vocabularies, and different criteria for what counts as a good decision. If you walk into a room speaking user-research language to people whose entire day is denominated in cost, risk, and speed-to-market, you are speaking a foreign language. Then wondering why nobody understood you. It's a pattern the industry has been repeating for decades — and one worth examining closely.
"We preach to each other: 'you are not the user.' What I say back is: 'you are not the business.' The shift from looking only at your users and target groups toward also thinking about stakeholders, and how to talk to them differently, is new for many people."
Katja Busch, UX Coach & Trainer
The practical implication is that the empathy tools designers use for users work equally well applied inward. A stakeholder Empathy Map. A persona built around your product owner. A journey map of how decisions actually get made in your organization. These take an afternoon, and they change the entire framing of how you show up.
The business vocabulary that opens doors
Most UX professionals already know usability is defined as efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction. Katja points out that efficiency and effectiveness are already business vocabulary. The shortcut is not to learn a new language. It is to recognise the translation that already exists.
She identifies three categories of business argument that reliably get a stakeholder's attention, along with the kind of sentence that makes each one land:
Value creation
Understand how the organisation makes money and where in the customer journey that happens. This tells you which UX problems cost the most to leave unsolved. Poor help-centre design looks like a cosmetic issue until the cost of customer service becomes the CFO's biggest line item.
Example: "The checkout flow currently has a 67% drop-off rate. A 15-point improvement recovers roughly €X in revenue per month."
Risk avoidance
Testing earlier means fewer expensive mistakes downstream. If you know in advance whether your business idea solves a real market problem, you avoid building the wrong thing. Katja cites the estimate that 70 to 90 percent of startups fail because they never asked this question. UX testing is risk management — and the numbers back that up. Frame it that way.
Example: "If we test this with five users before the sprint review, we catch the problems before they become support tickets."
Efficiency and effectiveness
These are the exact words in the ISO definition of usability. They are also the exact words in every board-level strategy document. You do not need to explain what these words mean. You just need to use them in the right sentences.
Example: "This redesign reduces the steps to complete a return from seven to three. That's efficiency in the ISO sense, and it's the language your ops team already uses."
"How can my work help avoid risks? How can we do the right things and know in advance whether there is a real problem in the market for our business idea? These are the levers that make stakeholders listen."
Katja Busch, UX Coach & Trainer
The point is not to become a business analyst. It is to build enough vocabulary to be understood by the people with the power to act on what you find.
How to present a design without losing before you start
The classic scenario: you have designed something good. You know it solves a real user problem. You stand up to present it. Halfway through, someone asks why the logo is so small. The conversation derails. You leave having agreed to changes that have nothing to do with the user problem and everything to do with the personal aesthetic preferences of the most senior person in the room.
Katja's diagnosis is simple: you started with the design instead of the business problem.
Before (design-first):
"Here's the screen. We used the Microsoft search pattern. This is what it looks like when someone submits a support request. Here's the empty state. And here's what happens when nothing is found."
Result: The conversation pivots to whether the logo is too small.
After (business problem-first):
"Support costs rose 25 percent last quarter, which means higher operating costs and pressure to hire. We looked at how to reduce ticket volume by improving self-service, aiming to resolve as many requests as possible before a ticket is created. Here are three options, with their cost and timeline trade-offs."
Result: The conversation is about which option to choose.
"When I come forward and say: I've understood the problem, and here are three options for a solution, enriched with business vocabulary so the other person actually has a chance to understand me, then I manage to increase my visibility."
Katja Busch, UX Coach & Trainer
The structure she recommends follows the Business Problem Statement from the Lean UX Canvas. Use this as a template before any important presentation:
We believe [business goal, e.g. "reducing support costs"]. We have observed [current problem, e.g. "a 25% increase in ticket volume over the last quarter"]. We need to enable [user action, e.g. "customers to resolve common issues without contacting support"]. We'll know we've succeeded when [measurable outcome, e.g. "self-service resolution rate increases from 40% to 60% within two sprints"].
Start there, and you walk in as a problem-solver. Start with the design, and you walk in as the person who needs their work validated.
Apply your own tools to your own stakeholders
The practical method Katja recommends for junior and senior designers alike is to run user research on your internal stakeholders before any important conversation.
That means building a simple Stakeholder Empathy Map for the person you need to influence. The same format you use for user research. If the broader challenge of getting stakeholders excited about testing feels familiar, that post is a useful companion to this one. If you don't know the answers, ask people who work closely with them. Here are the six questions worth answering before you walk into any high-stakes meeting:
- What is this person measured on? What are their KPIs, and what happens if they miss them?
- What is their biggest current pressure? Deadline, budget, headcount, a board commitment?
- What decisions do they own, and which do they influence but not own? Knowing this tells you who else needs to be in the room.
- What language do they use when they talk about success? Listen to how they phrase things in meetings and mirror it back.
- What would a win look like for them in the next 90 days? Frame your work as part of that win.
- What could go wrong on their watch that they're trying to avoid? This is the risk angle, and it's often the strongest entry point.
She frames this as an act of empathy, not politics. The enemy-image version ("the bad stakeholders who don't understand design") is comfortable but counterproductive. The professional version is: this person is under pressure from metrics I can find out, they make decisions based on criteria I can learn, and if I understand those criteria I can show how my work addresses them.
"The moment I put myself in the other perspective and am also willing to say, I bring empathy to my stakeholders, that is already a step for many people. Because with an enemy image, it is always easier to protect yourself."
Katja Busch, UX Coach & Trainer
She also recommends applying the Danish Design Ladder to understand where your role currently sits: operative (working on the product), process (working on how the team makes decisions), and strategic (working on what the organisation should do next). Most UX roles are defined operatively. The path to greater influence runs through process and strategy, which requires the stakeholder vocabulary to navigate.
What junior designers can do right now
If you're early in your career, most of this sounds abstract. You're not meeting the board. You're trying to get your wireframes approved.
The single most useful thing you can do this week: ask one stakeholder directly what they expect from your role and what problem they most need solved right now. Not in a formal meeting. In a coffee chat, a Slack message, a five-minute conversation after standup. Most designers have never done this because the job description implied the answer. Job descriptions describe an ideal that rarely matches daily reality. Running user research on your own role, early, gives you the context to make your work land.
Beyond that, Katja's advice: find allies. Look for people whose problems you can help solve, inside or outside your immediate team. Professional associations and UX meetups give you a safe space to compare notes and build confidence without revealing anything confidential. And when you hit friction, treat it as a journey-mapping exercise: where is the pain point in this process, who owns it, and what would a solution they would accept look like?
"Nobody opens the door for us. We have to knock ourselves and have a good reason to be at the table. That doesn't mean lecturing management about what the user wants. It means doing what we do with user groups and applying it to our stakeholders."
Katja Busch, UX Coach & Trainer
If you want to walk into your next stakeholder presentation with evidence rather than assumptions, Userbrain's AI-assisted test setup gets you from brief to first findings in hours. Start free →
Resources mentioned in this episode
- Danish Design Ladder — the model for understanding design's role at operative, process, and strategic levels (Danish Design Center)
- Lean UX Canvas — the original canvas by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, built around the Business Problem Statement
- Lean Product Canvas — the updated version of the above, renamed to shift the focus from "UX" to product outcomes
- Designing for the Digital Age — Kim Goodwin's comprehensive guide to interaction design and UX, recommended by Katja
About Katja Busch
Katja Busch is a freelance UX coach, consultant, trainer, and speaker with 30 years of experience in UX disciplines across agency and in-house environments. She teaches at universities across Germany, leads a certified UX Management training at the Haufe Akademie, and specialises in bespoke in-house performance workshops. Find her on LinkedIn.
