The Shift UX Leaders Salon
September 23
9:00a - 5:00p ET
Location TBD
Peter Merholz
Independent Consultant & Coach
About this workshop
UX leaders are getting it from all sides. Mandates from senior leadership about incorporating AI into the work. Frustration, anxiety, even outright fear from team members worried about their workload, their processes, their futures. All of it on top of everything already expected of them.
It makes for an emotional roller coaster. The ability to deliver powerful new value is tempered by exhaustion and insecurity — about the job, and sometimes about the relationship to the work itself. Research by Noam Segal for Lenny's Newsletter found that UX and research professionals are the least happy in their work.
Compounding this is the isolation inherent in both the role and the technology. UX leadership has always been demanding and lonely. That is now amplified.
Shift UX advances this premise: roles disappear, but the work matters more than ever. For leaders, that premise raises a harder question. If your title no longer defines your value, what does?
That's the question this salon takes on.
A companion to the Shift UX conference, this all-day gathering brings together UX leaders at director level and above to wrestle with the real challenges of leading with purpose during turbulent times. Facilitated by Peter Merholz, the salon is an opportunity to step back, gain perspective, and lead from a place of clarity rather than exhaustion and reaction.
Target Audience
<p>UX leaders at director level and above.</p>
Takeaways
- Concrete strategies for reshaping how UX is understood, valued, and practiced in your organization.
- A network of peers who understand your situation well enough to still be useful to you months from now.
- Operates under the Chatham House Rule — a safe space to speak candidly about what's working, what isn't, and what feels impossible.
High-Level Agenda
The whole day turns on one question: if your title no longer defines your value, what does? You'll answer it four times, from four directions — your organization, your positioning, your practice, and your own next move.
We've heard from senior leaders that they're less interested in lectures and more keen on working with and learning from peers. So, the Salon is highly collaborative and active. You'll be on your feet nearly as much as in your seat, engaging others throughout the day.
Setting the table
Peter opens with a short framing talk on the phase shift the profession is moving through, drawing on his own research: a 458-person sentiment survey and a listening tour of twenty UX executives.
Where you are
The first thing we'll do is figure out where you are, relative to others. Using sentiment patterns, and organizational overlap (size; reporting structures), you're placed in groups of 5-6 people in similar situations. These 'home groups' persist throughout the day, ensuring you'll leave with deep connections that you can take with you.
Understand your organizational context
What does your organization actually believe UX is for? Not what the mission statement claims — but the real deal: what the reporting structure, the metrics, and the last eighteen months of budget reveal.
Using a six-question diagnostic, we'll write the candid version in a single sentence, placed on a wall alongside everyone else's. This reveals a set of organizational archetypes which will be used throughout the rest of the day.
With the organizational context in mind, everyone asks themselves: "What's the single biggest opportunity in front of you right now?"
What are you claiming?
If your value isn't your title, your authority, or your craft — what is it?
In small groups, you'll "Design the Box" for UX that responds to one of the archetypes. And, yes, we mean an actual product box. Front, back, sides: the value proposition, its constituent elements, and to whom it is most attractive. These boxes are shown off in a 'trade show' with other groups. And then we vote on which boxes we believe best capture the claims of UX.
Most UX leaders never had to say their value proposition out loud to someone who doesn't already believe it. That needs to end. We provide a safe place for some practice.
How do you turn uncertainty into opportunity?
We present a set of imperatives for leading through this moment — from stop waiting for permission through balance idealism and pragmatism.
Each group takes the imperative that fits their archetype and identifies concrete practices to fulfill it, each with a first small step someone could actually take on Monday. These practices are then shared with the whole room, turning into a complete and robust playbook everyone walks away with.
What's your next move?
As we've mentioned, the role of the UX leader is changing. Over the course of three steps, you develop a plan for how you re-consider your work:
- What you can do that your current job doesn't use.
- What are all the opportunities genuinely available to a UX leader right now — mapped by the whole room together. This gets you out of your own head and into a space of collective intelligence and wisdom.
- The practices that have actually sustained people over the last year.
Closing synthesis
Peter takes the floor to synthesize what emerged from our discussions and activities — patterns running across the organizational archetypes, the value propositions on the boxes, and the tactics for handling the imperatives. This will serve as an 'explainer' that you can use to situate yourself in the broader landscape, and identify productive paths forward.
VIP Reception
All Salon participants are part of the VIP UX Leader cohort, and are invited to a VIP reception after the Salon, where they can continue discussions in a more relaxed setting, as well as meet Shift UX speakers and sponsors.
What you carry out
- The box you built — a physical object (or at least a photo of it) that states what UX is for
- The room's playbook — every imperative poster, transcribed and sent the following morning
- The option map — the full range of moves available to UX leaders right now, with real people attached to each
- A workbook with everything you wrote during the day
- Peers who know your situation well enough to still be useful months from now
Session speaker