This week we dig into belief bias, the reason your team grills the research it doesn’t like and waves through the stuff it already agrees with. Same evidence, two completely different levels of scrutiny.If you’ve ever won an argument at work, how sure are you that you made the better case and not just the more popular one?Belief bias is what happens when we judge an argument by whether we agree with where it lands instead of whether the logic actually holds up. If the conclusion sounds right, weak reasoning gets a pass. If it sounds wrong, suddenly everyone turns into a fact-checker. It’s one of the oldest reasoning errors on record, first noted back in 1928, but the study that set the template came in 1983 when Evans, Barston, and Pollard separated two things that usually travel together: whether an argument is valid and whether its conclusion is believable. People accepted believable conclusions about nine times out of ten, no matter whether the logic held.On a product team this shows up everywhere scrutiny is supposed to live. The design direction everyone already likes gets a thin rationale waved through, while the unexpected one gets picked apart. A sloppy study that confirms the roadmap is “directionally useful,” and a solid one that threatens it is suddenly “not statistically significant.” The same point lands when a senior person makes it and stalls when a junior person says the exact same thing. The fix isn’t to distrust your gut. It’s to grade the reasoning before you look at the conclusion, notice when the hard questions only come out for answers you don’t like, and slow things down when the stakes are real.Give it a listen and catch yourself before belief bias makes the call for you.Topics:

• 00:00 - Same idea, two meetings

• 03:45 - Two research studies, same afternoon

• 05:05 - What belief bias actually is (and where it came from)

• 06:00 - The 1983 study that proved it

• 07:00 - Why it happens: fast belief vs slow logic

• 08:10 - Belief bias is not confirmation bias

• 08:40 - Where it shows up on product teams

• 10:00 - Does group discussion fix it?

• 11:20 - 5 ways to catch belief bias

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It’s a regular Thursday sync until my manager cuts our Figma license and hands the whole product team one month to go fully AI. In this one I walk through who made that call, the surprisingly solid case for it, and the very selfish panic running through my head while I said nothing.

When the tool you spent a decade mastering loses its market value in a single meeting, what exactly are you afraid of losing: your job, or your identity?

This is the episode about the day the call actually came down. I’m at my kitchen counter with a fresh coffee, hopping on a normal weekly UX sync, when my manager announces the entire product team is moving to a 100% AI workflow by the end of the month. And by the way, the Figma license is getting cut. No debate, no “what does everyone think.” The decision was made in a room I wasn’t in, then delivered to a room full of designers who had about a month to deal with it.

I do two things in this one. First, I try to be fair to the decision, because it deserves it. I get into the cost math leadership was staring at in early 2026, the pricing question Bob Baxley raised after I posted about the switch, and why ripping the band-aid off with a brutally short deadline was probably the right move and not the reckless one it felt like. Then I tell you the less flattering half: what was actually going through my head in that meeting. Spoiler, not one of those thoughts was about our users or the work. Every single one was about me, my title, and whether being “the person who knows Figma best” was ever a real skill to begin with.

I also get into the part nobody sat us down to talk about, which is that these tools blur the lines between design, engineering, and product in every direction at once, and introduce the “in the loop, on the loop, out of the loop” question that runs through the rest of the season. If your company hasn’t had this meeting yet, I’d gently suggest not assuming it isn’t coming. Give this one a listen, then let me know about your own version of the kitchen counter moment.

Topics:

• 0:00 The day they cut our Figma license

• 3:00 The cost play: why pay for two tools?

• 4:05 Not my call: where I sit in the org

• 4:50 Nobody said "adapt or quit" (the soft mandate)

• 5:30 The fair case, and Bob Baxley's pricing question

• 7:15 Ripping the Band-Aid: off the dock, into the boat

• 8:40 What was really in my head: "just UI engineers now?"

• 9:45 Kevin the plumber

• 10:50 Watching a decade of skill depreciate

• 11:50 How remote teams process shock

• 13:10 Does engineering even want us in the code?

• 14:00 Every role blurs at once

• 15:10 The walk

• 15:55 In the loop, on the loop, out of the loop

• 17:10 Next time: what we traded away

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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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Jeremy catches up with friend of the show, Chris Nguyen, who’s rebuilt his business twice since his last appearance. They talk about why designers can’t count on job security the way they used to, what it actually takes to build something of your own, and why the perfect plan is a myth worth abandoning early.

If you can’t count on your job to protect you, what are you doing to protect yourself?

Chris Nguyen has already rebuilt his business once since he last joined the show, and by the time this episode airs, he’ll be in the middle of doing it again. He built UX Playbook into a recognized education brand, tried a community project called Backlog that fizzled out, took several months off to recover, and landed on Rectangles: a live-stream and newsletter brand built around the design conversations he wishes he’d had years ago. None of it happened on a straight line, and that’s kind of the point.

Jeremy and Chris talk candidly about why designers can’t afford to treat a single employer as their whole safety net anymore. Jeremy’s own team recently made a drastic tooling change that upended how designers on his team work day to day, and he connects that disruption directly to a bigger argument: if the ground can shift under you that fast, having something outside your job, whether it’s a side project, a creative outlet, or a small business, isn’t optional anymore. It’s how you stay steady.

The conversation keeps circling back to a simple, unglamorous truth: nobody has the plan figured out in advance. Chris talks about sitting on the Rectangles idea for the better part of a year before finally committing to a two-week sprint to get it out the door, and admits he still doesn’t fully know what it’ll become. Jeremy pushes on that idea with his own reflections on burnout, reinvention, and why doing something just for yourself, outside of work entirely, might be the most stabilizing thing a designer can do right now. Give this one a listen if you’ve been sitting on an idea and waiting for the right moment.

Topics:
• 03:16 – Catching up on 100 episodes and the never-ending edit grind
• 05:33 – What Chris has been building since his last appearance
• 06:20 – The funk, the time off, and the shift from product to media
• 09:37 – Why running a media company means the content is the product
• 11:36 – Chris breaks down what Rectangles actually is
• 14:04 – Going beyond UX and UI into big D design
• 15:26 – The early 90s aesthetic behind the Rectangles brand
• 20:10 – Why Jeremy’s team just walked away from their Figma license
• 22:42 – Designing straight into Cursor with a component library
• 29:20 – The case for building income outside a single job
• 32:36 – How UX education content has changed as the industry shifts
• 34:22 – The unglamorous side of building something online
• 52:56 – Why a latte art post outperformed a bias breakdown on LinkedIn
• 57:03 – Chris’s closing advice on ideas versus execution
• 58:23 – Consumption versus creation and why the balance matters
• 58:43 – Where to find Chris and the Rectangles launch details

Helpful Links:
• Connect with Chris on LinkedIn
• Subscribe to Rectangles
• Get your UX Playbook

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Your team isn’t just avoiding risk, they’re avoiding the unknown. In this episode of the Cognition Catalog, I break down the ambiguity effect: the cognitive bias that makes unfamiliar ideas, tools, and people feel like threats before anyone’s even evaluated them on their merits.

Have you ever watched a genuinely strong idea get quietly buried in a planning meeting?

Not because anyone argued against it, but because nobody could fully picture how it would play out?

The ambiguity effect is what happens when our brains treat “I don’t know” as “probably bad.” It’s not the same as avoiding risk. Risk is when you know the odds, and they might not be in your favor. Ambiguity is when you don’t even know the odds, and that uncertainty is what our brains treat as a genuine threat. The research goes back to economist Daniel Ellsberg in 1961, who ran a simple thought experiment with two jars of colored balls and predicted that people would almost always choose the jar they could see clearly, even when the hidden jar was, on average, an equally good bet. Decades of follow-up research confirmed he was right.

In a UX or product context, this shows up constantly and quietly. It’s the familiar roadmap feature that beats out the bolder, fuzzier idea. It’s the proven engineering framework that wins over the newer tool that might actually be a better fit. It’s the new hire or new leader whose ideas get extra scrutiny, not because they’re weaker, but because you haven’t had enough time to read them yet. The bias doesn’t announce itself. It disguises itself as discipline and caution. In this episode, I walk through where the ambiguity effect comes from, how to spot it in your team’s decision-making, and a handful of practical ways to make sure your best ideas get a fair shot before the fog scares everyone off. Give it a listen.fds

Topics:
• 02:28 – How the ambiguity effect plays out in a planning meeting
• 03:59 – What the ambiguity effect actually is
• 05:00 – The Ellsberg experiment
• 07:05 – Risk vs. ambiguity, what’s the difference?
• 08:22 – How it shows up on your roadmap
• 09:49 – When the unknown is a person
• 12:10 – What to do about it
• 14:42 – Closing thought

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Your nine-to-five pays the bills, but it doesn’t define your career, and if you think it does, that might be the thing holding you back. This week, I sit down with a lead product designer, community builder, and all-around multi-hyphenate to talk about owning your career before someone else does.

What happens to your sense of identity when the job goes away? Have you built anything outside of it that would survive?

My guest this week is Frank Bach, a lead product designer who’s worked at places like Instagram, DoorDash, and Headspace. But honestly, the resume might be the least interesting thing about Frank. He also runs the LA Design and Dev community, teaches courses, fronts a hardcore band called Monk, and runs his own e-commerce shop, Sunshine Shop. Frank is someone who has clearly figured out that a career worth having doesn’t fit neatly inside one little box.

We get into a lot in this conversation, like the danger of tying your self-worth to a company name, why “personal brand” feels so gross to so many designers, and what it actually looks like to cultivate what you’re known for without becoming a full-time content creator. Frank has a really practical way of thinking about all of this: treat your full-time job more like a freelance engagement, stay in “maintenance mode” when life demands it, and remember that your manager is thinking about their own promotion, not yours.

We also talk about the other side of having a lot going on: how to decide when something’s run its course versus when you just need a breather, how to balance side projects without letting them eat your life, and why starting something messy is always better than waiting for the perfect moment. If you’ve ever felt like your career is just happening to you, this one’s worth a listen.

Topics:
• 03:20 - How Frank got into design and the multi-hyphenate mindset
• 04:20 - The danger of tying your self-worth to a company name
• 05:05 - Treating your full-time job like a freelance contract
• 06:25 - The upside of big brand names on your resume
• 07:05 - What happens to colleagues who lean too hard on “ex-Google, ex-Meta”
• 08:17 - Why personal brand feels gross to so many designers
• 09:35 - Personal brand isn’t just posting on LinkedIn
• 11:10 - Being memorable: your look, your setup, your presence
• 13:40 - The Instagram hiring story: 15 years of showing up paid off
• 14:45 - Internal brand: the designers who are legends without being online
• 15:37 - Maintenance mode: you don’t have to be 100% all the time
• 19:38 - Does your day job have to fill your creative cup?
• 21:05 - How side projects made Frank more valuable at work
• 24:45 - How to have the side project conversation with your manager
• 28:40 - How Frank stays consistent with so many things going on
• 29:15 - The minimum viable version: where to start if you have nothing
• 30:19 - Knowing when to cut something loose
• 33:57 - Hiatus vs. done: how to tell the difference
• 42:31 - Closing advice: you’re in the driver’s seat

Helpful Links:
• Connect with Frank on LinkedIn
• Listen to Monk
• Sunshine Shop

—

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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