I cannot believe that the UX Ketchup meme is still new to people. It is literally 15 years old. We have known this for well over a decade. You have been conned, at scale, by the myriad of charlatans cashing in on your desire to learn UX. This is why we're vocal. Not to fight, but to save you from this manipulation and to save ourselves and our careers.

The redundancies are in part due to the lack of value generated by underperforming UX and Product functions that are not connecting Research to Design in any meaningful way

This is because people don't know, en masse, because UX has been redefined as a superficial visual design practice

There are many factors that have contributed to this clusterf*ck, some are much spicier personal observations:

- Art & Creative Directors Move To UX: the original 'straight to leadership' crew, with zero UX practitioner experience. Entitlement personified. Entire teams and departments were setup as design studios rather than UX teams. Tooling changed. Design thinking. Empathy. Figma. The death of UCD UX.

- The Ageist Defense Against Senior Experience: once in position, design leaders actively cut out all of the senior experience that could expose their inexperience, clearing the way for a new empire to be built on entirely new and different foundations. No new seniors accepted. Young, inexperienced teams trying to do UX without any team mentorship support from true seniors with actual UX experience

- Mentorship As Status Symbol and Social Virtue Signal: now these people have their empires controlled and young, inexperienced, cheap and manipulatable labour to support them, they went externally to start shouting for more exposure and status. They took their inexperience and design thinking ways of working and started to mentor people with zero experience. Someone with no experience making it up teaching it to someone with no experience

- Product Managers come into the picture and take this superficial world of drawing high fidelity pictures of what you think users would like and take the wheel. Instead of fixing this problem and linking research to design and becoming user centric again, Product Managers actively started to do their own user research, cutting out their researchers and getting them made redundant in some cases. So now we have awful DIY research informing a visual design practice and wondering why we're building absolute crap that doesn't sell and costs a fortune to market

- Product Management have gone totally rogue because that's what Theresa says. Design and UX/UI are still maintaining that Figma is the right tool for the job and that THERE IS NO UX PROCESS. Researchers are being cut at a time they are needed the most. True UX seniors are all sidelined watching this catastrophe unfold and are powerless to help

The solution: Hire back seniors. Reintroduce user centricity. We know all about ketchup. We know user centricity. We know how to build great products that sell.