Why Subscribe

🚨 Right now, every UXer is scrambling to become AI-literate so they don't get replaced.

That’s not your career threat.

Irrelevance to power is.

And it always was.

AI didn’t change what gets you promoted.

It just made the thing that was always true impossible to ignore: your career lives or dies on whether leadership sees you as someone who shapes decisions, not someone who ships screens.

The more capable you are, the more likely you are to be used rather than trusted.

Harder problems. Bigger scope. Cleaner execution.

And less say in what actually gets decided.

UX Mentor Diaries is for people who have already “made it” on paper but are quietly discovering that skill, effort, and seniority do not translate into authority.

What you can expect here

NEITHER motivational content. NOR generic leadership advice.

I write about:

• How decisions really get made at very senior/leadership levels

• Why influence erodes even when work quality is high

• The quiet ways credibility compounds (or disappears)

• What to do when responsibility grows faster than authority

The goal of this substack is to help you REASON BETTER in ambiguous, political, high-stakes situations (before negative consequences show up)

Who this is for (and who it isn’t)

UX Mentor Diaries is written for:

• Senior ICs, Staff+, Leads, and Directors

• UXers working inside large or complex organizations

• People who already know how to do the work

What happens if you don’t fix this

The market is contracting again. Your team gets cut from 8 to 4. You survive, but now you’re doing the work of 2 people with no title change.

A Director role opens internally.

They give it to someone from Product who “thinks more strategically.”

You start job hunting and discover every Director posting wants “executive stakeholder management” and “cross-functional influence” → none of which appear on your resume because you spent 5 years proving you’re a great designer instead of proving you’re a leader.

The window doesn’t close with a bang. It closes while you’re heads-down in a Figma file.

The game has rules. This newsletter teaches them.

Free vs. Paid

Free subscribers get one issue every Saturday that surfaces common UX career and influence patterns + previews of the premium content.

Paid subscribers get:

• Full access to every issue, including the full UX Influence Index

• Deeper analysis of real, messy situations UX leaders face every Wednesday

• Writing that connects patterns over time

• 6 Influence Learning Tracks, including

  1. Political Intelligence

  2. Strategic Judgement

  3. Building Authority

  4. Executive Communication

  5. Strategic Visibility

  6. Influence Networks

• 100% off all Premium Toolkits, including Brag Sheet Career Transformation System

🗣️ So…Why Listen to Me?

Because this isn’t theory.

I spent 25+ years inside the rooms where design budgets get approved and careers get decided, including most recently as VP of UX at JPMorgan Chase. American Express before that. Led a large international design team at a Swiss tech startup in-between. Worked at several agencies before that.

Influence “rules” are same everywhere.

Most UX career advice tells you to “be more strategic” or “build executive presence.”

That’s like telling someone to “be taller.”

And that’s why I built ↴

🎓 6 Learning Tracks to Master UX Influence

Marina Krutchinsky

·

Jan 11

Read full story

These 6 Influence Learning Tracks treat political intelligence, strategic visibility, and stakeholder influence as designable systems, not personality traits, not soft skills, not luck.

Great work doesn’t speak for itself.
Careers don’t stall by accident.
And influence is rarely distributed fairly.

This substack exists to help you see those dynamics clearly → and ACT deliberately instead of reactively.

What people say

Read a few issues →

🚨 A note on Leadership Coaching

For readers navigating specific, high-stakes LEADERSHIP decisions, I also offer very limited 1:1 UX leadership coaching, separate from this newsletter.

Mentorship & Leadership Coaching →

💰 Can your company pay for this?

Many of my readers expense their subscription through one of these:

• Learning & Development

• Professional development budgets

• Manager-approved reimbursements

To make the process easier, I provide ready-to-use justification templates:

• Manager approval template

• Procurement / L&D justification template

You can find both here ↴

How to expense your subscription

Join over 8,600 experienced UX ICs and leaders who have stopped reacting to office politics and started leading multimillion-dollar product initiatives.

Your “next level of leadership” starts with the first issue ;)

—Marina