Designing for a job I’ve never had

The brief was a sales-enablement console — a tool that tells a retention rep who to call, why now, and what to offer. There was just one gap: I’ve never studied sales, and I’ve never worked a day on a sales floor. Quotas, objection-handling, the rhythm of a call day — none of it was mine. Even the vocabulary read like a foreign language at first: RFM, churn, LTV, cadence, suppression, DNC. My first instinct was that this disqualified me. It turned out to be the most useful constraint of the project.

You don’t have to be the user

The reframe that unlocked it: UX has never required being the user — it requires understanding one. I wasn’t designing “sales,” some discipline I didn’t belong to. I was designing for a person doing a hard, repetitive job, and my real task was to learn that job well enough to make their day easier. So I learned it — how outbound retention actually works, what a rep’s morning looks like, what makes a call worth dialing and what quietly wastes an hour. The jargon stopped being intimidating the moment I understood the human problem underneath each term.

Design humbly in someone else’s domain

Not being the expert changed how I designed. I had no standing to tell a veteran rep how to sell, so I didn’t try. Instead of dictating, TRACTION surfaces the why — why this customer, why now — and leaves the judgment to the person on the phone. The AI does the homework; the rep owns the conversation. The engine ranks the queue; the rep decides who to skip. Even the guardrails — no recent order, no open care case, one touch every two weeks — came from respecting a domain I was a guest in: the fastest way to lose a customer’s trust is to over-contact them, and the reps knew that long before I showed up.

You don’t need to be a domain expert to design for a domain. You need to respect it enough to learn it — and design so the real expert stays in control.

That’s what I’m taking with me. The unfamiliar domain wasn’t a wall; it was the reason the design came out the way it did — humble, explainable, and built to make a human better at their job instead of replacing their judgment with mine. I still can’t sell you a set of tires. But I think I designed something the person who can would actually want to use.