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You don’t have to feel awful requesting design changes from a busy engineer
“Yeah, I’ll get around to those design changes when I can, but I’m looking at 8 hours of coding today.” An overworked Engineer told me, and it wasn’t the first time.
Sometimes, it’s not just you that’s juggling a full workload. It’s also the Engineering team.
I’ve been in standups where Engineers said they’d be around in the afternoon (after napping in the office) because they were up all night doing security/bug fixes.
Adding extra design work, like fixing design issues, feels particularly awful in these cases. However, not pushing for these design changes means a bad experience for the end user.
Your Engineer, although they mean well, may be dragged from product to product, and if you don’t tackle the issue immediately, it may result in a bad interface.
What do you do in these cases? You first start by learning to prioritize work.
The importance of priority and compromise
One thing I’ve learned, working as a UX team of One, is that to be successful, you need to prioritize.