Buy-in Starts Before the First Wireframe
The problem wasn’t the interface.
It was the conversation happening around it.
At Movoto, I owned the Agent App.
One metric mattered more than almost anything else.
Agents needed to keep their sales progress updated because leadership relied on that data to forecast revenue.
On paper, it sounded straightforward.
In practice, everyone was frustrated.
Leadership saw incomplete data.
The support team saw agents ignoring the workflow.
Agents saw one more administrative task competing for their time.
Everyone was experiencing the same problem.
No one was describing the same problem.
Looking between the lines
Through user interviews and observation, a different pattern began to emerge.
Agents weren’t resisting the system because they disliked entering information.
They disliked being asked to document the past.
Their attention was already on the next conversation.
The next showing.
The next offer.
The next opportunity.
Their momentum was forward.
The software kept asking them to look backward.
That became my hypothesis.
I didn’t present it.
Not yet.
This is the point where many projects jump directly into solutions.
A presentation.
A wireframe.
A roadmap.
Instead, I waited.
Over the following week I continued gathering observations.
I worked with our data team.
I connected user frustration with underperforming business metrics.
I wasn’t strengthening a presentation.
I was helping everyone experience the same tension.
By the time we gathered again, something had changed.
The room already understood the problem.
Then the wireframes mattered.
The concepts themselves were intentionally rough.
Dirty wireframes.
Conversation starters.
Their purpose wasn’t to prove I was right.
Their purpose was to give the team something concrete to reason about together.
Instead of debating whether the problem existed…
…we were exploring whether this direction could solve it.
That’s a very different conversation.
Buy-in wasn’t the outcome.
Shared ownership was.
Looking back, I don’t think the most important thing I designed was the interface.
It was the path that allowed people to arrive at the idea together.
Once that happened, the interface became the natural expression of a shared understanding.
The design wasn’t carrying the idea.
The team was.
What changed my thinking
That project permanently changed how I approach product work.
Today, I spend less time trying to convince people that a solution is correct.
I spend more time helping everyone see the same problem.
Because when that happens…
buy-in stops feeling like persuasion.
It becomes the natural result of shared understanding.