It’s easy to communicate when everyone agrees with you. The real test comes when they don’t. Or when you realize halfway through the conversation that the people in the room have already made up their minds.
Welcome to one of the most uncomfortable parts of working in UX, product and technology: sometimes they’re just not buying what you’re selling. And when you care deeply about your work, it’s difficult not to take that personally.
Drawing on nearly three decades working in design, UX and research, Jen Blatz explores what happens when professional expertise collides with skepticism, organizational politics, strong personalities, conflicting evidence and plain old disagreement.
This practical session isn’t about the perfect comeback or winning every argument. It’s about recognizing what’s actually happening in the room and choosing the right response. Jen examines moments that can send even experienced professionals into fight, flight or freeze mode: interruptions, hostile questions, demands for certainty, challenges to your credibility, missing information, conflicting opinions and the dreaded “What would you do?” question.
You’ll learn techniques for slowing down difficult interactions, answering without becoming defensive, setting boundaries around what you know and don’t know, and redirecting conversations that are going off the rails.
Being an effective UX professional doesn’t mean convincing everyone you’re right. It means knowing when to advocate, when to question, when to acknowledge uncertainty, when to push back and when to let someone else make the decision.

Talk Outline
1. Oh Crap. They Don’t Like This.
• We’ll start with those painfully recognizable moments.
• And the internal reaction many of us have: defend yourself.
• Why that instinct often makes the situation worse.

2. Figure Out What They’re Actually Fighting
• Not all pushback is the same.
• Someone might be challenging you with the common questions we hear.
• The first skill is learning to diagnose the resistance before responding to it.

3. Surviving the Questions Nobody Wants to Get
• Practical ways to respond to tough questions.
• Including something UX professionals desperately need permission to say: “I don’t know.”
• And how to say it without sounding unprepared.

4. Stop Treating Every Challenge Like a Debate
• Some questions require answers. And occasionally, someone just wants to argue.
• We’ll look at how to recognize the difference and decide whether to answer, question, redirect, park, or disengage.

5. Separate Yourself From Your Work
• Why criticism feels personal.
• Why seniority doesn’t necessarily make that feeling disappear.
• How to avoid becoming defensive.
• Letting go when someone else owns the decision.

6. When the Meeting Goes Completely Off the Rails
• How to recover after getting rattled.
• Regain control after an interruption.
• Stop one person from hijacking a conversation.
• Ways to handle questions you are not prepared for.
• Approaches to correct yourself without destroying your credibility.
• How to follow up after a difficult interaction.
• When to decide a contentious conversation needs to move offline.

7. The Five-Step “They Don’t Like Me” Survival Guide Framework
• Pause > Diagnose > Respond > Bound > Redirect

4 Key Takeaways
• Learn to identify whether someone is questioning the evidence, process, recommendation, implications or your credibility before deciding how to respond.
• Recognize where your knowledge ends and resist the pressure to manufacture certainty.
• Understand that being effective means making your case clearly, documenting the trade-offs, and allowing the person accountable for the decision to make it.
• Learn how to recover, not how to be perfect.

Why Jen Blatz Is Qualified to Speak on This Topic
Jen Blatz is a Principal Experience Researcher with nearly 30 years of experience. Through those years, not all encounters with stakeholders and team mates has been positive. Jen has firsthand experience presenting ideas, evidence and recommendations from multiple sides of the UX profession. Her work in design and research expands to another layer of complexity: communicating with cross-functional teams when the technology, customer expectations, evidence and even the questions themselves are constantly evolving.