Mid-level UX designer struggling with dev pushback — how do you handle this?
Hey, I could really use some advice from more senior designers.
I’m at ~4 years of experience, and right now I’m trying to get better at collaboration and being more confident/firm in my decisions.
At my current job, I keep running into the same issue: developers don’t build what I design — even after designs are aligned and approved.
I’m not expecting 100% pixel-perfect implementation, but at least ~80% would feel reasonable.
The weird part is that this sometimes works fine. With some teams, we align, hand off, and what’s in Figma gets built pretty closely.
But in our SaaS platform team, it’s a different story. There’s one teammate who is both PM and developer, and in ~90% of cases, when I hand off something, they come back with reasons why it “can’t be done.”
I’d be totally fine if the pushback was about genuinely complex stuff. But often it’s very small things. For example:
• I designed a simple banner with a message and CTA
• What got built had different copy, different color, different placement
• Instead of linking to “read more,” they changed the UX entirely and added instructions in the text because “they can’t redirect to that page”
*note: they had this banner in their UI library alteady implemented. At this point I doubt this person follows any rules from the DS
I always ask why, but I get very technical explanations that I honestly struggle to challenge. The usual reasons are:
• “It would take more time” (and time = money)
• “The codebase is messy / dependent on other services”
What frustrates me the most is that instead of collaborating, they often come back with a screenshot from their dev environment saying: “this is how it will look” — and that becomes the final solution.
At this point, it feels like anything I design for this area ends up ~50% changed.
I’m starting to feel stuck because:
• I don’t know how to push back when the arguments are very technical
• I don’t know how firm I should be vs. when to let it go
• I feel like design decisions are being overridden too easily
So I guess my questions are:
• How do you push back when devs give technical reasons you don’t fully understand?
• How do you tell the difference between valid constraints vs. “excuses”?
• How firm should I be in situations like this?
• Have you dealt with a PM/dev hybrid role like this, and how did you navigate it?
Would really appreciate any advice or similar experiences 🙏