If you work in conversion optimization, user experience design, or design leadership, you probably think of these as separate disciplines. Different skill sets, different tools, different conversations.

But treating them as separate is precisely what limits your impact.

These three areas are deeply interconnected, and they build on top of one another in ways that make each more effective. If you're only working in one of these areas without considering the others, you're solving the wrong problems, or at best, only solving part of the right problem.

I know this because my work spans all three, which makes me sound like I'm either a confused generalist or cobbling together random consulting gigs.

People often ask what I actually do, because it doesn't fit neatly into a single box. When I list the three areas, I can see the confusion on their faces. I sometimes feel like that conspiracy theorist from the meme, standing in front of a pin board covered in red string, ranting about how it's all connected.

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But it is all connected. And if you work in any of these fields, you should be taking this holistic, interconnected approach as well.

Let me walk you through how this actually works in practice, and why you should be thinking this way too.

It starts with conversion

Ultimately, the goal of almost every project I take on is to improve a company's conversion rate through their website or app. Sometimes that means acquiring new customers, sometimes it means retaining existing ones, but the end goal is always the same: make the company more profitable through digital channels.

In straightforward cases, I can achieve that with traditional conversion optimization techniques:

A/B testing
Interface design improvements
Refined copy and messaging

These are the tools you'd expect from anyone doing CRO work, and often they're enough to move the needle.

But more often than I'd like to admit, those surface-level fixes aren't sufficient. The conversion problem runs deeper than a poorly worded call-to-action or a confusing checkout flow. When that happens, I need to look at the entire user experience, which means examining usability issues, carrying out proper user research, mapping out all the other touchpoints where customers interact with the brand, and understanding the full journey they're on.

That's where the user experience design and strategy work comes into play.

When UX goes beyond the screen

However, sometimes even comprehensive user experience work isn't enough, because the real problems exist beyond the screen entirely.

I once worked with a company that sold frozen ready meals to elderly customers. They wanted me to improve their website conversion rates, which seemed like a straightforward brief. We carried out user research and discovered that the elderly audience was nervous about multiple aspects of the experience, none of which had anything to do with the website design itself:

Entering credit card details online because of fraud and scams
A strange delivery driver they didn't know turning up at their house
Unloading heavy trays of frozen products into their freezers

Now, in most companies, a user experience designer would hit a wall at this point. You can't redesign a website to make someone feel safer about delivery drivers or less anxious about lifting heavy boxes. The best you could do would be to make the existing service as palatable as possible through clever messaging and reassurance copy.

But in a company with a strong culture of design leadership, a UX designer can be instrumental in shaping solutions to these kinds of problems. Solutions that go way beyond polishing existing products to fundamentally reshaping the service itself.

This is where the design leadership coaching aspect of my work becomes essential.

Design leadership changes what's possible

In that frozen meal company, we didn't just optimize the website. We fundamentally changed the offering based on what we learned from users:

Customers got the same delivery driver every time, and when that wasn't possible, they'd be notified in advance and shown a photo of their driver
All drivers were police-checked so customers could feel confident about safety
The driver didn't just dump the products and leave but actually unpacked everything into the customer's freezer
Customers could even reorder directly from their driver if they didn't want to use the website and enter card details online

The user experience shaped the product, and by extension, delivered the improved conversion rate the client originally asked for.

You can see how these three areas that appear unrelated are actually deeply entwined. This interconnected approach is much more representative of what real user experience design should be about, rather than just pushing pixels around a screen.

What this means for your work

If you're working in conversion optimization: Start asking deeper questions about the user experience.
If you're doing UX work: Understand how it connects to business outcomes and conversion.
If you're in design leadership: Recognize that your influence should extend beyond the screen to reshape products and services based on what users actually need.

Because at the end of the day, conversion optimization teaches you what matters to the business, user experience design teaches you what matters to customers, and design leadership gives you the organizational influence to actually do something meaningful about both.

And once you start seeing those connections, you can't unsee them.

If you're thinking about how to bring these different elements together in your own work, drop me an email. I'm always happy to chat it through.

It’s all interconnected