​🎯 For UX & Product Designers | 🧠 Intermediate | 🕒 90 min | 💵 $100 Standard / $65 Uxcel Pro

​You did the research, followed best practices, and your design still doesn't land the way you expected. Maybe it gets questioned in review, pushed in a different direction, or shipped a little differently from what you designed. If this sounds familiar, the problem usually isn't your design skills, it's how you're navigating the people around it.

​In this workshop, Maria Teresa Stella walks through three practical, interactive cases pulled from real B2B and enterprise situations: a demo surprise, a stakeholder pushing for the wrong solution, and a stakeholder who critiques everything in the room. You'll work through each one live and walk away with strategies you can apply on your very next project.

​This session is for designers who want more confidence handling pushback, hidden requests, and work that doesn't ship as designed, not designers looking for a theoretical talk on soft skills.

​You'll leave with concrete tactics for keeping developers aligned, going upstream from a bad request to the real need behind it, and documenting decisions so they survive after the meeting ends, plus a practical resource to use on the job.

​🧠 What You'll Learn

​• Keep developers aligned so your design actually ships as intended
• Go upstream from a bad request to find the real need behind it
• Handle stakeholder pushback using UX patterns, benchmarks, and business goals
• Document and communicate design decisions so they survive after the meeting ends

​🕘 Agenda

​1. Welcome & Why This Matters (10 min) — Introductions, workshop goals, and why good design alone doesn't guarantee your work ships, including the most common pitfalls with difficult stakeholders in low-maturity, legacy-heavy B2B and enterprise contexts
2. Case 1: The Demo Surprise (20 min) — Work through what to do when your design ships differently than expected
3. Case 2: The Stakeholder Pushing for the Wrong Solution (20 min) — Practice going upstream from a request to the real underlying need
4. Case 3: The Stakeholder Who Critiques Everything in the Room (20 min) — Build tactics for handling pushback grounded in patterns, benchmarks, and business goals
5. Key Takeaways & Live Q&A (15 min) — Consolidate strategies and get your specific questions answered
6. Practical Resource (5 min) — Walk away with a toolkit to keep and use on the job

​⚙️ Format

​This is an interactive session, not a lecture. You'll work through three real-world cases live, with time built in for questions throughout.

​👤 Who Should Attend

​UX and product designers with some working experience, especially those navigating stakeholder-heavy B2B or enterprise environments and looking for practical, not theoretical, tactics.

​🎤 Meet Your Instructor

​Maria Teresa Stella is a Senior UX Designer with 7+ years of experience in B2B and fintech UX, with a background in Psychology and a Master's in Human-Computer Interaction. She's a mentor, conference speaker (Push UX, UxDay, and more), and instructor behind Uxcel's Mentorship Mastery course, where she teaches designers how to accelerate their careers through effective mentorship and development practices.

​🛠️ Tools

​No tools required.

​🤝 Brought To You By

​Uxcel is a learning platform used by 500,000+ product professionals and 200+ organizations to build cross-functional skills across UX design, product management, and AI. Learn through short, gamified courses that fit into a working day, earn certifications, and build a portfolio with real-world project briefs. Ranked Top 50 Educational Product worldwide by G2 in 2024 and 2025. Interested in hosting an event with us? Apply here. Join our Discord community of 6,800+ UX and product professionals and start connecting today. Catch up on past events and stay connected with us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.

​📌 Notes

• ​Includes access to the full recording.

• ​Tickets are non-refundable once the session has started.

• ​Use Uxcel registered email address when purchasing Uxcel Pro tickets.

• ​Attendees receive a practical toolkit/framework to keep and use on the job