SUMMER INTENSIVE
influence by design
friday, july 31 Philadelphia
Facilitated by
Pavel Samsonov
Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Stop BEING sidelined. Start building leverage.
You try to speak up for human-centered design, but it feels like you’re shouting into the void. You ask to be included in strategy, but your product partners bring you in too late to do deep work. And if you hear one more senior leader telling you to “influence without authority,” you might scream.
We hear about challenges like these all the time in our work. And it’s time to do something about them—something besides making another deck explaining the design process, or writing another email begging to be invited to the meeting.
That something is what you’ll learn at Influence by Design.
This one-day intensive retreat is designed for experienced UXers who want to stop feeling sidelined—and start effectively navigating the politics, pressures, and power dynamics in their organizations instead.
It’s intimate, in-person, and designed to help you break through the frustration and confusion of this moment—and find more agency and impact on the other side.
What’s included
✓ A full day of relevant, OMG-I-needed-this-right-now programming
✓ Two hands-on, immersive workshops facilitated by Pavel Samsonov and Sara Wachter-Boettcher
✓ Group coaching and guided conversations with your peers
✓ Honest conversations with people going through the same stuff you are
✓ Breakfast, lunch, snacks, and happy hour in the heart of Philadelphia
STANDARD price: $549
TEAM PRICING (3+ people): $450
This is the event for you if…
✓ You work in any flavor of UX or product design—including user research or content.
✓ You’re experienced at your craft, but struggle with cross-functional buy-in.
✓ You’re tired of feeling like an order-taker stuck executing someone else’s ideas.
✓ You’ve been told you need to do more strategy, but you only get brought in for execution.
✓ You want to lead design conversations, instead of just participating in them.
The workshops
Your ticket includes access to both workshops—so you don’t have to make impossible choices about what to attend. Just show up, dig in, and learn.
“I found it extremely useful to look beyond stakeholder presence and think more deliberately about influence, power, and how to navigate from one state to another. Very relevant and immediately applicable.”
—Workshop attendee, 2026
Map your organization, build your power
Facilitator: Sara Wachter-Boettcher
How understanding your org’s hidden power structures can unlock new allies and opportunities
You’d love to influence your organization—make it more human-centered, more innovative, more conducive to great design. But you’re feeling stuck getting your ideas adopted. You lack leadership support or allies from other disciplines. You feel steamrolled, second-guessed, or shut out.
If any of that sounds familiar, this workshop is for you. We’ll look at why so many designers exhaust themselves without gaining traction—and then show you a process designed to yield better results, with less stress and burnout.
At the heart of this work is understanding power: How does it move through your organization? Who holds sway in the areas that are most important to design? Which informal relationships and alignments can help you get things done—and which ones might create roadblocks? And perhaps most importantly, where does your own power lie—and how can you best put it to use? That’s what we’ll map out in this workshop.
What we’ll do:
Identify the impact you most want to make right now
Build a map of the often invisible systems of power and influence that exist in your organization
Use that map to identify areas of strength—places where you’ve already established healthy relationships and shared priorities
Identify gaps—places where you need to invest more in order to understand others’ motivations and mindsets
Build a toolkit for deepening your relationships authentically
Learning outcomes
You’ll walk away knowing how to:
Approach your biggest initiatives or design goals so they thrive instead of flounder
Understand how your organization functions beneath the surface and outside the org chart
Build allies and find points of alignment with pretty much anyone
Create design leverage
Facilitator: Pavel Samsonov
Shift design’s perception from a blocker to an influencer through the undercover process
Your cross-functional colleagues say they are too busy to engage with the design process. Attempting to establish rigor gets you branded as a troublemaker. UX is left on the sidelines of decision-making and boxed in with narrow, tactical briefs. Your design org has no influence over roadmaps because none of the company’s success metrics are user-centered.
One person can’t elevate the design maturity of an entire company. But it’s still possible to earn leverage in a low-maturity environment without giving up on doing Design—it just looks a little different from what we were taught in design school.
Waiting for permission won’t work. Hoping that the next PRD will carve out a bigger role for you won’t help. You will have to change your own approach instead. This workshop will show you how to shift the perspective of the design process: from something that slows down outputs to an intractable part of business value creation. Together, we will:
Explore what is preventing your attempts at exerting leverage from working today, and identify approaches that resonate with stakeholders
Understand why product managers seem like they have all the power, and learn how to show up alongside them in an effective way
Create a welcoming interface between your design process and your organization
Identify vehicles for driving impact aside from high-fidelity visual artifacts
Learning outcomes
The workshop will help you:
Meet stakeholders where they are—without compromising your human-centered design principles
Ask difficult questions as a partner, not a roadblock
Make your problem framing stick in the minds of your stakeholders, and make Design part of their definition of success
Go from documenting someone else’s decisions to making your own
Coaching & Community
We’ll bookend the day with group coaching sessions—structured spaces designed to help you explore the topics more deeply and get the most out of the day.
Opening session
We’ll start by sharing our biggest challenges around influence and power—and having honest conversations with one another about where we’re stuck and what we’re hoping to get out of our time together. You’ll walk into your workshops focused—ready to work through your most pressing challenges.
Closing session
At the end of the day, we’ll come back together to synthesize and close out. We’ll reflect on what’s shifted in our perspectives and how we’ll apply what we’ve learned—and decide what we’ll do differently when we get back to the office on Monday.
Throughout the day, you’ll also forge real connections with your peers—going past small talk and easy answers, and building relationships that last way after happy hour ends.
The location
You’ll be spending your day at Think Company, a beautiful design studio in the heart of Philadelphia.
Picture: open space and flexible, comfy seating. Natural light. Cozy rooms for smaller sessions. A communal lunch table. Plenty of whiteboards, tons of gender-neutral bathrooms, and easy access to drinks and snacks. Zero depressing conference rooms or fluorescent lights.
Two minutes to City Hall. Ten minutes to Amtrak or New Jersey Transit. It’s more than doable as a day trip from NYC or DC—and the perfect place to make a weekend of it, too.
Come for the workshops, and stay for Philly’s historic charm, walkable neighborhoods, and endless public art. We’ve got great restaurants, loads of summertime festivals, and incredible museums you don’t have to fight the crowds to visit. Plus, we’re the city that brought the world Gritty. And don’t believe what you may have heard: we’re actually pretty nice, too.
Staying for the weekend? Check out Visit Philly for tourist info and the uwishunu events calendar. Or hit us up for personal recs—we’d love to share our favorite ice cream shops, beer gardens, and hoagie spots.
Think Company
The Philadelphia Building
1315 Walnut Street, Philadelphia
The event space is reachable by elevator and all areas are wheelchair-accessible, including restrooms. Please contact us if you have additional questions about accessibility.
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Check in, fill a mug and a plate, and get settled for the day.
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We’ll start the day with a group coaching session that unpacks the topic and sets the stage for the rest of the day.
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We’ll split into two groups—one will start with Pavel’s session, and the other with Sara’s.
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Enjoy catered lunch and deep discussions with your peers. We’ll ask about your dietary needs when you register.
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You’ll join whichever workshop you didn’t attend in the morning.
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We’ll come back together for a closing coaching session designed to help you reflect on what you learned—and apply it back at work.
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Stick around for soft drinks, beer, wine, snacks, and plenty of spicy conversation with your new friends.
The agenda
Photo: Joyce Newrzella / Hatch Conference
your facilitators
Pavel Samsonov
Principal experience designer at Justworks in New York City
Author of the Product Picnic newsletter
Pavel’s approach to product and UX draws from his research at Nielsen Norman Group, experience building design practice at AWS, and managing product teams at Bloomberg. Pavel often describes himself as a problem designer, because the biggest influence on the solution is always the framing of the problem.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Leadership coach, author, and facilitator
CEO of Active Voice, the company behind Throughline
Sara launched Active Voice in 2020 after spending a decade as a UX and content consultant. Now she spends her time coaching, running leadership programs, and teaching workshops on topics like building influence, navigating conflict, and improving cross-functional relationships for companies like Adobe, Mozilla, and Mastercard.
More: activevoicehq.com
Register now
Influence by Design will be held live in Philadelphia on July 31, 2026.
Your ticket includes a full day of programming, from 9am-6pm, including:
Opening coaching session
A 2-hour workshop with Pavel Samsonov
A 2-hour workshop with Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Closing coaching session
Breakfast, lunch, snacks, and happy hour
standard Ticket
Registration will close on July 29, 2026, or when we hit capacity.
$549
TEAM Ticket
Register 3+ people at the same time and save 18%—that’s almost $99 per ticket. Enter code TEAM at checkout.
$450
FAQ
Need something not answered here? Send us a note—we’d love to answer it personally.
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Registration will close on July 29, 2026, or when we hit event capacity. We’ll let you know when tickets are limited.
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We allow for ticket transfers up until 48 hours before the event, and partial refunds up to 28 days before the event. Please see our official ticketing and refund policies for details.
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Yes! Please send us an email at throughline@activevoicehq.com with any specific information you need included on your invoice and we’ll do our best to accommodate.
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Your ticket to Influence by Design includes the full day of activities, from 9am-6pm ET. This includes:
Opening coaching session
2-hour workshop with Pavel Samsonov
2-hour workshop with Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Closing coaching session
Breakfast, lunch, snacks, and happy hour
While lodging in Philadelphia is not included, we’re happy to make recommendations. Email us at throughline@activevoicehq.com for help.
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The event space is on the second floor, and reachable by elevator. All areas are wheelchair-accessible, including restrooms.
There are no steps to enter the building or inside the event space.
Please contact us if you have additional questions about accessibility.
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Yes, at checkout you’ll have the option of paying in full or splitting your ticket into two equal payments, one at checkout and one 30 days later. There is no fee for paying in installments.
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If there’s enough demand, we’d love to host this event again, either in-person or online. If you’d like to be on the waitlist for future sessions, send us an email. Make sure to let us know if you’d be interested in in-person, rtemote, or both.
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Yes! Use the code TEAM when registering 3 or more people and you’ll save $99 per person off the standard ticket price.
The team discount cannot be combined with presale pricing.
It’s time for design to Stop BEING sidelined—and Start building real leverage. Join us july 31.
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