How to convince your boss to send you to Shift UX 2026

Shift UX 2026 is an opportunity to bring practical, cross-disciplinary UX thinking back to your organization. Hosted by Rosenfeld Media, the event takes place September 23–25, 2026, in New York City and online: two days of conference programming plus an optional workshop day. It is designed for people who care about how products and services actually work in the world.

The strongest request is simple: connect your attendance to a project or challenge your team is working on, present a responsible budget, and commit to sharing and applying what you learn.

Make it about the work

Shift UX is focused on the changing roles, skills, structures, and measures shaping UX work—not just another collection of talks. You’ll leave with frameworks and peer connections you can put to work immediately.

Start with a current problem:

• Your product team is moving quickly but lacks enough customer evidence behind key decisions
• Your organization is incorporating AI and needs to think more carefully about trust, transparency, and human judgment
• Research insights are not reaching the people who make product, business, and technical decisions
• Teams are struggling to align around complex customer journeys, content, services, or systems
• UX practitioners need stronger ways to collaborate across functions and demonstrate the value of their work
• Your team is adapting to changing roles, responsibilities, tools, and expectations

Then connect that problem to a practical outcome. Instead of saying, “I’d like to attend Shift UX to keep up with industry trends,” say:

“We are working through how to make better product decisions amid rapid change in our tools, workflows, and customer expectations. Shift UX brings together people across design, research, product, content, and data—the same disciplines we need to align internally. I want to bring back specific approaches we can apply to [initiative].”

That framing turns professional development into a business case.

Explain why Shift UX

Shift UX is a hybrid event for people whose work shapes products and services: designers, researchers, product managers, content designers, data scientists, and more. Its premise is especially relevant for organizations navigating this critical moment where UX work is changing, but the underlying need for thoughtful, human-centered products remains essential.

Show the ROI of attending Shift UX

Calculating “ROI” is imprecise and can be daunting. You cannot promise that one session will solve a strategic problem. But you can promise a practical process for turning what you learn into something useful.

Within two weeks of Shift UX, commit to:

• Sharing a concise debrief with your immediate team
• Hosting a working session for your colleagues
• Identifying one practical framework or technique worth testing on a current project

For example, if your team is building or evaluating AI-enabled experiences, your return plan might be:

“I will document relevant approaches to designing products people can understand and trust, then facilitate a 60-minute working session with product, design, content, and engineering. Together, we will use those ideas to review one upcoming AI feature and create a lightweight set of questions for future product reviews.”

That is a more credible commitment than promising to “bring back inspiration.” It gives your manager a tangible outcome, identifies the people who will benefit, and ties the event to work already underway.

What to say

Need some help crafting the perfect email? We’ve got you:

Subject: Requesting approval to attend Shift UX 2026 (Sept 23–25)

Hi [Manager’s name],

I’d like to request approval and budget to attend Shift UX 2026, and wanted to make the case directly rather than just forward a registration link.

Why this one. UX demand looks like it’s shrinking, but the actual need for the work isn’t—what’s stuck is the way we’ve packaged it: titles, team structures, roles, and metrics that haven’t caught up. Shift UX is built around that exact problem, which is directly relevant to [what our team/org is currently navigating—e.g., a reorg, flat headcount, unclear UX metrics, pressure to prove UX value]. I’d come back with frameworks and peer contacts I can put to use right away, not just notes from sessions.

What it costs me in time. [Sept 23 workshop or UX Leadership Salon day / Sept 22–25 with travel] out of office.

Format and cost options:

• Main conference only (Sept 24–25): $995 in-person / $595 virtual
• Workshop day only (Sept 23, in-person): $995
• Both together: $1,890
• VIP track (director+, in-person Sept 23): $1,995—includes the day-long UX Leadership Salon with Peter Merholz and an evening reception with speakers and other UX leaders
• Volume discounts if [other team members] attend too, and 15% off for government/higher ed/nonprofit staff
  I’d like to attend [option]—total cost $[amount], plus [travel/lodging if applicable]. I’m asking for approval by [date] to lock in [any pricing deadline, if one applies].

Happy to share what I learn with the team afterward—a debrief, or folding what’s useful into [a specific team process, e.g. our next planning cycle]. The conference ticket includes access to the sessions’ recordings and decks, sensemaking artifacts (e.g., sketchnotes), human-written notes, and reading lists.

Thanks for considering it,

[Your name]

Make the decision easier

A good request acknowledges that your manager has to weigh learning against budget, work commitments, and fairness across the team. Respect those tradeoffs. Be transparent about costs, propose an attendance format that fits the organization, and show exactly how you will extend the value beyond yourself.

Shift UX 2026 is built around a timely reality: the work of creating useful, understandable, effective products and services now requires people to collaborate across shifting roles and disciplines. Your pitch should reflect that same reality.

Do not ask your manager to fund a trip. Ask them to invest in an experience that will help your team make better decisions, build stronger connections across functions, and respond thoughtfully to what comes next.