About
Making
to know
Design has always been about making to know, experimenting to understand possibilities and constraints. Rapid prototyping isn't new; it's just gotten faster. Product design has always been a messy team sport where we collectively find the best path forward given the constraints, place a bet, learn together.
The tools change. The game doesn't.
Buck Up is led by Becky Buck, twenty years into building bridges between design, research, and product. We are deliberately small. Becky leads every engagement, and brings in trusted collaborators (researchers, brand designers, additional product designers) as projects demand. Senior hands on your problem, sized to the project.
Expertise
What we bring
Team Building
We build and level up design teams, hiring, coaching, and embedding alongside them, so outcome-oriented designers and researchers excel at driving decisions. Becky has over a decade of experience scaling and leading multidisciplinary teams of 3–30, including product designers, anthropologists, cognitive psychologists, content strategists, and front-end-obsessed engineers.
Product Discovery
Answering "what should we build?" through research, prototyping, and the discipline to commit. We've led discovery for multiple 0-to-1 launches, product-market fit moments, and enterprise overhauls. We turn 2–3 year product visions into 6-month roadmaps, and open-ended briefs into shippable bets.
Research Practice
Becky started in tech as a UX researcher, and the practice has been research-rooted ever since. Especially in the AI era, UXRs are crucial; they find truth and make it unavoidable, map how users actually think and behave, go deep with data, and do the strategic analysis and storytelling that PMs are rarely given time for.
AI-Forward Practice
We treat the AI moment the way we treat any unfamiliar problem: lean into the work, experiment, keep what works, learn from others who are further ahead, and stay optimistic. We don't pretend to have all the answers. They'd change next month anyway. But that challenge (evolving with rapid change) is central to our practice.
The Studio
Early-stage product development
Design, research, and product management have spent decades building silos around their territory. Becky has spent twenty years building bridges between them.
That bridge-building started in Innovation Consulting, ran through Forge Studio, Becky's previous agency, and through design leadership roles inside venture-backed startups. Buck Up is the current form of that practice: we work mostly with early-stage startups and organizations raising the bar on design maturity, moving craft and speed of delivery together. We partner closely with Go-to-Market teams, helping shape the narratives, customer segmentations, and marketectures that define new products.
Ideas
Speaking & media
- Communicating Product Vision, Wharton Innovation Club. 2022
- Prototyping for Product Managers, Wharton Innovation Club. 2022
- Keep talent in Research roles, Advancing Research. 2021
- Designing Consumer Platforms, Amazon Conflux. 2017
- Design Disruptors, InVision documentary, representing Salesforce. 2017
- Slide Design for Non-Designers 101, Salesforce & Dropbox. 2017
- Designing Products for Everyone, EvolveUX. 2016
- From UI to UX, Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference. 2015
Philosophy
The skills to frame problems, create options, build alignment, and navigate a path forward are more important than ever.