Notes, Flowcharts, and 75 Minutes of Pressure

I passed the Conversation Designer Certification (CXD2) from the Conversation Design Institute. 

It was 100 questions in 75 minutes, and it was much harder than I thought it would be.

I went in thinking, “Okay, behavior design, persona development, I’ve got this.”

The exam responded with: “Sure. And also Foundations. Workflow. Fundamentals. Remember those?”

I did. Barely.

Over the past couple of months, I took classes across all of those modules and built what can only be described as an aggressively thorough study guide. Hours of notes. Rewritten definitions. Diagrams. Cross-references. The kind of document that makes you question your own hobbies.

But here’s what surprised me: the test wasn’t really about memorizing techniques. It was about whether I understood how everything fits together.

You can’t apply behavior design if you don’t understand where it lives in the conversation flow. You can’t “increase motivation” if the structure itself is confusing. And you definitely can’t build trust if your repair logic falls apart the second a user hesitates.

While studying, I was also developing an independent retail pharmacy conversation design concept. (Independent as in: not affiliated with Kroger. Just me, being curious.)

Pharmacy conversations are high-trust and high-uncertainty. People don’t always know what they need. They’re not always motivated. Sometimes they’re just unsure.

Studying behavior design while building that project sharpened how I think about:

• Motivated vs. uncertain users
• When persuasion helps — and when clarity is the real hero
• Why repair flows matter as much as happy paths
• How structure quietly builds confidence

The certification exam was hard. But the real shift happened before I clicked “start.”

Somewhere between reviewing my notes for the third time and mapping escalation logic for the pharmacy assistant, I stopped thinking about conversations as scripts and started thinking about them as systems.

That’s the part I’m proud of.

The certificate is nice. My homemade study guide is slightly ridiculous. The systems thinking? That’s the win!

And it’s exactly where I want to keep building — where writing, UX and AI meet.

And before I go, I have to share a funny quote from Hans van Dam, the founder and instructor at CDI. He said it during a prompt chaining class, and as a voracious reader and literature nerd, I cracked up: “If you don’t know who Marcel Proust is, look him up. And take one year off and you can read one of his books.”