who have several hours of work under their belts, and with that experience, know better than you, what you should do.

Several hours?! How can anyone manage such dedication???

I think you're overthinking it.

Did David Lee Roth go to The Institute of Rock N' Roll or did he just fucking do it?

I guarantee you that some of the BEST user experiences you've interacted with didn't start with the discovery of a persona. I promise you that. I guarantee you that I don't need someone who's solely studied relevant user journey's to know what the BEST user journey is.

Disclaimer - I don't give a fuck about David Lee Roth. I just picked him. For humour.

User Experience ≠ just wireframes & user journeys.

Can we just kill this topic already?

I am not a trained UX designer, but I am the only person dedicated to thinking about user experience at my company.

My primary job is product design (which really is mostly UI design), but at a startup it's rare you have the resources to hire someone entirely dedicated to experiences.

So I'm not an IT guy either, but I'm the only one doing IT at my job.

It sounds like you don't want to be a UX Designer.

We sure talk about job titles a lot. I hope it gets sorted out in the not too distant future.

FWIW, I'm not a fan of "UX designer". When people say they need a UX designer, they typically want someone who is specialized in interaction design with basic user research skills and the ability to collaborate with art directors and developers.

Art directors/product designers apply the "UX designer" to themselves because no one wants to be just painting wires. You can't get true "good design" that way.

There is a difference between a UX expert and a UX designer. Many of us have real world experience building and testing web experiences, refining interfaces to be more intuitive, finding and testing pain points, working with clients to grow their customer base, etc. If you have done A/B testing, worked to build and iterate over wireframes or worked hard to strip unnecessary elements from pages, don't cut yourself short.

Andy Budd gives a good talk about this that starts with "Raise your hand if you consider yourself a 'UX Designer'. Ok. I hope by the end of my talk that most of you will reconsider that."

http://www.slideshare.net/andybudd/the-ux-of-user-experience

That’s right, but clients who are looking for a ux designer is not looking for that 50%  —  they’re looking for you and for the other 50% that are "not" ux designers. That’s called marketing, and -unfortunately- it's quite an important part of making money in any business.

Does it really matter that much? Just choose whatever you feel comfortable with right?

"product designer" is just vague enough for me to communicate the general gist of what I do without pinning me to any specific specialization or capability.

If you've worked with a kickass UX person, you know that you are not a UX Designer. Hat tip to the author as this is something most web designers won't admin freely.

I, also, am not a UX Designer.