#112 What to look for in a UX Role?
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It's a very personal equation and it's very dynamic. So it happened to me that throughout my career, at some stages, there were some things that mattered. Like I have this big logo in my CV now, right? And then that didn't matter anymore. What mattered more was the work. I

when you choose a role, factor it in relationship to your career stage at that moment. So if you're a junior designer, maybe it's not very important to choose your favorite industry. And maybe you want to focus on choosing a mature team that you're joining. And is there a team that you can learn from? That's more important than the industry. And as you move forward in your career, what are the types of projects you feel are missing from your portfolio so you can target your ideal roles as you move further?

Hello, designers, and welcome to a new episode of Honest UX Talks. As always, I'm joined by Anvisa, and today we will be unpacking an important career topic, which is what to look for in a UX role. What matters most when you're applying and choosing a UX job?

we will share our own experience and try to nail down some of the criteria that matters most when you're making this very important decision in your career life. But before we do that, I have some very exciting news. We are very proud to announce that we've partnered up with Week Studio to support our conversations about design and also support our work as designers and

let's say senior professionals that are looking to make their workflows more efficient and just be more creative. Wix Studio enables you to have that because it's a web creation platform, but it's tailored specifically for advanced design professionals. So it's optimized for seasoned designers and freelancers and very valuable for agencies.

But essentially what I love about Wix Studio is that they have all these professional tools, all these very powerful instruments in one place. They have built-in responsiveness. They have useful AI capabilities like an AI code assistant, object eraser, generative field. They also have a lot of mechanics for achieving advanced layouts. And also another great thing is

that probably all designers and even seasoned professionals will love is that they offer a Figma to Weeks Studio plugin. So you can quickly bring your Figma design to life more efficiently. I've learned in my past years as a, let's say, seasoned professional now that a robust platform can essentially enable you to be more creative, right? So with the right tools, with the right

creation platform, you can really focus on just breaking the boundaries of creativity and innovating and creating something that's new and still feels mature and high end. And so yeah, I'm very excited for partnering with Wix Studio. And we're going to dive deeper into that in future episodes. Yeah, I do want to ask you how your past weeks went because I want to share how mine were.

So how are you? Sounds good. Oh my God. Yes, my last weeks were really crazy and I don't want to spend the whole episode talking about it because yeah, I was traveling for the first time for all-inclusive resort with my baby and I've quickly learned that's the last time I'm doing this in my life.

Not maybe in my life, but definitely with the baby. Because it was very painful since my baby is 1.4 now. He's extremely active. And we quickly learned he doesn't sleep in the new place. So we were sleep deprived for eight days. We were extremely tired because he was very excited. Everything is new. Everything is yet to explore. Run.

steal, bring, change, break, roll over, all the stuff, right? He was just running constantly and we were tired. We were on the survival mode, running after him, not sleeping. And everything was fine until the last day because on the last day we had the flight, which was basically very late in the night. It was basically midnight. And the problem is that when we arrived to the airport,

we realized we have the stomach bug. We put our luggage away. It went to the luggage carrier and we basically don't have anything on us to help the baby survive in this. And on top

On top of that, our flight was six hours late. So we were basically surviving that night. We felt very bad and everything was very hard and we basically didn't have anything. No sleep, no food. The baby had a problem with the stomach and all together it took us almost the whole day to go back home. We just arrived being super tired and sick. I even had temperature for two days.

And so, yeah, we survived it. And now as I'm recovered, I still feel like I'm recovering. But as I'm recovered after this vacation from the hell, I'm kind of trying to go back to work. But it doesn't feel that easily, right? If you go back after the vacation, you open your Slack, you try to catch up what's happening. It's hard to go back. And so I'm still in this mode of trying to put on my engines and see how I can do this.

So yeah, it's a bit of a pickly moment for me right now. How about you? I know you want to share something, so feel free. I also have an all-inclusive story. I was just at an all-inclusive resort in Egypt for the first time, but I wasn't there to just enjoy all-inclusive. I was there to learn kitesurf.

which is very interesting for me as a process because I never considered myself a sporty person. Like, I don't know how to snowboard. I've never been interested in sports really, like except for childhood when I was taking swimming lessons and basketball and whatever. But it was never like part of my identity. And then my brain kind of learned that I'm not good at these things. I don't have any talent for them. I don't have the

physical strength to pursue sports. And so I had all these kind of misconceptions about myself. But now that I'm 35, I'm starting to open up. I feel like I'm running out of time to experiment with things. And so I became much more open to just, I don't know, trying out, failing, seeing how it feels. And so this year I took my first snowboard lesson. It was interesting, the process of learning, like being in the student shoes after so many years when I haven't learned anything

new. It was really an interesting learning journey, but this time with kite surf, I don't know, maybe it's because you really have to orchestrate and coordinate a lot of things. Like so many things have to go together. Understand the wind direction and the speed and then manage the kite and then put your board on. And there are so many elements that have to go right together.

right? So it's very, very complex and just preparing is a very complex process. And so the beauty of it for me was not just learning something new, but being forced to be present. Like I don't know how to relax in my real life. I don't know how to meditate. I'm

mostly with my phone in my hands just mindless scrolling focusing on content stuff how's that performing how's that performing then working then with my kid then so I don't have these moments where I'm immersed in something like even when I watch a movie I think about other things so I just don't know how to relax and for the first time in my life thank you kite surfing gods

I learned that because it's very dangerous, so you can really get hurt and it's very complex. So you really have to pay attention to understand how to make it work. So these two things kind of forced me to stay present for many hours and it was healing in a way, right? Okay, so now not only I can do this thing that I thought I'm not good at and I'm learning it quite fast.

It looks like I'm good at it, but I am finally present in something like completely immersed and focused and not thinking about my to-do list. It was just incredible. If my job and kid didn't ask for my attention the week after, I would have just stayed there for two more weeks and learn and

just explore more of the space. But yeah, I wanted to share this with everyone because I really feel it's an important maturity lesson if you want. You are not something. So when we define ourselves as something, we're just limiting what we can do. And I thought it's just a cheesy way of talking about the world, but it's so real. Like I'm good at this thing, which I have no pre-existing advantages for, right? Except I am pretty good at coordinating things.

myself. My husband also kite surfs and he has similar problems to you with like being not present. And he also says it's the magic. So maybe it's just to confirm that it's true. It has something magical and it really helps you to stay focused and present. And it's also fascinating that the complex, dangerous things forces you to do this. So you sometimes have to go in a different direction to find some sort of remedy to help you out.

It was incredible. And then the week before I gave my last talk in person in Bucharest at HowToWeb. Thank you for inviting me. And yeah, now I'm just planning out my next talks and focusing on what matters most to me in my career. And so this is a very good segue into what matters most in your design role when you choose one and in general when you're designing your career path. Right. So let's see.

Let's start like we always do from our own experience. And I want to ask you, what's the mechanism behind your choices so far? How did you choose your UX roles? And what did you learn from your experience so far? All right, let's talk about choosing jobs and deciding. I guess most important topic today is really about decisions and how do we decide what is a good

design role, design job for you, and what factors you should be looking at when you are making this choice. I know today it's a bit of a tricky topic to talk about, I guess, because the market is not very much open to us. It's not pampering us with multiple offers, but I feel like it's still very important for you.

It's important for you to not sacrifice your career and not settle down for whatever is available. It's okay for short term if you know that it's going to be just temporary stop for you to be there for half a year, year, it's fine. But like if you are actually serious about your career and you're trying to make conscious, intentional decisions, it is important for you to ask for the right questions in the interview and obviously try to figure out what are the non-negotiables for you and what are the things that you are able to tolerate because as we established

previously in our conversations, there is no perfect job. Actually, I think we have one conversation about the red flags. So maybe go back and listen to that as well. We did establish in the conversation that no job is perfect.

It's about you understanding what are you able to tolerate and what are the things that you're just done with. You can't stand them. You can't live with them. You know that they are not aligned with your values and you really cannot work in this environment. Talking about my personal experience, to be completely honest with you, I wasn't very intentional for a very long time. My first, I mean, obviously I was freelancing, which was very different. And of course I was either choosing the clients or not choosing the clients. That was it. I was mostly going off the topic and how exciting is this product?

For me, the product was always important. And only then when I started working for big companies, so corporates, I started realizing, hey, people are very important. I actually want to work in a great environment because it's basically building the relationships, right? You're basically married to the company because you meet them every day for at least eight hours a day. And you kind of want to feel good about working with people. You want to have fun. You want to feel connected. You want to feel on the same wavelength. And so

it kind of became that, okay, people are super important for me as well. However, what I was missing, if I look back, so my first two corporate jobs, I was looking at basically my direct environment, right? The PMs I will be working with, the design team I will be working with, the tech team sometimes I will be working with. So just like direct peers, and I never really paid attention to the leadership.

And only in my last role, I realized what's the role of the leadership in my day-to-day job, right? How the leadership really pivots the way you work, the culture it creates, the values, the principles, practically like how your work is being evaluated. Your performance, your career growth, your promotion, etc. Everything is dependent on how your leadership is basically setting up the tone.

In my latest job, I started actually paying attention to this. When I was actually looking for the last job, we didn't have yet design leadership. So we basically only had design manager and a small design team. I think when I was joining, we had like five designers and one design manager. And it's crazy to think that

It's been less than three years now, and we are now a team of about 60 designers. So we have about four projects and directors, one VP, and a couple of design leads, as well as a couple of design principals. Mostly senior designers, a few middle-level designers. And so why I'm saying this is that when I was joining the last job, the leadership was not still something I looked into deeply. I only looked at the super top-level leadership, so the CEO level, but there was no design leadership.

And only now working in the company, I realized that design leadership is super, super important because it essentially contributes to creating the culture you will be working with and the mission that you are working with. Maybe the mission is still more focused on the product, but definitely the culture in which you work, in which basically they hire people that

they bring to work with you. And then the, let's even call it like performance review criteria, everything will be based on the culture that design leadership is creating for you. So that turns out to be, as of recently, basically to be super important to me. And now if I look into all those, like, let's see, what do we have in the cards? Like what are the important factors? Today, we can basically say that I see three important factors, one being product or mission or

context in which you work. So it's usually industry or product or challenge or side of the industry, B2B or B2C or something like that, right? So the mission that you are working on. Second part is the culture of the company or of your design team. Culture, I mean, actually people.

So let's be specific here. So mission, people, and then the third one is the leadership that impacts the people you work with, right? Leadership, design leadership, really looking actually who is steering that ship for you. And how do you align with this? That's also very important because very often you might have good intentions, but you just don't align on the values. And it also could impact the way you work.

So I'm going to stop here because I don't want to go into too many details, but I would love to ask you if there are anything else that you can also look into your story and find as an important factor when it comes to searching for the job.

I resonate with everything you said. I do have just one other thing that I think you didn't touch on. I think one thing that I used to minimize in my career, but now I find is very important is this not necessarily excitement for the product, but products that you feel you're interested in working in. And this became like a luxury at some point in my career that I, in the beginning, you'd kind of really choose. I want to work at Apple. Okay, great.

Right. So it's like it's something that the world starts opening up as you advance in your career. Well, maybe not today because the world is in a strange place, but typically you get more opportunities as you grow. And so the most important thing is the people I will be working with. Can these people teach me things like not directly, but can I learn from them? And then is the product positive?

and the industry, and the space, and the problem I'm working on. Is it interesting? Is it helping me grow? Or is it just pushing a pixel, moving one button across the screen and seeing, right? And those are also interesting experiments, but they don't really foster. Like for me, a personal example is when I moved into the AI space and started working on AI-focused projects,

that was the moment where my growth really accelerated. Like I really took off my critical thinking skills, my knowledge. Even my design process was impacted by the fact that I was working with this very ambiguous space. There were so many open questions. It was really challenging. It was very interesting. And so I feel that the problem space you're in is a very important thing to factor in based on my experience. Because if you don't go for...

a problem space that you're interested in, right? So it's true. In theory, designers should be able to design anything. We should be able to solve for boring industries like, I don't know, banking, which is not boring at all. I've been in banking for 10 years and I can tell you it's definitely not boring, but we have to be able to solve any type of problem.

But some problems are just naturally more interesting to us. And then if we have that, we can sustain the enthusiasm, we can sustain the learning, we can sustain the growth, right? And so that's something that you really want to help yourself, right? You want to support yourself.

and being able to put in the effort consistently for long stretches of time. So yeah, that's the only one other thing I wanted to add. I need to interrupt you here because it's so good you mentioned this. I think I wasn't clear when I was explaining this because when I said mission, I literally mean this, like the product and the challenge you work on. And it's so good that you brought it up. I'm really happy and I'm like clapping my hands internally because I was happy to hear this because I think most of the people today, and we literally had this conversation yesterday with my team,

Most of the people today, they say product means nothing. If you're a professional, you would work in any context. It doesn't matter. And I was so disagreeing with that. I felt that's not correct for me, at least. And I'm so happy to hear you're saying this because I feel the same way. Like for me, product is important. I care about what work I do. I don't want to be working in the context that I'm not

interested in. I don't want to solve those problems. I don't understand this, for example, user persona. I don't understand their problems. I don't feel connected to them. I feel very not related. I can give you a specific real example. And it's one of the key principles why I chose the company today. It's because it's in the hospitality or travel industry.

I loved the industry very much all the time. I even had my own startup that I was working on for almost three years and without being paid because it was in the travel industry, right? And now working in the travel industry and being paid for this, it's what made me actually almost like waking up every day in the morning and be excited about solving these problems. If I look back, my previous job was at Citrix.

And while I really loved the team there, my design team was really strong, very UX mature. I don't think I've worked in such a UX mature team before. And it's probably the team I still look back to as to how to design things, how to think, how to make decisions. While the team was really strong there, I didn't love the product. I was working for developer tools. I'm not a developer. I don't understand APIs very well. And I had to design API tools.

And it was just hard for me. I always felt imposter syndrome. I had no idea what I'm doing. And not always we were able to actually test those tools with the developer. So point is, now as I'm working in the hospitality, I feel excited. I feel connected to it. I always think about...

The product I'm creating, how many people it impacts, how many different segments of people. I want to talk to those segments of people. And I really am excited. And I have like those moments when in the morning I wake up and 6 a.m. I have an idea. I want to write this down. And then I go back to sleep. And then I open my notes. I have those great ideas that I just brewed in the back of my mind unconsciously while I was sleeping. Right. So I do think about this.

and I don't want to be a slave of the industry I'm not excited about. This argument that you just said that, oh, if you are professional, you will do great at any industry, you should be universal, you should be the Swiss army knife that you can solve any problem in any context, that is true. And you can't solve any problem in any context. It's really about how you feel while doing this. And like you said as well, if you're mature enough, if you have this privilege of choosing the jobs you can be choosing in context you want to be working. I think what

our personal motivation is a big factor when also company chooses us. Because if they know that you want to solve these problems, if you want to work in this context, it gives them a good confidence that you will not be slacking and you will actually be excited to solve it and you will be pushing for good decisions and you'll be somebody who's like really into it rather than just doing for the sake of doing, right?

So motivation is what impacts this kind of product, information, whatever. And I think it's very important. While many people will still argue, I believe that it doesn't matter what product you're working on. What matters is people. Any thoughts? My thoughts are that I totally agree. The place where I'm coming from with this idea, and I feel that that's why it resonated with you as well, is that it's really hard to sustain motivation over long periods of time and jobs will eventually get frustrating.

and you'll have things to deal with. So what you want to do is optimize for things you love, right? So it's like a relationship if you think about it, right? So your partner will frustrate you. Your partner will be annoying many times. But if there are enough good things in there that keep you going, then it's a positive equation at the end of the day. It's the same with roles, right? So it will be difficult. You will have days when you would just want to open your laptop or decide that

This is my last day. I'm quitting. You want to surround yourself with reasons to be motivated and push forward. And just the interest in the problem space is one of them. And people, obviously, is a very important one as well. But there's also like another aspect. And then I want to jump into exploring how we can identify these things when we're interviewing. How do we know if the people are OK and how do we know if we're going to love the job? That's an important and ambiguous question that I want to dive into after this.

And the last point that I wanted to make is that it's a very personal equation. It's a very personal exercise and it's very dynamic. So it happened to me that throughout my career, at some stages, there were some things that mattered, like bragging rights. I have this big logo in my CV now, right? And then that didn't matter anymore, right?

What matters more was the work. There's a dynamic aspect to it. So it evolves and it changes based on where you are in your career and what you're trying to improve in your work, in the way you work, in your approach towards work and what you want to learn and what you want. So it's not set in stone. Again, coming back to my intro about Kitesurf, it's never about this is how I am and this is what matters to me forever.

Sometimes things will change and some things will matter more and they will gain more weight. And so it's an evolving equation. And so to this point, what I want to say is that when you choose a role, factor it in relationship to your career stage at that moment. So if you're a junior designer, maybe it's not very important to choose your favorite industry.

And maybe you want to focus on choosing a mature team that you're joining. And is there a team that you can learn from? That's more important than the industry you will be in. And as you move forward in your career, what are the types of projects you feel are missing from your portfolio so you can target your ideal roles as you move further? So that's an important thing to optimize for, right? So I know I want to be this AI designer. I'm going to prioritize this AI role now. I

I'm going to try to go for that because this is what I want to do next or this is where I see myself in three years. So it always has to be in relationship to the career stage you are at and what you want to do next or what you feel or think you want to do next, because that's also ever evolving.

And so, yeah, that was my last point. I love this point. And I'm actually helping designers to find jobs. So I love that you did mention that maybe as a junior, don't focus on the industry so much. And while I'm actually recommending juniors to do, pick the industry, you're totally right when it comes to like thinking more about the gaps in your design career and which gaps do you want to fill? Obviously, if you're very early on, everything is open and just like

think about which direction you want to start from, probably which one will help you to grow and kick you off the ground the most. But you're completely right with the fact that industry is less important than the growth and the team you're joining, because the team will basically secure your growth and help you kind of learning and building the most important fundamental patterns on how you operate. And then this industry, it's only obviously if you have hospitality background, then it might kind of boost a little bit your chances of

joining the hospitality company because you understand the context better, but it's just a little nice to have. Most importantly, start from yourself, right? What am I trying to learn? What is important for me, for my growths? Recently, I had this conversation with my middle novel mentee designer, and we were having exactly this conversation. She basically started from like, you know me, where should I go? We started having this conversation. Yes, I know you're an analytical person, but do you want to start going and building that vertical

all the way and have this depth of knowledge in vertical analytical design? Or do you actually want to go and practice something new, build a new idea, build a new paradigm? There is like difference between working in Airbnb and Booking.com, right? Airbnb is very vision driven. Booking.com is based on analytics and how people behave and the tests choose

And so which one do you want to perform better? Do you want to be really strong as an analytical person and go to the booking.com type of company? Or do you want to explore Airbnb, learn building new visions, understanding more aspirational design product building journey? So it's really which gap do you want to fill right now?

right? Especially if you're a middle designer, now you understand a little bit. Do you want to now go all in into one vertical or do you want to build another idea or a new concept of how else you can work so you become a bit more well-shaped and more a universal designer? I guess you would have more tools in your pocket, right? So choosing then basically, is it a more operational job or is it more a vision-driven job?

It's up to you. And even in a middle level role, you can stop and decide to pick one vertical and go all in into it and just grow because you know it aligns with how you think very well. So you will probably thrive there or actually pick a challenge, learn something completely new. Now I'm looking back and saying, yeah, I wasn't happy working for the developer tools, but it taught me so much about how technical world works. I learned so much about technical

Now I'm much better as the collaborator because I understand how things are built. And obviously, I can collaborate better with developers and can be a more productive partner for them. And so if I were not challenging myself back then working for developer tools, I would not be great today. All those challenges are gross opportunities and they will shape you. But it's really every time you have to ask yourself, right, at which point do you want to stop and grow one vertical? Or at which point you still want to grow all those horizontal skills and learning challenges before you went

all in into one vertical. So I'm going to stop here and then let's shift this conversation into the direction you were having in mind. I think you made great points. So thank you for that. And the direction I had in mind is this significant conundrum and difficulty when you're navigating your career. How can you tell when you're interviewing if you will like the people, if they're good people, if they're people you can learn from, if the problem space is really interesting, or you will be just executing on, I don't know what leadership skills,

requests to push pixels around. So I know you have more experience teaching and talking about how to find jobs in the design space. So maybe you can speak more to that. I still have ambiguity myself, right? Some companies present themselves in this very, very nice light when I'm interviewing with them. And I don't know, sometimes it's gut feeling. I have probably an educated feeling

guess after 10 years in the industry to why that might not be really entirely true. But it's difficult. I feel like I could very well believe things that are not there. And how can you navigate that when you're interviewing? How can you know? You're right. It's very hard. And I don't have a good answer for this question, to be honest with you as well. I'm trying to remember how I was doing this last time. There are a couple of signals. I think the most important one is obviously where do you report?

That's an easy one. And it's easy to immediately understand how this organization will work. If you report the product or if you report even worse to tech teams, that's weird. Then design will not be thriving in this environment or marketing. I think the marketing is also another one that is popular.

Most importantly, what it gives you is what type of metrics and what type of success criteria you are optimizing for. Not you, your company optimizing for and ask you to optimize for. And that's tricky. For example, if you're reporting to tech people, to tech director, for example, you're optimizing for consistency, for efficiency, for patterns, for predictability. But that's not how that good design is built.

Very often it goes in conflict and you need strong design, vertical, strong design organization to push for good design decisions. So yes, it's consistent. Sometimes you have to make those compromises, but at the same time, it has to be good design that people understand. It has to have sometimes exceptions.

And it has to have new patterns evolving. It has to have like thoughtful analytical person who understands different systems, different context and chooses the pattern that works the best for this context, right? And if it's just always streamlined towards efficiency, consistency patterns, then you're creating the product that's just, okay, internally it works. You're optimizing for your teamwork, but you're not optimizing for the user and somebody who you're creating this ultimately product for.

It's always tricky and also it might impact the way you feel. For example, if you are always coming back with your process, how you were taught to design, how you always say, yeah, we need to do the discovery, research, blah, blah, blah. And tech team doesn't care about like, why should we spend our time on this? Spend some more time just doing prototypes like that will help us. Obviously, you will not feel good, especially if you are a person who feel passionate about, again, my word passionate, I hate the word, but

But if you feel excited to do, let's say, discovery research, if you feel excited to learn more about the problem space, and then you're joining this tech-driven company that asks you to do just, not to say pixel pushing work, but more tactical design decision work, and you don't want to do this, right? Again, so yeah, who do you report is very important and will be very telling about the company organization and structure.

Now, another thing that I would definitely look into, and that's something I'm learning right now, is your current either design leaders or tech leaders or product leaders, especially the mid-level management leaders, because CEO is easy to research. They will speak a lot about the company. They will have talks. It's easy to find what they are caring about. I personally prefer when there are two leaders and they are different. That's what I like about my company. We have one CEO who is very pragmatic.

a very realistic and the second founder who is very visionary. And I like when those two powers clash because in this reality, you can build something that is shippable, but at the same time that changes the status quo. So that's my little small thing that I recently discovered that I like it. But

mid-level management, it's something that we usually skip it. We usually don't pay attention to this, but those are the people who actually impact the way we work and evaluate our performance. The VP level, the managerial level, look into people who work there. There are a couple of tools. I don't remember them right now from top of my head, but I will add the links in the show notes. But there are tools that help you to see the company organization structure. How many

levels of hierarchy is there? Is it more than four or five? Is there four or five managers for you? If that's the case, I personally feel like it might be a little bit of a red flag simply because there will be a huge gap between the top leadership and you and they will not hear each other.

It's just too big of a distance that there will be mismatch with reality and the direction. But the second part is look into where those people who will be directly managing you or people beyond managing your managers, look at their background. Where did they work? What do they say today online? Do they have podcasts? Listen to their podcast. See what they're appreciating. See things they promote, things they care about. Really look into the values. That actually sounds like more research.

But trust me, long term, by listening to that one podcast or looking into their LinkedIn and see what they're writing, what they are sharing, what they are reacting to, will give you a good sleep at night if you were to make this decision today. Because today I can, for example, notice when culture is changing. I can see those signals even in my company when something is changing, when let's imagine we were hiring people with certain background and now I can see we are hiring people with different background because the

company priorities are changing and that impacts which backgrounds we hire. It's not like who, yes, people and personality is super important, but also their backgrounds, right? You can so notice where those people worked and what kind of backgrounds shape the way they think. Like, again, remember, right? I was just saying, is it Airbnb or is it booking.com? They see a different company culture.

Same industry, hospitality, but very, very different approaches to design. And I'm bringing you this example because we use those products, right? Airbnb, we probably used. Booking.com, you probably used. And you see the difference design-wise, what kind of product it is. And that's a byproduct of the culture and the leadership direction, not people inside bottom up who are saying, now we want to do all those A-B tests. And the leadership says, yes, sir, we will do all the A-B tests. It's a bit of a different

thing, right? It goes top down, unfortunately. It's good when you can change things, but there are certain degree to which you cannot go. So yeah, leadership, looking for signals, seeing what people they are hiring, their backgrounds. But also just a little disclaimer that, for example, if you know that this person worked at Booking.com and they are working on your company, it doesn't actually mean that they're thinking at Booking.com. Maybe they left the Booking.com because they didn't like the work. They maybe wanted to change things. So be careful, but

It's just like with research, right? You want to triangulate your data. It's okay to see like high-level picture. Okay, they worked at booking.com, great. But also look deeper, see what other posts they shared. Maybe they actually go against that culture now. We all learn, we all evolve and we change. We're definitely moving organisms and we don't see them once.

fought for for long we change the way we think as i would say as well so yeah leadership company organization what people tell glassdoor read glassdoor it's so easy uh just go there see what are the common patterns of what people say what things work well what things don't work well yeah that's probably gonna be it anything else you would add here

I think you've covered most of the things that I also had in mind. And I don't know, the last thing I would add is similar to Glassdoor, and I think there's another website or platform called Blind. I don't know. Yeah, we need to find it. That's a better one. People essentially complaining internally in...

anonymity, similar to Glassdoor. Anyhow, another thing that you can do is research on LinkedIn, just go on the company and then go on the tab called people. And then you will see people who are working there. And then you can reach out to someone who is either in a design role or close to the design team and introduce yourself and then ask them.

Maybe I mean, it's hard to say bad things about your current employer, but I don't know, you could give it a try. And you don't know what you're going to find out. I ask in interviews, not just on LinkedIn, people that are working there trying to get some info. But in the interview process, I always ask, what are you currently dealing with? What are your problems? What are your challenges? What is it difficult?

about working in this company. And many times I get accurate answers, but you have to listen to them, right? So they tend to give you a cosmetic version of the reality, but they tell you what is not going well. And then you have some flavor of what you need to deal with. And do you want to deal with those things?

Are those things you can cope with easily? Or is it like, oh, not for me. Thank you. Maybe reach out to people who are working there or have worked there if you can find them. And then also ask. Just ask. What are the problems? What's not working? What's going badly? And then you might probably learn the direct way, right?

And so these are all the things that I wanted to say today. I don't know if you have any closing thoughts. I'm hoping that everyone kind of has explored internally while listening to this conversation. What are the things that matter to them? And of course, we were talking about the big themes, but maybe there are also smaller themes like I want to work with this person that I worked like five years ago and I enjoyed working with them or I want to work with this company because they have nice, awesome

offices in my town and now I want to go to the office. And so it could be anything. It's very personal. It's a constant self-reflection effort. But yeah, some of the things are quite general and I think we can all tap into them with our own personal lens. So that's my closing idea and

Thanks to everybody who tuned in to our conversation. Thank you, WIC Studio, for supporting these conversations. We've been doing them for four years. And so it's just great that we are now able to move forward. And yeah, listeners are actually the engine behind our going forward. So thank you for listening.

And if you want to support us, maybe leave a review on Spotify or your platform of choice. Very important, submit topics for future episodes. We want to have relevant conversations and speak to the topics of the day. And I think that's it. Anything else, Anfi? No, thank you so much for listening. Go ahead and listen to previous episodes and otherwise we will also see you in the next ones. Thank you and bye-bye. Bye, everyone. Bye.