#125 A director's perspective on hiring UX designers in 2025 w/Chris Abad
01:01:20 Share

One of the things that's really important to me is their product thinking and their strategic thinking. And when I say strategic thinking, for me, strategy is like understanding why you're doing something. Like you can have an amazing design that you look at in someone's portfolio and you're like, this is fantastic. But what I want to know is like, talk me through all the decisions that you had to make to get here and help me understand why you did this versus that. And that will really separate maybe a more experienced designer

or a really good designer versus an average designer because those skills are much more transferable to new problems, new technologies, ambiguity.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Honest UX Talks. My name is Anfisa and today I'm not joined by Oana instead. I'm joined by Chris Abbott and today's topic is a director's perspective on hiring UX designers in 2025 and beyond.

I'm very excited to have Chris today because Chris has 20 years of experience in design, PM, I guess as well, UX in general at places like Google, Square, Dropbox, Salesforce. He hired a lot of designers, built teams, make game changing products. And I feel like there is a lot to share when it comes to hiring the designers and learn today from Chris. Without any further ado, first of all, let me just welcome you. How are you doing today, Chris? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

because it's always so weird to introduce people when they could do this themselves. Yeah, hello, hello. Thanks for having me. You covered it really well. I've had sort of a varied career over the last couple of decades, but I've been a startup founder, spent a lot of time as a product manager. And as you said, I've spent the last few years leading larger design teams at companies like Google and Dropbox and Square. Through all of that, I have done a lot of

of recruiting, interviewing, hiring of designers. So hopefully I have an interesting perspective that your listeners find valuable that we can talk about today. Oh yeah, I bet so. It's interesting because now you said you started also from entrepreneurship, then PMing and now then to the design leadership.

I also started from the startups and it's cool to hear maybe there are some interesting parallels we could draw. Another funny thing that you said that before doing the design leadership, you were also doing the PM. How was it? Why did you decide to kind of start from the PM role? Maybe tell us a little bit more about your story. Sure. I think it's unusual because usually designers are trying to go the other way. A lot of designers will start in design and then they want to become PMs, usually because they want more influence over what actually gets built.

For me, so I, at the beginning of my career, I founded a couple startups. You know, this was maybe 15 years ago. And the second startup that I had was acquired. And then I went and joined one of my seed investors. I joined his startup. And at the time, the company was 20-ish. I joined as head of product and design. There was no team yet. There was one designer that they had just hired and then me.

And the reason why I ended up in product and continued a career in product is because as a startup founder and CEO, I was used to having a lot of autonomy and say over what we did and also used to having a lot of impact on the business strategy. And especially 15 years ago, that just wasn't what a designer did. My background is in design. It's certainly what I'm most excited about, but I sort of fell into product out of necessity.

One of the things that happened when I first stepped into this first product role that was really interesting, as I joined, I think I had maybe three open headcount. And my first task was to go hire product managers. I actually had no idea what a product manager was. I'd never been in a company larger than my own startup where nobody really had titles. We just kind of did what was needed. And so there wasn't a lot of structure. Even at the time, product

management in this industry was still fairly new. And so I Googled it to try to figure out what a product manager was. I still didn't know. And in fact, I know how much I didn't know because I went and hired my first two hires and actually just hired designers. I kind of gave up trying to figure out what a product manager was. And I hired designers because I knew

I knew how I thought about product. And if I needed people to help me build a great product, I was like, "Well, I don't know what product manager is, but I know designers know how to do the job. So I'll just go hire them." What I learned shortly after that was in an organization that is used to more of a traditional product management function, if you put designers in that role, and it's not necessarily what they signed up for, they didn't necessarily know that's what the expectations were going to be, they can be pretty unhappy.

because they get stuck doing other stuff that they don't like. And so the second time around, I had a better idea of what a product manager was. And I hired people who wanted to be product managers. And it was kind of off from there. And so I spent the next 10 years building both product management and design teams. But I spent a lot of time figuring out how to teach one side to be more like the other and build empathy for the other side. And so I would always say that I would try to teach my design teams how to think more like product managers.

And then I would try to get my product management teams to think more like designers. And then hopefully they would meet somewhere in the middle. That was sort of my introduction into product management. And because I was in this role, I had to get good at it. And so I learned a lot about how to do product management really well. And like I said, I continued to do that for 10 years. My last role as head of product was at user testing. And at user testing, very similar, I had an opportunity to build a team almost from the ground up. When I first joined, there were, I think,

maybe three product managers that had been in other departments in the company and had sort of moved over into product management, which is really common in startups, but not a lot of formally understanding how to do product management. So we built out the practice along with the

product design team and a research team and a brand design team. What I realized at user testing is, you know, we, I probably grew my team from the three I started with to like 40. And of course, with that was the company and the product and our customer base and the scale and revenue. And by the end of it, what I realized was this product management role as it grew was continuing to take me away from what I really enjoyed, which was design.

was design. And at user testing, I found it really difficult to get into the design, spend a lot of time with the design team, and really just nerd out about design, which is what I want to do because that's what I enjoyed. And so after I left user testing, I

I decided I was going to make a career change. This was six, seven years ago. So I left product management behind and decided I was just going to focus on design in roles that were just about design, which was really scary at first, because even though at my core, I felt

more like a designer, I had sort of built a brand and reputation in the industry as a product manager. And again, like this was kind of going the opposite direction of what most people were trying to do. And so it was weird for me. It was weird for a lot of other people that I told them that I wanted to go do this. And in the beginning, I had a lot of imposter syndrome. I wasn't sure

if I was cut out to be to like, I guess, stand on my own two feet with only design and not be this sort of hybrid product manager slash designer. That imposter syndrome stuck around for probably a couple years before I really felt comfortable and confident that this was like the new chapter of my career. But

I think I just had an amazing introduction to really phenomenal design teams and people that really helped me along the way. And so now I'm very comfortable with that. I don't necessarily see myself going back into product management. I enjoy design too much. Like product management is one of those roles. It looks so different at different companies. Like every company has a different flavor of what product management means.

And I think there are some companies out there where what I like to do on a daily basis actually looks a lot like product management or is product management at that company. But at least for now, I feel like my tribe and my own center of gravity is squarely within design as a practice. I guess what the title is and what role that is.

may look different at different companies i love this i personally find this fascinating because you're right like i think only maybe in the last few years more and more conversations started about the future versus i guess with the race of the ai and like hey a lot of the processors and tools are automating the task we are doing and so we could see the whole role kind of merging together so designing pm in engineering kind of becoming one big pillar one big role and it's so fascinating because i see a lot of designers are asking themselves are we becoming pms or is

design is in the opposite direction. So which way are we moving? And actually a lot of companies today I see they're somehow deprioritizing design leadership and moving more towards like now everybody is a PM, not a PM, like a product in a way.

It's very interesting you started from the opposite direction. I'm very curious and apologies for everyone who actually tuned in for different topics, but it's a very interesting topic because it also touches on the way we're moving and how it's shaping the way we are hiring today. How do you now define the difference between the product

the PM and the product designer? At least maybe let's start from like a current definition. And what's your stake on like, where is it moving in the future? Like, do you think those are different disciplines? Do you think they will be merging together? I'm very curious about your perspective today, being in both of those camps and not just being, but actually being on a leadership level, shaping those both, I guess, tribes.

Some of it depends on the makeup of the team. Because I think what I've seen with my own teams in the past, it's very common for product managers to sort of fill a need. So when you're building product across the entire workflow, there's a whole bunch of different skill sets that come into play to get that job done. In a lot of cases, product managers kind of become this like multi-tool.

that fills in gaps that you might not have. Some really common gaps, for example, or especially at startups, it was very common for me to not have a dedicated researcher on the team. And so product managers and designers would fill that gap a lot. I had a lot of product managers going out and talking to customers to understand who they were and what their needs were, whether that's market research, customer research, things like that. Product managers fill that gap. But if you have a dedicated researcher on the team, there's less need for a product manager to do that.

Another really common one is product managers very frequently fill in the gap of a project manager, especially when it comes to engineering delivery. And so if you don't have a strong competency there, if you don't have a dedicated project manager, you don't have an engineering lead or engineering manager who's playing that role, the product manager kind of by default fills that role. But if you have that, then, you know, there's less need for the product manager there.

So some of it does depend on that. Now, there are certain responsibilities that product managers have that don't really fall into any of the disciplines that are sort of uniquely to product management that don't typically fall under design. And that is, for example, identifying what is the business impact we want to have.

Like we can come up with a great product, but is it good for business? That's something that product managers sort of uniquely do. Identifying constraints, especially when it comes to maybe business constraints, industry constraints, regulatory constraints, like those sorts of things. Product managers have to understand the environment that they're operating in so they know like what we can do, what we can't do and identify those constraints for the team. And then the creativity comes into like how do we sort of navigate those constraints to still come up with a really valuable product.

product for our customers. In an environment where I think you have a lot of dedicated roles filling in these different steps that need to happen throughout the process of building a product, one of the highest leverage things that I've seen product managers do is being responsible for the speed of decision making. And that's sort of a nebulous thing that happens across the entire workflow.

Again, when you have an entire team of specialists, the more people that you have, the more risk there is that actually the thing that kills the project and the team and slows everyone down is you just can't make decisions quickly enough. And so a product manager can be really, really valuable in being good at that, at helping the team make fast decisions. On the other hand,

designer and again some of this depends on who else is on the team and what gaps the designer might need to fill if you don't have a dedicated researcher the designers can be very responsible for doing a lot of customer-centric research or idea validation concept testing like that type of research if you have a dedicated researcher that they're partnered with the most important thing that a designer can do is figure out how do we solve this problem for the user to meet this need given all the different constraints that we have to operate in which was

sort of identified by the product manager. And that takes a lot of creativity. If you don't have any constraints, the job is much easier. Like come up with a good product that people like, you know, the UI is great. But when you start introducing constraints, we have to make money that sustains the business. We have to

to follow these privacy rules. We have to protect data in this way. We have limitations in our technical staff, certain things that we can't do. Now the job gets much harder. And so designer's job is like, how do we actually create this experience for users? Not in a vacuum, but like adhering to all of the constraints that are put

front of me. So at least based on that definition, the role of a product manager and the role of a designer look pretty different. There's a lot of overlap. I sort of picked out what are maybe the what is most different. But in practice, there's a lot of overlap. And in fact, one of the things, you know, because in a lot of my teams before I was responsible for both product and design, what I like to see and the people who spent the most time together were the product manager and the designer. In a lot of companies, it is the product manager and the engineering lead.

spend the most time together they're sort of if you had to pick a pair that's joined at the hip it's them but the way that we'd sort of set up our process in the teams is we had two modes figuring out what the right thing to build was and then making sure that we built the thing right this is a really common really high level framework on how you do this stuff and the primary responsibility and the highest leverage point for both the product manager and designers in that first part figuring out what the right thing to build is and then the engineering team is

predominantly responsible for, let's make sure we build the thing right. Now you don't completely separate things and there isn't this big handoff. There's tons of overlap between all the different roles. But if we had to sort of like characterize where these roles fit, that's how I would do it. And so in that way, product management and design are really similar and overlap heavily because they're both generally responsible for making sure that we're actually building the right thing in the first place, not as much making sure that we build the thing in the right way.

A simple question. Do you see them becoming the same role, let's say, five, ten years from now? What's your take? I'm very curious to see if all the speculations we have today have any fundament to be the truth in the future. I'm not sure. Even over just the last year, the new capabilities of

AI tools and things like that have completely surprised me. So it's hard for me to anticipate which direction this goes. I will say if the core functions across a product team are product management, design, and engineering, honestly, what we're seeing is AI being able to handle

some of the basic tasks of engineering more than any of the other roles. And so, I don't know, like if one of those roles were to merge, it might be more likely that engineering merges into one of the other roles rather than product and design going into a role. You know, there was a time, and still today, but we talk a lot about designers who are technical and designers who can code.

And especially in a startup where you're wearing many hats, having that blend of skill set is incredibly valuable. And designers who can code, it's easier and more efficient to create these really high quality experiences because you don't have to like transfer what you have in your head into someone else's brain so that they can code it. And you don't have the burden of having to document everything externally so it happens accurately because it's all in your head. And if you're the one designing and coding, that's very efficient.

I think the same will end up being true for like a product and design skill set. I think a designer or a product manager who can sort of like use the tools to smash those two together will be incredibly valuable. But that takes a special kind of person. Just like there is absolutely a vibrant field in design for designers who can't code, even though designers who can code have a big advantage in some areas. I think the same will be true for like a product and designer hybrid. The thing that worries me

is companies who perhaps feel they can eliminate the design role because the tools can take care of it. And I think that's problematic. Maybe one day, but they're certainly not there yet. You can create a UI, but if you don't understand what it's actually doing or why it made that thing, you can ship stuff. But whether or not it's effective, whether or not it's impactful,

And then as things get more complicated, you start taking yourself into a deeper hole you don't know how to get out of. It's really easy in the very beginning. Like if you're doing a five-minute demo, the thing that you create out of that demo is really impressive. But when you have to actually put together an end-to-end product that you iterate on over a long period of time and continue to add features into, I don't think the tools are quite there yet. Yeah.

I think coding is a little bit closer. Like you can take an entire code base and use AI tools to some extent, figure out how to modify that code to add functionality. I don't know that you can do that with design tools today. That's one of the reasons why I said I think design is a little bit further behind.

That's for UI design. I think there's other design disciplines where it's a little bit easier to kind of get someone who isn't like super skilled at design, but maybe has a good eye for design. If you're dealing with ads, like images and copy and layout for ads or landing pages, things like that, it's a little bit easier. But I think UI design is a little bit more complex.

Yeah, it is very interesting because I think like on the market today, the opinion is opposite that it's design that could be automated, right? And then the brain and the strategy and business thinking is actually the power that PM pillar is holding and that it will be hard for many designers to get the skills to get there, right? It's very interesting to hear you're thinking it might not be the design PM disciplines, but actually the engineering disciplines. I don't know.

I definitely don't see this in my company, but I'm pretty sure it's very different company to company, context to context. And at the end of the day, it's probably just people who think on multiple levels who could actually make a difference that will be having the roles in the future.

This might be unpopular opinion broadly, maybe not for this audience. But if I were to take someone inside of a company that is not in product or design, in general, I'd have a lot more confidence. I could teach that person to be a good product manager versus teach that person to be a good designer. I think good product management skills are much easier to pick up than good design skills. I think if someone is not a good product manager, I have more confidence I can work with them.

if someone's not a good designer to some extent like what i've seen is you sort of have to have this inherent skill set like something that you start with like natural talent it's really hard to teach someone to be a good designer if they don't have that starting point that's very cool to hear i mean it's very interesting and fascinating because a lot of the things i have a

in a way different opinion, but also in a way I agree with you. So it's interesting to hear this. I've been doing a lot of mentoring over the last 10 years and I feel like it's easy to teach anyone a design and even like somebody who is an engineer and who might not have like talent per se, as we usually call it, could become a great designer as long as you have certain soft skills. Not everybody has

having those skills and doesn't have like this fundament to start building the design skills that's a different story I love to have those conversations people early on on like how they approach things to understand really what what it takes and what it will take them to take a leap into design but it's fascinating to hear honestly that you're saying that from your perspective it's easier to teach product direction rather than the design itself do you think it's about the talent I

Or is there other skills that you feel like are very important or hard to teach in a way to become a good designer? I think it is in the taste and the craft in execution. I've seen this in larger companies. I've seen this in startups. You get people from other teams, other disciplines that want to transition into something working on product. I've seen plenty of people do that successfully to move into product.

There is only one person across my entire career that I can think of that I saw successfully move into a design role and like make that leap. And he was in a role that was very design adjacent. He was a writer, but had really good natural instincts for design. But I've seen a lot of people that they just can't do it. They want to be designers and they kind of understand the rules of design. Intellectually, they get design, but they can't actually execute.

you yeah that makes sense it just it doesn't sound like good news for designers you know there are a lot of people who are trying to move to the design thinking that it's just creative job and you open and try to creatively fulfill some some vision but at the end of the day i personally feel like a lot of people come into design with expectation it's just a creative job but then it

requires so many more skills that sometimes go in conflict with creativity and, you know, having this eye for the detail and like sometimes it requires switching the brains in such a way that becomes too demanding to even be able to do. And that's where I've seen people struggle a lot. You could be great at UI and design and like

visual, but when it comes to switching brains to what you were saying about the product management, the business impact, the prioritization, that goes in conflict with craft and perfection and details. And then it's like, how do you balance those? How do you become pragmatic as a designer while still delivering something you're proud of, something that you want to put out there as a product? And so that's the conflict I definitely have been seeing a lot in the past.

For the craft itself, it is probably taking some background and people with background definitely have a better time in transition into design. Anyways, I think we might want to start talking about the topic of today's episode, but I still think this conversation was really interesting so far because it does build on what do we expect from our designers? What are the skills that we might start building or already needs to have in order to move forward successfully as a designers and as a design discipline per se. I'm trying to think how to approach right now.

From one side, we've talked a lot about the skills and what it takes to be a designer. From the other side, you also mentioned an interesting perspective that in the early stages, so in the startups, you might need to be sort of a jack-of-all-trades. You might do all those different roles, whereas moving forward, like probably more later in the game and in a different context, you might become a bit more niche and a bit more focused on the UI and the craft and generally like just the visual, the way we deliver work.

How do you define a good design today? And maybe how is it relevant to different contexts? Obviously, you've been working on small companies, but also very big companies. How does this shape your perspective on good designer, not skills, but designer per se? Like you said, there's a blend of different skills that are necessary for a designer to have to be a good designer.

For someone new coming to the field, it can feel overwhelming because you do have to context switch and you have to have left brain skills and right brain skills and it all has to kind of come together into this like cohesive thing. One of the things I would call out that I would say I focus on a lot, like assuming you sort of have kind of the basics and the foundation of execution. One of the things that's really important to me is their product thinking and their strategic thinking.

And when I say strategic thinking, for me, strategy is like understanding why you're doing something. Like you can have an amazing design that you look at in someone's portfolio and you're like, this is fantastic. But what I want to know is like, talk me through all the decisions that you had to make to get here and help me understand why you did this versus that. And that will really separate maybe a more experienced designer

or a really good designer versus an average designer, because those skills are much more transferable to new problems, new technologies, ambiguity. If someone, let's say I was hiring a designer to work on a consumer social media, but they hadn't specifically worked on that before, but they had worked on business process workflow manager.

But if that person understands the fundamentals of a design process and they're really, really sharp on why they did what they did, their output may not look like the thing I want them to do in the new job. But that thought process is the same. That thought process is exactly what I want. All the domain specific

They can learn. In fact, some of that you can't expect someone to have coming in because it's going to be so unique to your company anyway. So the best thing that you can do is if someone has shown that they have experience solving a problem in your specific domain, that's nice. But if they've shown they have a process that allows them to do a really great job at solving a problem in any domain,

because they've sort of built up this process for themselves on how to tackle new problems with new information and learn new things. That is infinitely more valuable, at least to me. For me, for example, when I'm in design crits and I'm giving feedback, especially if it's a more junior designer who we're trying to sort of like uplevel their skills, that's what I'll ask a lot about.

It's not, oh, you did this, you might want to do this instead. Or, you know, you made this mistake in your execution, you should do it this way instead. What we want to talk about is, okay, you did this, why did you do that?

And do you even understand why? Okay, let's talk about how do we develop that thought process so that you can fix that next time, but you can also apply that to your other design decisions that you're going to make in the future. I absolutely agree with you here. You very well articulated it because I feel like a lot of the design leaders also evaluate designers like this today, but

I don't hear very often this articulated as like, "Can you answer the question why? Can you give me a good thought process that I understand?" But first of all, it includes a lot of skills. Not only that it looks great, it also means that you thought about it and you also articulated it and you communicated it in a way that everybody understood it.

It's a part of the storytelling, but also articulation and persuasion. It's understanding how to speak as well. So I like that you mentioned this part. And what I am curious about is when it comes to your experience, you obviously hired a lot of designers. I don't know. I don't know the numbers. I'm guessing hundreds. You probably have seen thousands, if not, I don't know, dozens of thousands portfolios. Can you

Talk me through your thought process. Have you been analyzing those portfolios? What did you look into? How do you know this is a person that's worth talking to? How do you make those decisions usually? Because obviously, especially the last couple of years, it's been quite insane what's going on in the market and how many people are looking for a job today. And so the competition or the demand

The demand is low, but the supply is so big and so it's very hard to stand out today. So now with your experience, can you walk me through how you were looking for the portfolio, especially in a couple of years? Yeah, I think the lens of the last couple of years is important because I think this has evolved over the years that I've been doing this because it is a competitive market.

the quality of your portfolio to some extent is relative. It's hard to say what the quality of your portfolio is in a vacuum. It's more like, how does it compare to the other potential candidates that I could hire? Like as a hiring manager, I'm using some reference point. I may not be comparing you specifically to this other person who just applied to the role, but

I'm calibrated against my understanding of like what the talent is out in the market. For example, you know, 15 years ago when I was looking at portfolios for UX designers, for product designers, a lot of people didn't even know how to talk about their work in the form of a case study. And so even just having that filter eliminated a lot of people, you would get

static partial screenshots that look like really great UI design. But that isn't what was important and what the job was going to be for a UX designer or for a product designer. And so I could eliminate 80% of the portfolios I was looking at just by starting with who actually sent me a proper case study. That's not the case anymore. One of the challenges today is it's really well understood that this is how we talk about this kind of work. But you know, you have

so many online tutorials and examples or boot camps that have really identical processes and templates for how to talk about a case study. And so now they all look the same. They all kind of follow the same formula. Presenting your work in the form of a case study is no longer the bar. The bar is much higher to stand out. As a hiring manager, let's walk through a scenario. Let's say I am at a larger company.

where I'm looking to fill a role. Maybe I have a couple roles that I need to fill, but I have a dedicated recruiter that I'm working with. Especially right now, you put a job out and I see this all the time because you can see the data on like LinkedIn and I've also talked to recruiters and hiring managers. You're getting hundreds of

applications inside of 24 to 48 hours. So absolutely flooded with potential resumes and portfolios to look at. And depending on how involved the recruiter is, maybe they're screening out the obvious non-fits for you, maybe not. But even then, even if they're doing some screening, if I'm going to sit down because I'm trying to squeeze this in between different meetings and I've still got my regular business as usual. So maybe I've carved out

30 minutes to an hour of recruiting time on my calendar. And so I have a whole bunch of portfolios that I've got to look at. And I'm just rifling through them. Maybe I spend a minute looking. Partially because that's just the reality of the amount of time that I can spend and I'm trying to juggle everything. Some of it is because, at least in my case, and a lot of hiring managers are going to be in this, you've done this so much that you start to do a lot of pattern matching.

Because you feel like you have a sense. Like you look at something and you look at it for, I don't know what the number is, but maybe even in the first 10, 15 seconds, you've formed some opinion about whether or not that person's a fit. Some of those are in the maybe category where you're like, okay, maybe I got to look deeper. But a lot of them are going to be obvious yeses or obvious nos in that first impression. Some of the things I'm looking for or that influence kind of that snap first impression decision, for better or for worse, some of it really is about visual discernment.

design. As designers, we like beautiful things. And even if that's not the responsibility of the job, when I first look at your portfolio, if it is visually impactful and visually pleasing, that is going to give a much better first impression.

And so that does matter. I'm not specifically looking for that, but I'm at least aware that that's in one way or another influencing what my first impressions are. One of the things that I think is increasingly important right now and what I look for, the typical format that I see a lot right now is you have your homepage of your portfolio, which will probably have some sort of

headline about you, who are you, and then a collection of case studies, a handful. What I'm looking for is

how well does this person fit what I'm looking for? Because I need something specific. I don't just need any UX designer. Like there's certain skills and certain expertise that I need. And so I want them leaning in one particular direction or another. From the designer's side, that means that you need to be really clear about how you are positioning yourself and have a cohesive story across your headline and your case study selection.

I'll give you an example. I was working with someone, I'm working with them now, but we just did this exercise a few days ago and he showed me his portfolio and his headline was fairly basic. He has a background in behavioral science and now he's a senior designer working on enterprise software. And I think his headline started as,

behavioral scientist and UX designer based out of San Francisco. That's not bad comparing to a lot of the designers who are saying great at user experience, innovation, user-friendly, seamless design, intuitive, etc. Sometimes we get the like buzzword bingo. This was basic but very generic, middle of the road. I think what his

headline is right now is something like I design enterprise software in highly regulated environments. Really specific. But

so much better positioned for the work that he has in his portfolio, which by the way, and I won't say which company, but one of the roles that we're looking at is they want someone who has experience designing enterprise software, and they want someone who's going to work on privacy. And these are like large enterprises that have a lot of privacy and concerns when it comes to data that there's a lot of regulations.

And one of the things he found out from talking to the recruiters, they've been having trouble finding someone with this skill set because that's a specific designer. And so as a hiring manager, if you're looking at someone's portfolio and it says, I design enterprise software in highly regulated environments, and then you look at the case studies,

And every case study, let's say there's only three or four case studies, but every single one you can see in the title that it somehow demonstrates how he can handle these really this complex enterprise software and navigate the constraints of regulations and data privacy. You're like, oh my God, this is, you still got to talk to them. Like you don't immediately make a decision you're going to hire them, but it would be weird not to at least want to talk to them.

So that's the sort of specificity that I think is needed right now to stand out when you have a hiring manager and you have recruiters,

who have an idea of what they're hiring for and what's going to be different about that designer, but they're sifting very quickly through hundreds of portfolios. Like, I'm a UX designer is not going to cut it. Absolutely. One of the reasons we are talking today, actually, something I wanted to mention, because I think it's very important for us, is that Chris Abbott is actually joining the community that I'm running for designers looking for a job at the Indie UX Design. And he will be doing a lot of portfolio for us or MEI, Ask Me Anything sessions.

as well as obviously sharing his expertise from his perspective on the industry today. And also, I think you're doing the Maven course on the portfolio storytelling. Obviously, I'm very looking forward to hear more about how you analyze portfolios. But for those of you who's not in the community, can you give us a glimpse

on a good storytelling portfolio, the portfolio that makes you very curious to talk to the person beyond the fact that they did this homework reflection and understood how to tailor their portfolio to the company you're applying to. As you're looking at the case studies, as you are reading through the information they wrote down, they prioritized, they visualized,

they put together as a story what makes a good story and how do you understand they answered that question why that you basically mentioned recently you're trying to see like is this person able to give me a good reason for the choices they've made and how this ties with the storytelling of the case study can you give us a little bit more answer to that question i guess

First of all, to touch on your first point, because I don't want to blow by that. I'm super excited to be joining the community. With a lot of the work that I've been doing, I had a lot of fun helping designers who are getting into the field or looking for their next role. But it's really tough right now. The market is really difficult.

I've spent a lot of time working with people one-on-one, but job hunting can be a lonely activity sometimes and can be very frustrating. And the idea of a community of people who are coming together to both learn but also support each other, I think is a much, much better way to do this.

So I'm really excited to get involved. I think there's already a great, vibrant community. My hope is that I can, based on some of the experiences I have, I can add value back into the community and help folks on their journey. So you had asked about how storytelling fits into

your portfolio. Yeah, I guess just to rephrase it and make it more specific, you did mention that you're looking for the reason how they answer the question why, right? Are they giving me a good enough reason to believe that was the right choice? How does this tie with the storytelling? Because everybody's right now on the market and we always talk about this needs the storytelling portfolio, storytelling case studies, everybody used to have those templates, double diamond, etc.

Now we need to start designing those storytelling portfolios. What does it mean for you? And how do you find the answer to the question why they arrived at the solution? So how do you really scan through those portfolios and trying to get the answers to the questions you're having through the storytelling arc, I guess?

There's a few different things here. From a hiring manager perspective, if I'm in quick scan mode, the signals I look for and the thing that helps me is honestly headlines. I can start to get a sense for what the story is about by reading your headlines, or I can't and then that hurts you. Mechanically, as a hiring manager, when I'm scanning through portfolios, that is the number one thing that helps me follow the story and know where I want to drill in is through headlines.

As a tip back to people creating that, like that is a really, really important part of how you set up your case study is be really mindful of the story that you're telling through headlines. How do you actually create a portfolio that tells a good story and what are the important things to think about? And then I'll get to a little bit about like talking about the why. The thing that's really important to start with is be really clear about what is the message that you're trying to get across and focus the content on that.

message. For example, I talked earlier about what is your headline and what is your positioning as a designer. If your whole image that you're putting forward and how you're differentiating yourself is I design enterprise software in highly regulated environments, that is your story as a designer.

And so the case studies that you have should support that. And the point in that individual case study should ladder up to that. So for example, you may have done a bunch of work in this project on other related stuff. And you get really worried that you're not able to show it off because it's work that you did. It's impressive, but you may have done a bunch of

branding work, design systems work, like that stuff may not be as relevant. And all it does is sort of dilute supporting your core theme, which is I'm a designer that designs enterprise software in highly regulated environments.

So this is like macro level. This is like outside of the case study. Like your portfolio as a whole is telling a story and your case selection supports that story. And then within the case studies, your headline selection supports those main points. And then you drill down into the details. One of the things when it comes to the actual case study, one of the anti-patterns that I see is people want to tell the story of how I designed

this app. That's not the story. It could be the story. It's just not a very interesting story. The prompt I would use is like, let's say I'm a hiring manager and I'm interviewing you live. We're having a conversation. And now I have it in my head. I'm looking for someone, a designer for my enterprise product who's going to work on the privacy team. And I know that your expertise is designing enterprise software in highly regulated environments with considerations for data privacy and things like that.

I'm like, man, that's really cool. It's so hard to find because there are so many complexities that come up that make the job of design really hard. And it's hard to find someone who's good at that stuff. But I believe that you're good at that stuff. Can you give me an example? Right.

And so then you might say, well, you know what? Let me tell you about a time where we had to like completely rework our approach to the UI to be HIPAA compliant because of like consumer data privacy concerns. Awesome.

That is a story. And so then your case study might be all about that. That is a challenge, the way that you navigated that challenge, the things that you did that were creative that other people may not have thought of that allowed you to overcome that particular constraint. The funny thing is when you do that now, what ended up as this, you know, 10 page diary of how you design the entire product, slims down to a five minute read, but very, very specifically how you overcame that specific obstacle.

So all of this is like before the details, choosing your case study, knowing what the headline for that story is. What is the story you're trying to tell? If you get the sort of like scaffolding right, then filling in the gaps gets a little bit easier. Then when you go tell the story, the other anti-pattern that people do is they just tell the story about the design process.

chronologically. I did research, then I did brainstorming, then I decided what we were going to design, then I created wireframes, then high fidelity, then we built it, then we shipped it. Like, that's also very, that's a story, but it's a very boring story. I know, I know exactly what you mean. Sorry for the, like, for the silence.

It's obviously very funny and it's very right. Like we start always from the beginning and because it's been such a long journey, it's probably sometimes six months, eight months work, you kind of go down that I need to go through every single step to arrive to that solution. But one trick that we used in the community recently, it's like,

flipping that story what if you start from the end and instead of going hierarchically from like a timeline perspective but if you start from the end and then like with that result in mind can you reverse engineer what's the story is actually about what was the result that what was the actual point of that story because it's very tricky because you always start from the beginning and there's so many details and while you put it all in the paper spend so much time whereas

like you were saying, you get scaffolded in a way that it actually gets to the point faster. You don't have to spend so much time like sweat in that story. Just focus on the things that matters. Sorry for interrupting, but I was just like, I needed to add this. No problem. As a hiring manager, I would say there's the two main things I want to see. I want to see what you made and then I want to understand how you got there. But one of the reasons why doing your case study chronologically hurts you is because if I want to see what you made,

that's all the way at the end. Like you've sort of buried it. And so a lot of times you kind of want to jump something to the beginning. This is what I made. And then also the story of how you made it. I don't want to hear you walking me through the design process. What I mean is in the real world, and this is what I would expect would happen if you were in this role, design is not a straight line from A to B. There are gotchas and potholes and

curveballs all along the way. And what really separates out the good designers are the ones who navigate that. Like knowing how to go through the standard process of design is just table stakes. This is one of the reasons why I think like school projects can be really difficult because

they don't include the most important part. Like you're basically just practicing the steps one, two, three, four, but you don't have any of the curve balls that get thrown at you along the way. And as a hiring manager, that's what I really want to understand. Like I'm assuming that you know the basics of the design process.

But what I want to know is, okay, you created this thing. What were all the curveballs you were thrown on this project? And then how did you overcome those? What happened when you presented an idea and the engineer said, we can't build that because our tech stack won't support that? What happened when the product manager said, that's great, but I need you to cut the scope in half because we don't have time. Like all these things are what actually happened in the real world. And those are the things that separate out the good designers. And so good hiring managers want to hear that story.

not I did research, then I did brainstorming, then I did low fidelity wireframes. Like that's boring. The template. Exactly. I love to hear all those points. It makes me excited that you're joining the community because these are all the principles we always love to talk about. We constantly talk about how you need to optimize for scanning, the titles, the fact that you need to get to the point, your story, what's your bio. Everybody is struggling through those parts. Everybody's struggling to figure it out. I also struggle like everybody. I think it's

It's just, we're all in this together because it's very hard to not only navigate through the whole career right now, but the deliver on all of those, the bar is very high right now, as you already said, but also figure out your own story, do your own homework, do your own strategy. Do you understand how to tailor your story towards the company you're targeting?

Many of the junior designers, I feel like especially who joined the design industry recently during the COVID years, they didn't have this particular opportunity to figure out where they need to apply. Right? So they didn't have this experience yet to understand that they are designing in highly regulated markets, for example. What would be your advice to the junior designers? Because I think

the people in the early stage of their career even more in the weeds today trying to figure them out how to frame themselves, how to explain what they can offer, how their past experience is tailored. For example, if you worked in accounting, how do you tell that story that I can do design great, but how does the accounting fit into that story? Like, can you tell us a little bit more on what would be the advice to junior designers today when they're still figuring out their path in the design industry? I mean, a lot of the stuff that we just talked about comes from

experience actually doing it in a real world scenario. Because if you have experience, that experience is your strongest thing that you want to push forward. Designers who don't have that experience are just in a different boat because they don't have that yet. And so that's not their strength. And so then we have to figure out, well, what is your strength then?

because what you'll be competing against is probably in an entry-level role other designers who also don't have experience so maybe that's okay it would be better if you had an experience but maybe that's okay because maybe that's the role so let's figure out what makes you special and why you're unique and what sets you apart and then let's tell that story some of the things if we take experience off the table some of the things that can set you apart is your

craft and design sensibilities so we we highlight those that might be a thing some of it could be your technical skill set maybe you haven't actually done it at a company but if you are very technical if you understand how to code if you can build your own prototypes that's a skill set i think just like we were talking about before we just got to figure out what makes you different and

unique and why you stand out. And let's just make sure that we tell a story around that. I think something that is really important for designers to learn right now. And again, let's assume you have all of the fundamentals out of the way. Let's just take that as table stakes. Like, you know how to do the design process. Your execution is good. What else can you do to

help you in today's market and in the future. I think being familiar with and comfortable with and curious about AI tools is increasingly important. Few

Fewer teams have figured out how to integrate these tools into their design process reliably. Like this is a core part of our process now, but many, many teams are experimenting with it. What I would want to see is as a designer who has a growth mindset and is continually trying to improve yourself, if you are not curious and playing with AI tools today to see how you might use them, kind of feels like you've been living under a rock for the last couple of years.

And all different tools, language generation, audio generation, image generation. Just being creative. And do you have some basic skill set around prompting so that you can work with these things? That way, I think will at least help you keep up. So it does sound like you're saying that people who might have, let's imagine you're transitioning from different background, accounting, psychology, banking, whatever, you might have soft skills.

right you might have training now you've learned a little bit the design tools the ui the process you got those basics done and your strengths is probably different like for example if you're coming from accounting or whatever banking you might have strategy as a pillar but you don't have a strong ui for example you still haven't you know you didn't have those experiences yet you haven't been able to practice on the market for a while you know this is your gap and i think even people with like five years of experience on the market they still have some parts better some parts worth

What would you suggest people who might have like a stronger pillar in the strategy and let's say less developed UI skills versus the opposite people who come from design background, design training, who actually were very deep in the craft, but maybe especially right now on the market still need to fill some gaps with like

business, I don't know, strategy, et cetera, to get that to the same balance level. What would you suggest to people who have those kind of skills in balance? Would you suggest to go back to school and practice more on the side project? Or is there any other ways for us designers to balance those skills out, to be able to actually, you know, be competitive on the market?

Different people have different modes of learning that work for them. There are so many more options out there today than there were when I was learning all this stuff. There was no formal training when I was learning this. You just learn by doing and just read everything I could. But you couldn't go get a degree in UX design. Today, you can't. It just depends on what

works for you, but there are formal courses out there. You can go and get a college degree in the field. You can take bootcamp style courses in the field that will teach you the basics. You could do shorter online courses. You could read articles, you could

watch YouTube, you could find a mentor, you could find someone to partner with, to sort of peer design with. I think all these are viable paths. One question that people have is if I go and get a degree or this bootcamp certification, will having that on its own help me be more competitive in the job market? And I would say no. What is far more important is the skills that you develop and your ability to demonstrate those skills.

UX research is one of the subfields of UX design where having an advanced degree is much more common and you will have hiring managers that are perhaps looking for that. But a lot of the other disciplines, you could have a degree or you could not. Sometimes the school matters, but most of the time not. If people are saying, "I'm struggling to get recognized in this job market, it's really tough, I need to make myself more competitive."

If I went and got my master's degree and put that in my resume, like, will I then be more competitive? Probably not. Hopefully the skills that you develop in getting your master's degree and the way that you demonstrate those skills in your portfolio, in an interview, in whiteboard exercises, hopefully that makes you more competitive.

That's the goal. So what you're saying is like still go back and fill those gaps before you're ready to apply or at least to a certain level. Maybe. It depends on what the gaps are for someone. The market is so crowded right now that I think there are a lot of designers out there who have sufficient skills. They're really good at what they do. They have good experience.

and they still can't, they're still not getting interviews. And that may have more to do with how you're presenting yourself, like what your packaging is as a candidate. So in that situation, you don't need to go back to school. You don't need to go build new skills that you don't have. You need to get better at packaging yourself.

So it kind of depends. That makes sense. Absolutely. All right. I know we've been talking for a while, so I'm pretty sure a lot of people already learned a lot. But to close our conversation up, last question. Is there anything you think we haven't talked about that is important regarding to the topic of being hireable, I guess, in 2025 and beyond? Like, is there anything that we didn't touch base on, but it's actually very important for designers to pay attention to? Yeah. In the folks that I've talked to and in the data that I've looked at, the two

Two most important things are, one, some form of specialization. Specialization could mean developing a new skill set. So for example, one of the emerging fields that I saw when we were putting our team together at Google and I've seen it in other places is conversation designers.

especially with the advent of LLMs and everyone building conversational experiences. That role of conversation designer, as long as you understand how to apply that role in the context of generative AI, is becoming in demand increasingly. And so as an example, what we saw at Google was people who historically had been in roles of UX writing, adding to their skill set so they could join a team as a conversation designer. That would be one form of specialization.

But another form of specialization would be a lot of what we talked about with just how you package yourself. Because you can't just be a generic UX designer. You have to fit a specific subset of roles. And yes, it means that there may be a lot of roles out there where the home manager will look at you and immediately dismiss you. But the market's so crowded that that's happening anyways. And if you're just sort of a generalist, you're probably getting dismissed by 100% of the roles. And so figure out what you're really good at and sort of

focus your positioning and your framing around that. That type of specialization I think is really important. The other thing outside of specialization is building your network.

Because the market is so flooded and there are so many people applying to these jobs so quickly that you're getting filtered through automated systems. And recruiters and hiring managers, to some extent, are relying on those automated systems to help them sift through the noise. And those automated systems are largely parsing your resume.

That's really disadvantageous for designers because your most important artifact when you're applying for a role is actually your portfolio. ATS systems, as far as I know, can't parse portfolios today. And so they make recommendations about whether or not you're a fit for a role and how they prioritize you based on your resume. As a designer, that puts you at a big disadvantage. So your best bet is to somehow figure out how to skip that system.

and skip to the next step without having to go through the filter. The best way you can do that is through some sort of direct connection, whether it's a referral or connecting directly with the hiring team or someone else on the team, something like that. You can do that in a targeted way. You find a role, you

reach out to the hiring manager. But you can also do that in an indirect way simply by always building up your network and connecting and meeting people. When I'm looking for a role, I would say 75% of the time when I find some direct connection into a role, it's because there was someone at

else that I knew in my network from some other time that got me there. It's not because I created a connection in that moment because of that role. Sometimes that happens, but often it's like the work that I've done over the course of my career to build up my network and to meet people and stay in touch with them. That's what helps me connect into these new roles. So those two things are really, really important.

some form of specialization, which will help you stand out. And then the second one is networking, building your network and leveraging that to get into a role so that you're not kind of going through the filtering gate.

Yeah, that makes total, total sense. And it's so right because I feel like a lot of people start networking like months before they start applying for a job or even in the same time. And while it's still better than nothing, it is not going to be as effective as if you were to do this just ongoingly, time to time, sharing your thoughts, connecting with people, having coffees, et cetera, meeting on the meetups, et cetera. 100% I see the networking effect still working probably the best as of today. I think I only have a small follow-up question for the

first point that you mentioned. You mentioned being niched down. And a lot of the designers who are still applying to hundreds of jobs out there, sitting and targeting those, just open new position, I'm going to be the first in applying because that could be a great strategy as well. But you cannot tailor your portfolio hundreds of times. You need to tailor it once. And then what do you suggest to people who are like, okay, I have this perfectly crafted portfolio for maybe one company, but I can

doesn't have an open role. What do I do with my super targeted, super tailored portfolio for specifically one context? Also, how do you know how to tailor it? Maybe you have this company that has in mind, that is looking for a designer for a very specific role. We all know that on LinkedIn or any other application tracking systems, you have those generic job description. Nobody said we need the designers with this specific skills, this specific pillars.

What would you suggest to those people who are tailoring their portfolios, but there is no open role? On the other hand, if you have figured out a portfolio. So you're probably not going to create a portfolio for every job you apply to, but there's no rule that says you only have to have one. And this is the same way that we design products.

You're not going to design a product just for one customer. It'll be too specific, too specialized, and it'll only meet their needs and nobody else's. But you can't design a product that somehow makes everyone happy. So you have to design for a category of people that you can build a business around. Same thing with your portfolio.

like you can't have a portfolio that's going to make every hiring manager happy but don't make it so specific it only works for one specific role you want to design it for a class of companies or roles like for example someone who has experience designing consumer mobile entertainment apps that's very different than companies who are looking for large enterprise software or

designing for developer tools or designing consumer FinTech apps, like these are all sort of like different categories. If I'm Honda and I'm looking for a designer who has experience designing in-car infotainment systems, you don't have to design just for Honda. But if your experience is designing like embedded UIs for hardware, like your portfolio is going to look very different and not be attractive to someone who wants to design consumer entertainment mobile

mobile apps, right? So like pick a class, but you can have more than one. If you have, depending on how large your portfolio is and the diversity of experiences you have, let's say if you have someone who is really good at designing complex systems and workflows, but they also happen to be really talented at visual design and illustration and animation.

Those roles exist, but those are two different roles. You hurt yourself by including both of those in a single portfolio. You may have two different portfolios and it'll be very obvious to you which one you should send to who. It all makes total sense. And I feel like the whole silver lining of this conversation was all about productizing your portfolios. And it's the same thing what we do at The Design Job.

We are trying to understand who's the user, what problem are we solving, how to prioritize that, how to craft it, how to slice it down, et cetera. Like it's all about productizing your portfolios and it's just a lot of the skills that we're using at the day-to-day job. So I think it's one of the things that many designers just struggle to do because it just feels like, oh my God, I have to do yet another job that is not paid to get paid finally. But it is what it is today on the market and it's just the only way today to stay competitive, I guess.

We're fortunate that we work in an industry. These are well-paying jobs. And so you've got to put some work in and the more competitive the jobs get, the more work you have to put in to get yourself to stand out. But I think that's just the nature of what it takes to make it in this field. It is competitive because it is attractive. Like these are good, well-paying jobs for people that have the right skill set. One thing I didn't answer that I think would be good to touch on is you had asked

how do you know specifically what a company is looking for and like what the ideal profile of designer is? Because it may not say in the job description. And I would say yes and no. I think looking at a lot of the job descriptions out there, they are 90% boilerplate, like the same generic stuff that you'll see in every job description.

But there's like the other 10% that gives you clues on the specifics of what they're looking for. Unfortunately, I think it can take a lot of experience being on the other side and seeing what this actually looks like in practice to be able to pick these out. But this is what I've run into, which is why a lot of the people that I work with, I'll ask them to actually don't just tell me who you're interviewing with, send me the actual job description that they wrote.

90% of it we don't need to talk about, but I might pick out a few words where I'm like, "Oh, they're saying this. This is what they mean by that." And this is the type of designer that they're looking for. Sometimes it'll be obvious. Sometimes you'll pick it up in either the title, if it's some title that's more specialized than just like UX designer or product designer. Sometimes on the team, like the example that I gave earlier, the fact that it was a UX designer on the privacy team, that gives you clues about some of the specifics about what they're looking for. In that job description,

that we were using as an example there was one word in there and it was really weird term that they used it was like generated generated something but it it made me realize that what they were actually looking for because they were dealing with enterprise customers and a lot of data privacy and they were also dealing with a lot of generative stuff and so it was like oh

Yeah, like that's really hard, like figuring out how to still be HIPAA compliant and accessibility compliant in a world of generative AI. Like that's really hard. That's a really unique skill set. But if you were to pick their ideal person, it's someone who knows how to navigate all those constraints. Yeah, you have to do a lot of reading between the lines, and that might be where finding someone who is more experienced in this can help give you clues because the job description is a lot of noise. But usually, I mean, as a hiring manager,

People do this all the time. Like if you're busy, you're under pressure and you need to put together a job description, you'll go grab someone else's job description that seems fairly reasonable. And so you kind of just end up perpetuating this problem of 90% boilerplate, but you'll go change a few words because you have a few key things in mind that are really important to you. And you'll sort of leave them as Easter eggs

in the job description. And then on the other end, you know, hopefully you know how to decipher those. Another little trick that I personally use and I usually recommend to people in the community is also just to go and check out what their company leaders are saying, especially mid-level management people are saying, because you will be reporting to those people typically. And just like what are their missions, visions, hopes they have moving forward in the market. And a lot of those leaders are talking online. They're sharing about their plans, about the future, how they see the company progresses. These are also very good signs where they're

the designers could kind of understand, oh, they're going that direction. They will need those skills, right? So just like doing, again, this kind of research, desk research, understanding how to frame what you've got to offer. So yeah, I personally love this conversation. I think there are a lot of really good points and very well articulated. I love to hear. I feel like we align a lot of those points and I'm so happy to hear all those thoughts because now I'm very confident that you'll fit right into the community and people will love you. And I'm also really hoping that maybe some people who work

considering joining the community will now see this as a, hey, join us. Because I think Chris has so much to offer and has all those really golden bullets on what makes sense for us designers to focus on today, but also how to shape your careers, how to navigate through the career, how to navigate through the hurdles. Even once you find the job, sometimes it's hard to even just

make yourself successful in the first three to six months, also figuring out, building relationships, et cetera. It's just a lot of things. So what I love about this career is that it's always variable. There is so many more things coming up every single year and even months. And I feel like you could never have another community and the support in this process.

I'm really excited to have you right now joining us and hearing what more you have to say and helping out people, of course. Thank you again for joining us today. Any last words? No, none for me. That was great. Thanks for having me. Cool. Thank you so much. Thank you everybody for listening to us today and we'll see you on the next or the past episodes. Bye-bye.