#131 Finding your strengths
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Ultimately, what you should be trying to understand based on your past experience and the problems you have been solving is how the problems you've been solving in the past abstrugate to the design industry. In the community, we have one student who wants to move from fintech to other industries. But the way to do this is through this abstraction.

of I became really good at solving this particular set of problems, I could take that and abstract it and map it to this new industry. So the set of problems I'm good at solving is this common denominator between this industry that you are currently at and the industry you want to target. And that applies to also people who don't have the design industry background.

If you are moving from hospitality, maybe the thing that you were really good at is working under pressure where everything is like overwhelming and everybody's trying to check in at the hotel reception desk and you're managing so much stress and you're really good at managing stress. What type of problems you used to solve there that you could use now in design industry? ♪

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Honest UX Talks. This time around, we are meeting together with Ioana. My name is Infisa, and today we are going to talk about the topic that was many times brought up in the community I'm running, so the community that helps designers to find jobs in this tech market crisis. And the topic is finding your unique strengths, where everybody is expected to be a generalist. I think it's important to know that.

I think today when you think about the market, it is important to understand what are your strengths and how do you stand out so you are not being one of those generic UX designers that is passionate about design and user-centered, seamless user experiences that everybody says in their portfolios about. But the trick is that

The market today says you need to be a generalist, you need to be a product person, you need to know how to build things. So how do you lead with your strengths, not being a specialist, but still being the generalist, right? The market is very confusing right now, so I hope we can unpack this topic and see how you can notice your strengths and how to package it.

almost like productize your portfolio today, especially if you're looking for a job. But before diving into today's episode, I would also love to say thank you VIX for supporting our podcast episodes. VIX Studio is an intuitive platform for designers and agencies to build high quality websites.

And lately I've been playing out with this Figma to Vix Studio plugin, and honestly, it's been a huge time saver. As somebody who is balancing work and life, especially with a little one, I'm always looking for ways to simplify my process without cutting corners. And this plugin lets me bring the designs from Figma straight into Vix Studio with just one click. So no exporting files, no recreating layouts from scratch, literally one click. And

And once you're in, your design becomes a solid starting point for a fully functional website. Now you can tweak details, add no-code animations, use a built-in AI tools, and get your website off the ground immediately. It helped me personally to cut down the tedious part and stay focused on what I really enjoy designing. So thank you so much, Vic Studio. Find more details in the show notes. You'll find the link there. And now let's continue to the episode itself.

I'd love to start our episode by just quickly catching up with you. So how have you been, Ioana, in the last couple of weeks? It's going to be a very surprising answer because I didn't give this answer for a very long time, but I've been very productive and energized. I don't know what's happening. I know that the industry is still in a very weird place. While we're recording this, it's two days after the tariffs and

and the trade war and the entire economic crisis and everybody's like scared, worried, losing their savings, losing their future perspective. It still feels like a very transformational, risky, in many ways, dark time.

But on an individual level, after having experienced some sort of maybe burnout or just lack of motivation, lack of creativity, lack of drive and excitement for the things that used to excite me in the past, I seem to have recovered them, which is absolutely incredible. I'm very grateful for that because if any of you have experienced something similar to burnout, heavy burnout or just mild burnout, whatever, you probably know that one of the

of it is that you feel like this is going to be your life from now on. Like there's that despair where you don't really see how things might ever recover for you. It feels like it's never going to be good again. Everything will be bad forever. And so I'm very surprised to see that it lasted just a couple of months. It's true that I took, I wouldn't say I took time off because I'm incapable of that.

but I tried to only do things that bring me joy, relieve some of the pressure from my shoulders. I haven't had a full-time job for the past couple of months. It's been anxiety-inducing at first, and I felt like, what am I going to do this year? My income is going to decrease and...

Will I ever be able to go back to a job again? And I'm at a stage where I'm doing well, thank God. I have my design studio, my consultancy on AI and design. I'm doing talks, I'm collaborating with brands. I'm doing a lot of things that really make me feel excited and making a living. I'm sitting in bed at night and like feeling creative again.

And I'm very grateful for that because it felt like it's never gonna be back again. And here it is a couple of months into changing something. I'm doing well again. That's like the general perspective. And then what am I up to? I'm just packing as we speak. I'm packing my bags and going to Berlin, my second hometown. This week, I'm very excited to be back in Berlin. I tend to have two, three trips in Berlin per year. And

And this is the first one in 2025. I'm going to take part in a conference called Prompt UX and I will lead a workshop that is called identifying AI opportunities in your product. It's going to be a workshop with 120 people, which makes me also excited, but for some parts.

I hope it goes very well and we don't break the mirror board. 120 people and cursors moving at the same time in this collaboration world.

But I think it should be great. So yeah, and now I feel that after having revisited and reconstructed the framework for uncovering the opportunities in your products, so I want to reuse and improve based on this workshop, the framework for going through this process and maybe help companies,

smaller clients, smaller teams, product teams, maybe even C-level teams and so on. So help companies, startups, whoever feels stuck in this AI ambiguity, help them uncover ways in which AI could be surfaced in their design decisions and improve the experience of users. So I'm kind of moving towards my own

model for going through a facilitated session, three, four hours, maybe one full day, and then landing on a plan for how to start implementing AI in your product in a way that's meaningful and not just let's have AI over there in our product so we can say we have AI. So I'm very excited about this. And then, yeah, it's just going to be a lot of traveling. As some of our regular listeners might know, I just recently returned from Japan.

Now I'm going to Berlin, probably going to go to Amsterdam to a very nice conference called Slow AI early May. And then late May, I'm going to Canada and then I'm going to New York. And then, yeah, summer, I want to take a break to regroup, recenter and see what comes next for me at the end of the year. I kind of have clarity that I don't want a full time job. I probably won't want a full time job for a long time from now.

But I do have a plan to kind of go deeper into the AI building space and maybe experiment once more with the founder perspective on the world and my work. So we'll see. This is a high level plan. I typically am very religious about respecting my plans. Once I arrive at them, for me, the hardest part is just figuring out what I want to do. But once I figure that out, I'm kind of always moving towards that direction. So probably you're going to hear more about that. But yeah.

I think that was my, I regained enthusiasm, even in these very strange and demoralizing times. I feel that the world will probably go through very hard times in the next year or two years, three years, but then the sun will come up again and I will be there waiting for it and all of us in the same boat.

So, yeah, that's me. How are you, Anfisa? I mean, I have a lot of thoughts about what you've been sharing, starting from the fact first that you have regained your strength, which is something that we want to talk about today per se. So it's actually really fascinating and inspiring. I hope people will get inspired from the session as well.

And secondly, yes, I think the world is absolutely crazy and unpredictable and every new day is bringing us new and new. I don't even know what to call them anymore, like fire's palms. News that make you wonder what the hell is going on. When did the world get off the trails? You know, this movie, don't look up. I think we're now living it. But you will see. Enjoy the ride, everyone. Like we all, I guess, do anyways. We have no options.

So yeah, I think next year will be very interesting. I'm considering to sell all my stocks now, given that a lot of these companies, they're tech companies. Fascinating journey for all of us, I believe. Well, we'll see how it unravels. But let's talk about job market while we still have some last rays of sanity, I hope, and still try to understand how to stay sane and stay inspired. I think your story will help us a lot, a little bit in this episode. Now,

Now about me, I'm not sure really what to mention. Work as usual, handling a lot of things. In the community last week, we have had a very cool workshop about storytelling portfolio. In one and a half hour, how do you create a strong structure for building a storytelling portfolio that stands out in a market? And it was fascinating because without posting it on social media, around 500 people have signed up.

But only 100 people could join the workshop. And it was quite interesting to manage so many people's stories in one workshop while you're trying to facilitate the workshop online with technical issues and people moving boards and everything. So it was quite interesting. But for sure, I think it was productive because I got a nice feedback from people and I felt like it was helping a few people at least. Looking forward to see the portfolios that people will create out of the workshop.

I'm happy about the results of it, but also as per usual in the community, we have about eight workshops per month. So we're doing a lot of things. Also some members in the community started doing their own workshop, which is even more inspiring for me because people are sharing, creating more resources for each other, helping out each other.

I find this inspiring. I definitely find a lot of energy in this venture, I guess. At work, I'm also trying to picture my development plan at the moment, reflecting a lot, and I hope this will help this episode to be also productive. So let's actually dive into the episode of today. And again, for everyone who already forgot the context, we're talking about finding your strengths, unique selling value proposition as a designer, almost like productizing your skills on the very tough market during an ongoing tech crisis.

tech crisis. So let's start simple. Ioana, I would love to hear your story. We recently saw your episode about AI, how to be a designer in the AI, but I would love to hear your story around finding that passion in the AI. So how did you realize that you are most interested in this? Why your unique skills were so well matched with the space of ambiguity when AI was rising and how you jump on that path?

opportunity and it kind of blossomed. So maybe you can reflect a little bit on how you found this interest and why do you feel like it meshed well with your personality?

This is a very interesting question. I think that in my personal case, I was lucky enough to be in a company that was doing AI. So I don't want to say I was so determined, I was so well positioned to go in this direction. And I knew that I am the first AI designer in the world. I was determined.

lucky enough to be in the right moment at the right time, but I also did took the opportunities. What I think would be really useful for people who are listening to this episode is trying to maybe reflect on, first of all, how you've adopted working in this new thing that you didn't even realize was going to be like a revolution in the whole...

But also, how did you mesh well with knowing now that you are coming up with this new workshop and like different frameworks on how to work with AI, make it useful and valuable tool for every product company? It was a journey for you, obviously. It's been now two, three years or even more. And you somehow worked

walked through this and a lot of people are still kind of catching up and figuring out how to use AI, how to make it valuable in the company. But you've been there early on. And I think what would be really useful for people because of this episode specifically is to understand how do you feel like it matched with your personality. So looking into how you think maybe, how your unique traits, how they combined with like working with this ambiguity in the market today and helped you to become effective.

This is another very interesting question. Like, why did I click with this topic and then took it further out there? And I think it has to do with, again, it's like how well you respond to different things in the outside world. On one hand, what triggers enthusiasm? What's your go-to? I want to do something with this. Like when you feel you want to do something with something, what is it that you do?

Do you build something? Do you go talk to people about it? Which is my go-to. I'm excited by this. What do I do with it? I want to just tell the world. And I think something that also helped me was I think I'm a good critical thinker. Like I really like to unpack everything and go deep in topics and then come with different lenses or what does it mean for art? But what does it mean for philosophy? But what does it mean for humanity? But what

does it mean for nature? And so I came into this topic with a lot of different angles and perspectives. I think I had some sort of futurism lens, like how will this change our future? And perpetually asking questions. And then that got me constantly curious and constantly wanting to

Take it out there. I felt that because we're all probably wondering, asking these questions to some degree. I felt like, why shouldn't I just throw the questions out in the world and then see what people are thinking about this, what their sentiment is? The lesson here is that everyone has their go-to kind of response to something that scares them or is exciting for them or they resonate with.

What I would advise anyone who's looking to find their way, just expose yourself to many things. How might it translate into reality? I don't know, maybe just start looking at a lot of visual design. Maybe you want to build the taste that everybody is talking about nowadays, right? The future successful designer will need to have a high level of taste. It's something that's being thrown around a lot in the design industry.

So maybe you want to build that taste. Maybe you're naturally attracted to beauty and you want to dive deeper into that beauty. Once you get there, what do you want to do with it? Are you like, oh my God, I found this gorgeous visual. Is your response, I'm going to recreate it with AI or I'm going to recreate it with Photoshop or I'm going to recreate it in Figma or whatever?

what can i do with it can i put it in my product can i put it in an article or do you want to share it on social media hey everyone look at this beautiful thing i found and so what are you good at or what's your automatic reaction when you find something exciting and i think that that's the combination of what do you find exciting and then what do you do with something that you find exciting is something that can help you figure out

What's your unique value prop? So maybe you're someone who wants to code an idea when I never had that instinct, right? I don't think I'm a particularly natural born builder. I like to discuss things a lot. Like I could unpack them philosophically forever.

and go very deep into any topic and yeah just feel a lot of reward from talking about things from thinking about things but there are many people who feel that's not interesting what's interesting is to build and break and experiment and throw on the wall so that's what it all comes down to look around in the world maybe in the world of ai are you excited about tools that replace coding lovable or replit or cursor

I don't find a lot of excitement for that. Of course, I'm excited that I can probably in the very near future and even today bring my ideas to life in a workable prototype, right? That's not the Figma sequence of screams. It's exciting. It's powerful. But that's not what I'm naturally drawn to. I'm more drawn to the artistic side of things, poetry side of AI, like

can we make poems about it? And I'm like, kind of capture the sentiment of this stage of the world and so on. So you can really see what makes you respond and what is your response. And so I'm now repeating myself, but I think it's an important thing to kind of take in because that's where you will find your flavor.

And just one more thing. To me personally, it felt like what really helped me, and again, maybe it's not a generalizable lesson. When I started talking about AI in public, I was working on an LLM product. I was dealing with the ambiguity of AI, new types of interactions. So it was my reality. But at the same

time, I kind of felt like a fraud. Like, look, I've been doing this for six months. Many people have been doing these things for 10 years. Who am I to talk about AI in this way? And I always led, even in my course, AI for Designers at Interaction Design Foundation, all the talks that I started giving and people were just inviting me. And you know why they were inviting me? Because nobody had no idea, really. LLMs were new. The scale at which we were adopting them was

unexpected and so everything was new, right? Nobody really had a clue and we were all just in the same boat trying to disambiguate the topic and I feel that you don't have to be an expert in something to define yourself as... because I think many designers have a problem saying I'm a visual designer because I don't think I'm that good at visual design. I don't think I should say that because I'm not there yet. Look,

We're all in the process of going from somewhere to somewhere else, right? It's not like overnight I became the AI expert. And even now, like I'm three years into this journey, I've been giving talks and reading everything about it and talking to experts. And so I feel like I have some evidence in my brain, right? I have some expertise. I still start all my talks with, look, I'm not an AI expert.

I don't know who is. Some people are. They're scientists. But in the design world, there is no AI expert. We're all just figuring these things out. And so maybe that's something that could help everyone. Like figure out where you are in the process or what your process is, right? And then try to

internalize that without feeling like a fraud, without feeling the imposter syndrome, which has haunted me for most of my career. Go out in the world carrying yourself. I don't know everything and that's fine. Nobody knows everything. I know some things. I know I want to know more about this. I know I'm passionate. I know this is my thing, even if I'm not yet very good at it, right? Those are my three things from my personal experience. I'm very excited to hear your story.

I actually wanted to also reflect back on what you said before jumping into my story, because I feel like it was not told super distinctively, but it was very interesting to hear from your words. The fact that you feel yourself more of this like philosophical person, you're thinking about the consequences of things we're doing today that will possibly reflect in the future society, etc., other spaces.

and surfaces, and you were early in the AI space in terms of design, especially, but you were the right person to ask those questions because in the early stages when everything is messy, undefined, unclear, nobody knows how this AI is going to be affecting the world half a year later after you started working on that project.

But you were the right person to ask those questions because in the space of ambiguity, you have to ask those questions and not jump right into solutions like, oh, AI can search the internet. Let's just do this search UI. It would have been very easy to jump into solutions if you were the person is more excited in prototyping and testing out different UI concepts. But you are the other person, right? So I think that's one of the reasons why you meshed well with this concept of AI is just a rising thing. And I love to ask those questions about the future and how we are affecting it.

And I think that's why it worked so well. But what this story tells, I think, hopefully listeners, is that it is important to understand what type of who you are as a thinker, what type of questions you usually ask, what type of the process you're most excited about, or part of the process you're more excited in jumping into right away, what parts of the questions you kind of

don't like to ask and then what type of the process you write to jump into and maybe feeling more proud of usually when you start working on things. Those are the first things that we can start think of based on this episode. Now, when it comes to my story, obviously, I don't have the same AI story, but I

I think I'm also finding myself right now every single day, and I think that's a must-do exercise for every single designer today on the market with everything shifting so rapidly. Just like everyone, I'm asking myself all these questions of how do I find myself being relevant in five, ten years from now on the market that is rapidly changing. What I found most helpful to me, it's kind of a combination of three factors.

I seek internally, trying to understand what are the parts of the design process that I'm most excited about. Then the second piece of information I'm taking is what kind of feedback I'm receiving about myself, right? The third piece is by listening kind of indirectly, podcasts, people speaking outside, not directly to me, but by listening to those talks elsewhere, product podcasts especially, I'm hearing how people think about future evolutions and how this could be mapping onto my career.

And so I like to take those three sources of information of what I feel most excited about, what people are telling me I'm really good at, and possibly also the opposite, where I'm not so good at. And the third piece is like, when I'm listening to those noises and whispers outside in the world right now that everybody's discussing, which parts of it are more interesting to me, which things I want to jump into it.

moving forward, right? That will be possibly, you know, the future trends. Not just trends. I don't like the word trends. I think the potentials for development in the tech world. These are the three pieces of feedback I am looking through every single day, to be very honest. Today, what I'm leaning towards, and actually at the moment, I'm working on my development plan in my company right now. So as a part of the performance review, we have to do those development plans and try to be proactive at thinking where are you heading? What do you want to do? How do you see yourself in some time from now?

And I am definitely more and more getting into this space of merging the design role and the product thinking. Because honestly, every single time I'm working on the project, people keep telling me that Anfisa, you have identified some sort of master mapping. You're always thinking big picture. You have thinking about too many broad things. You're thinking about how this affects the system in other places, how this affects people.

this part of the product, that part of the product. And typically a lot of designers would, and actually this is a funny story now, piece of the story that makes me believe that maybe I should be tailoring that merge of the design and product persona in the future. And the reason how I am defining today, quick story here. So recently I was working on this new feature for my company, for a product. And when you open my file, you check out my design files. They are full of notes. They are full of context. They

It's not a Miro board that I'm jumping into. I'm actually doing all those mapping questions, investigation board type of activities directly in Figma. And when you open my Figma file, I have like 20% of design things there and like 80% it's notes and questions and screenshots and whatever mapping of things, of sources of information that I need to process to arrive to certain conclusions or confidence in the designer's choices. And I'm usually least excited about the design UI tweaks.

where it is about the specific component choice, specific layout choice. I'm much more curious about unraveling old context and finding a way to make it work in the business, users, etc. The reason I'm bringing this story is because it was kind of interesting for me or funny to me that I opened my file and because I was jumping between different files of different designers, I've noticed that every single designer is like so design-oriented. You have millions of screens, different frames, different concepts, different visualizations.

And you open my file and it's just notes, notes, notes. And it is so not design-ish file. I even showed it to my husband and I'm saying to him, like, look, maybe I'm not a designer. Look at my files. Like, I'm absolutely not designing here. And my husband also told me, like, why don't you just design it? Like, why don't you take this product brief and design it? And I'm like, that's stupid. How can I do this? I have to ask all those questions. And he's like, oh, you're horrible. Can't you just design it? Don't ask questions, design it.

And I can't. I have some sort of blocks in my head that I need to understand before designing. It's the way my brain operates. I'm

I'm receiving this feedback. It kind of perpetuates and builds this kind of notion of probably this is who I am. Probably this is how I'm designing and helping products to succeed. I hope helping. If you look into impact, it could be. So, but the thing is, again, it's just noticing about yourself, how you operate, how you think, how you design decisions, where you feel blocked, where you feel you have a lot to overcome. For example, I know that I could have like five concepts and

And I could sometimes struggle with like prioritizing this concept. I kind of struggle with like leaning into my intuition and picking something that I feel has most potential. I overthink things and I'm trying to get into this perfection mode with like five different concepts where I just need to give up four concepts and focus on one and just start focusing on iterating and focusing on the details there. But I'm postponing it. I kind of enjoy the process of exploring too much.

And that's where I know my biggest friction is today and I have to overcome it moving forward. So right now I know how to frame myself. Like I know that while I could be more or less okay, I'm delivering fine work through the whole process. But I know that internally my deepest problem is that I'm too excited about discovering but less excited about delivering. That makes my strengths the early stages of the process rather than the later stages of the process.

While if you look into my project, it looks I'm delivering work. People would say there is no problem with that. But I know where I struggle and I know where's my strengths. I know where to capitalize on this, right? How to make it effective. And maybe I might ask myself, if you were to look for a job, how can you use this, your unique way of thinking and find the product match to this? Like what kind of businesses might be needing the skills you're having?

What kind of businesses might be looking for designers who are great at master mapping or great at UI and delivering quick concepts or great at numbers and maybe quantitative design and working with hypothesis and maybe testing, right? So really the parts of the process, we're lucky to be in design space because we have so many different surfaces, right?

and so many different contexts in which we can operate. But if you think about your past experience, even if you don't have much of the experience, but when you think about your past and the way you think, what are the parts that makes you most and most excited? So I think that's usually the very good question that could help you identifying those first and most important signals.

I have two more questions to you, Ioana. Given all of our stories that we just shared, what do you think would be other questions that people could ask themselves that could identify the signals of what kind of designer they are? We know that today in the market, everybody is passionate about design, but what does it even mean? How do you even arrive to that one-liner pitch on your portfolio that says,

You're great at disambiguating complex problems or you're great at working in certain abstract concept problem spaces or something, right? How do you understand what kind of questions you can ask yourself that could help you build in that one-liner about yourself? Anything that comes to your mind?

I think there's another important aspect that I'm not building, but maybe diverting a bit from your earlier point about what other people tell me I'm good at. That's a very important map to use. What do I know I'm good at? What do I constantly get good feedback for? And that's really something that you should factor in when you decide what your next step are.

I think another very important question that you should ask is what have I been doing for the past five years, 10 years, 20 years? What's my expertise so far? Have I spent 10 years in the fitness industry or health industry or fintech?

What is the expertise, assuming that you want to do more of that industry work or still remain in that domain and kind of, but what is the domain knowledge or what is the knowledge that you can bring to new dimensions and new reinterpretations?

of who you are. An example would be, I've worked in FinTech for 10 years. I'm not sure I want to do that, but I know that I'm very strong at that. So maybe I can say that I'm designing at the intersection of AI and managing our finances or maybe managing wealth. Maybe you want to do more of that work. So that should be part of your headline, tagline. What is the field or the areas or the things that you have some expertise in? And this

lends itself very well to even people who don't have a lot of design experience. You must have been doing something before that, even if you were just studying. But most of the times, even if you had alternative roles, there are some skills in there that could translate into your new definition of who you are. So maybe you've been doing bartending

Maybe you were just working in hospitality, right? So that's something that you could bring into. I'm passionate about the future of hospitality because I have all this experience working at the grassroots of this field. And I really understand deeply the pressure, the struggles, right? You can bring other kinds of experience to the way you define yourself. And so two questions here to recap. One is, what have I been doing recently?

as a designer and what do I want to do in the future. So these two kind of pair. And then what have I been doing outside of design that can inform my definition of myself? And a personal example for what have I been doing outside of design is for the past years,

I become obsessed with art. And so I have all these concepts. I have a Figma file that's called Everything is Art. And in my Figma file called Everything is Art, I have six concepts of art installations and I'm documenting them and I'm writing those kind of, you know, when you go in a museum and you read the description of what contemporary art means, because otherwise you wouldn't make sense of it.

I feel that I have so much passion for this in the past couple of years and in general for human mind, the relationships, the suffering, the pain, the way we struggle with ourselves, the self-relationship. And so I have a lot of passion for that that informs my design practice. Again, the three questions I want to put out there. One, what's your domain knowledge as a designer? What is the thing that you want to work on next or the couple of things that you want to work on next?

And what are the things outside of design from your professional experience or maybe from your hobbies or whatnot that can kind of help define who you are? There is no full isolation of our professional persona from our personal life. There is a very fuzzy delimitation. I mean, I come at work as who I am. It's a version of me. It's a facet of me. Unless you're severed. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. It's still me. And so I'm still going to have my trauma, my pain, my sensitivities, the things that kind of make me ick and so on, right? So that's my point. Even if there are things in your life outside of design that make you excited about them, they can inform how you define yourself. And maybe it's just tech in general.

And you're just a person who's very curious to see where the future is heading towards. And that's how you want to position yourself. But yeah, bring everything. Like just analyze all the aspects of your life and bring them into your definition. There are a lot of thoughts I wanted to share based on what you just said.

So one thing that you mentioned was quite interesting to me. So I just remembered that while I was doing the interviews with hiring managers preparing for the portfolio community I'm running today, one question that I've noticed a lot of hiring managers are asking at the design interviews, they're designers, is the question, tell me about your story getting into design space. And I personally...

see this question today as a great signal as to what moved you to design, what made you want to start designing. And that could be a question that could unpack some of the strengths you might be having that you don't even realize. So for example, some people who are

designing today, if you ask them what brought you to design originally, will tell you, I was always a geek. I liked working with Photoshop in 2004, and I was always like designing, designing, designing. And maybe I was liking the strategies when I was playing games at school or something, right? Or maybe you designed something in the HTML. I think one of the story of the design dinosaurs, as we call them today, is that you were designing something in Flash. I

Right. So all those stories, like what brings you to design, what things were exciting for you early on that could connect actually to your strengths, to your personality traits that made you different or made you unique in the design market. So that's one of those. If you ask yourself to tell the story right now to this kind of imaginary design manager, and if you try to genuinely answer that question, what is it?

will it tell you actually, reflecting on that story? What might it mean for you as designers? My story would be that I went into the design hackathon. I had no idea what is design hackathon. I ended up working in the kind of whiteboarding session with a lot of developers, with marketing people. I was really enjoying the collaboration space. I love the energy of the offline collaboration. And that's the story why I actually jumped into design, because I realized you can create products out of this collaboration synergy

working together. For me, it was always people. And I'm actually staying in the design industry partly because I'm enjoying so much the design community. And so this gives a good idea that I'm this workshoppy person, that I could be doing a lot of those collaborative sessions. And, you know, this is what I may be good at, possibly. People could tell outside better. But there are ways for you to figure this out. One of the stories is what's the story that brought you into design?

Now, another point that I wanted to pick up from where you left, Ioanna, was about your past experiences and your past industries. If you're a designer without a lot of experience and you're just transitioning to design, so you did not map out yet how design world operates very well in different contexts,

in different environments, under different constraints. You might still struggle with understanding what my hospitality background means for design industry, and that's very understandable. If that's your case, I always recommend you to just pair up with a mentor and try to unpack what that means for your career and how you should frame yourself. But

I think ultimately what you should be trying to understand based on your past experience and the problems you have been solving, plus other data sources which we already discussed, such as, you know, reflection, et cetera, is how the problems you've been solving in the past abstrugate to the design industry. So if you work in the B2C hospitality, it doesn't really mean that you should always work in the, you know, in hospitality. You might switch. I know that, for example, in the community. So we have one student who wants to move from FinTech to other industries and

But the way to do this is through this abstraction of I became really good at solving this particular set of problems. I could take that and abstract it and map it to this new industry. So the set of problems I'm good at solving is this common denominator between this industry that you are currently at and the industry you want to target.

And that applies to also, for example, people who don't have the design industry backgrounds. If you are moving from hospitality, maybe the thing that you are really good at is working under pressure where everything is like overwhelming and everybody's trying to check in at the hotel reception desk and you're managing so much stress and you're really good at managing stress, for example, like what type of problems you used to solve there.

that you could use now in design industry. Another tip I wanted to give, because I think Ivana mentioned this, but I definitely don't recommend you to use the word passionate in your review. So obviously it's a good idea to start thinking what are you passionate about, but just don't put this in your portfolio simply because...

The amount of the words passionate in the portfolios I've seen in my recent years, I cannot count it. So it gives me ick and please don't do this because even if you know what you're passionate about, by using that word, you just don't put yourself in a very solid position because everybody's saying those things. I totally agree. No, no, no, no. I'm totally, I didn't mean, it's like the difference between a research question and an interview question.

you don't say that and I know that when people send me LinkedIn requests and they have that in their headline I want to just reach out and tell them look remove that from your headline whatever just take out passionate and say this is what I am not passionate yeah so I agree yeah absolutely so I guess the last piece I will mention here before we wrap it up is also think of your

the interest in your life affect the design solution space, for example. So one story that I can bring up here is that recently I had this mentoring call with one of my mentees from the community and I was reviewing their portfolio. And as I asked them the questions about their past experience, one thing that came up, which was in the conversation, but not in their portfolio. So for example, I asked about this project and they said, "Oh, I use a Sims reference, you know, a simulator game Sims in this project."

And I was like, oh, that's interesting that you found the inspiration from the games. And then I looked into a different project and turns out he was using this pretty frequently that in a different project in his portfolio, he was using another reference from the game to solve the problem. And that was a very interesting thing that I usually don't see in the portfolios is

And that's obvious when you start looking through the projects that he has in portfolio, but it wasn't reflected in their bio. And so what are the other things that you like to take inspiration from that you like to map? Maybe you'll have those associations that make you think differently because I personally don't use Sims games references in my work.

I don't find those inspirations in this real world or kind of digital world applied to different contexts. But that's a unique skill set that not many people realize they have until they start walking or talking through this, right? So maybe if you start again observing yourself and realizing how you were solving problems in the past.

That could give you this flavor of what you're really good at. I guess very last piece, it sounds like controversial to what we were just saying, but if in the past somebody was telling you that you're good at UI, but then you started applying to different jobs and somebody's saying you're not good at UI, don't get confused by this because this also came up a few times from the mentees I was helping right now recently.

please don't let this derail you because the thing is that it really depends on the context in which you are in. So while some people could say you are really good at UI, for example, in other contexts, in different businesses, it's just not the same skill set or the expectations are different. And so you should not be relying so much only on your past experience. Try to triangulate your sources.

to find that your unique sort of strengths and what everybody's telling you, what you feel, what you're getting excited about, but also the level of obstruction that you can take out from your past experiences and apply to the future. So that will be the final takeaway from this episode. And if you still struggle, please reach us out. Feel free to share with us your story. I hope it was enough for you to already start thinking into what makes you different in the market and how you should be trying to position yourself, especially when it comes to your strengths.

differentiating, you know, positioning yourself in a market. That's very important today if you're looking for a job. Yeah, with those tips, I hope we can wrap it up. Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. If you find those episodes helpful, please let us know by reviewing us on any podcast platform of your choice, be it on Spotify, Apple Podcast. We are very, very excited and motivated by your reviews, so please keep them coming. And also, if you have questions, do let us know. We would love to take your question to the next episode and discuss it further.

Thank you, everyone. Bye-bye.