#137 Growth design in the age of AI w/Kate Syuma
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As a designer in a growth team, you need to be able to prioritize your solutions earlier. Because if you don't do that in the beginning, you will create a solution that will cost six months of development, but the team is not ready for that. So you need to create A, B, C, D variations and be able to say, this is a quick win, this is a meaningful shift, this is a big bet. So you need to do that yourself without waiting for permission from a product manager. How do you manage your team?

Hello, design friends, and welcome to a new episode of Honest UX Talks by Wix Studio. This time, I'm not joined by Anfisa. She's on a very well-deserved holiday as we speak. But I'm joined by another woman I admire, which I've been in contact with for the past couple of years in the design industry. Her name is Kate Tsuma, and she's a growth advisor.

She's the ex-Miro head of growth design, where she started as a founding member in a growth team and passed through hyper growth from being a startup of 50 people to what Miro is today on Series C Unicorn. And currently as a founder of Growth Mates, Kate creates a platform for learning from industry leaders and an advising practice that guides companies in growing meaningful products by leveraging PLG and enhancing UX quality together. So she's

all up in growth design which is the topic that we will be unpacking today mostly we will also talk about how it feels and what life is when you go on your own and build your own practice studio agency work consultancy what are the struggles what are some of the challenges that you have to navigate is it rewarding or maybe it's just not recommended

Stay tuned towards the end of the episode. We will be unpacking this and we're both on a similar journey. So we have a lot of insights on what it means to move in another area of your design career from being an employee, whether you're the head of growth at Miro or you're the product designer at Miro. So moving from full-time roles to leading your own journey as a solopreneur, let's say. And also a lot of interesting insights that I had no idea about on growth design.

But before we do that, I want to take a moment to thank our wonderful sponsor, Week Studio, which I feel like I'm now family. They're my family. They're very nice people, the people I'm working with. And as I was mentioning in Kate's intro, I'm also on a solopreneur journey. I've launched my design studio earlier this year. We're doing great.

much better than I expected. But I do feel that we need a website soon. So our business is growing without a website at this moment, but this is not sustainable. Whenever I have some time, I'm working on building our website in Week Studio. And recently I became obsessed with a couple of things in general, also for my portfolio, but especially for the agency website, which has to be very cool, dynamic, modern, right? So we use AI as a material. This is

our agency headline. AI as design material, we're the future forward-thinking agency that you want to work with. And so this should be reflected in our website identity as well. So for that to happen, I'm very much spending time into experimenting with animations and

And Wix Studio has recently launched a couple of major upgrades to the motion and effect system. The background scroll effects have been moved to the new motion system. So they're the same beloved 12 background scroll effects, but they're fully rewritten. So there's much better performance and they're built on the latest technology and they feel very modern and they unfold.

fold very smoothly and also images now get parallax and reveal scroll effects on their inner parts so there are a lot of opportunities for creating motion now in Vix Studio and I'm experimenting with all of that. Also WebGL effects and I'm adding custom cursors wherever they make

and they feel like they add some personality. And yeah, it's just very interesting to build my own agent's website and stay tuned for the final product. And thank you Wix Studio for supporting our design conversations. And now let's go back to today's talk.

Hi, Kate. Thank you for accepting our invitation. Thank you for joining us on Honest UX Talks by Wix Studio. I'm very excited to unpack the topic of growth design, but also other very interesting side or connecting topics like the creator space, your career, which is very interesting, moving from leading growth at Miro to doing your own

thing in the entrepreneurial space. That's something that many designers are currently aspiring to explore as a possibility to continue their career. So I think we have a lot of things to discuss here. But before we dive into all of these interesting themes, I would love to learn more. I know some parts, but maybe you could give us a

quick tour or not so quick tour of your background, your story, what are you working on these days, what have you been working on for the past years, and just, yeah, a general backstory. Absolutely. Hello, Ioana, and I'm so glad to be here. It reminds me about like, how many years was that ago? Like three years ago, you've been a guest on my Growth Maze podcast, and now here I am, and so many things has changed over the last three years. You've joined Mira, I left Mira, then you left Mira,

We started our independent journeys now, and I've been always inspired by your track, to be honest. When we talked like three years ago, you've been already quite, you know, big name in the design community, and I was just getting started. And for me, like to see people who are combining different career paths is such an inspiration. So just thanks for inviting me. And just to tell the audience who I am, let's start from the beginning, but not so far.

I'm originally from Russia. Maybe some people will recognize it based on my accent. But now I live in Amsterdam, in my opinion, the best city in the world. And I just love being here. I started my design journey and design career more than 10 years ago as a graphic and brand designer. But I was studying business informatics that time. So probably now people who know me, people who know that I'm

also advocating for growth and growth product design, understand the mixture. I have a business education, but then in my career, I've been doing product design at the end. But when I was doing that education, I realized that I'm not a fan of like a pure computer science or economics and marketing. I want to do some creative work. And it was pretty rational that in the

tech world, the creative part is covered by designers. So I started my journey from actually educating myself in graphic and brand design. I was working in marketing studios, doing a lot of marketing materials that time. This is something that helps me these days create an enormous amount of content for LinkedIn, probably. It's the skill set that I gained that's

time. But then I was probably lucky because a real-time board, previously Mira was a real-time board, if somebody didn't know that, they just reached out to me because we were in a small city in Russia. And, you know, you could count all designers in that city in like your...

And I was like very, very unknown designer at that time. But the community was so small. And I had a Dribbble account with literally three shots on this Dribbble account. And these people just found out me. And they gave me the test home task. I was so suspicious. And I was like, I will not even try. It doesn't make any sense. They will not hire me. It's ridiculous. But what I did, I just locked myself for weekends in my room and didn't.

gave it a try based on what I read in good books and UX approach that I learned. I just gave a try to prepare a proposal of marketplace and real-time board. And the next week, I had a conversation with the CEO with a room full of people. 10 people in the room were basically interviewing me. And then I was so unsure if I get a job because this conversation was so interesting. Like we were very honest and open talking about my childhood. However, I wasn't sure if I get this job.

But then I opened my email on my birthday. Actually, I was 20 years old, I think that time, pretty young. And I opened my mail and there was an email from Andrey with like, congrats, please join our team. And I was like,

the best birthday gift I have ever had. And since then, for the next seven, almost seven years, I've been at Mira. I've been growing there from one of the first product designers, the founding designer in the growth team. Then I became a design leader and head of growth design. I had a fantastic, amazing team. I'm still in touch with many people of 10 product designers, user research, content design people. And after that,

such a long time, I just realized I want to give a try to some other career trajectories I've been dreaming about. So I decided to leave and started my independent journey. And now I'm a founder of GrowthMates, and it has a lot of different things there. But the main thing is advisory and consulting with a purpose to help other companies build meaningful products with a good and

I would say, exceptional UX quality that would delight their users. I try to combine this product-led growth knowledge I gained over years with my UX background, with my interest and deep passion in behavioral science. So this is what I'm doing with companies and clients. But apart from that, I just love sharing educational content. I have a course, newsletter, podcast. So I'm just combining it all right now and seeing where it leads me.

You probably know that I'm in a very similar space as well. So I resonate with everything you just shared. You experiment, you go deep in some career spaces, like you were specialized in growth design. So it was the first time when I came in contact with this very articulate person.

role. And then I resonate deeply with your need to kind of experiment with new places in the content design tech industry in general, and then see what are some intersections and then how different parts of our career as designers inform these new experiments we're running. So I'm also in a very experimental stage. I didn't know your story about how you got your job at Mirovitz.

It's just like, I think many people at the beginning of their journey are aspiring to such a dreamy story, right? So you're in this, you're in your probably hometown or a small town. And then there's a big company that's starting to emerge from that place and they contact you and it's really dreamy in a way. It's super cinematic. And,

I think it's really amazing that I think Miro, as far as my understanding after working there, and of course, I was a fan of Miro many years before I got the job as an AI designer. One thing that I felt really contributed to their success was this very smart growth mechanics and the work that you're doing.

with that team. So I really feel that Miro is a great example of how growth design can really reflect very objectively and tangibly in the success of a company. For many people, I think growth design sounds still a bit fuzzy, like what does it

really mean? Like, is it UX design? Is it graphic design? Is it marketing? What is it? And so even despite this fuzziness, I felt that at Miro, we have a very tangible example of how they're very clearly related, right? So a team that really experiments a lot and

is very intentional about the way product can acquire new people. And then how do you grow a product? Yeah. The fact that it was an intentional mission really translated into results. So yeah, with this space I've just explored, I would love to learn more about what growth design really is. Let's demystify the growth design term. And how do you feel it impacted Miro, for example, and then the people you're consulting? How do you feel it translates into a product success?

but what is it? I love revealing these myths. And to be honest, glad to hear that I'm one of these people who come to mind when you think about growth design. When I was doing my job, there were no probably well-known names there. There was Lex Roman, by the way, who was introducing growth design and she was at InVision that time. And my definition was inspired by her definition partially. But after

After doing that for many years, one remark, when I say growth designer, I really mean a product designer, not a graphic designer, not a marketing designer. I mean product designer, because there is a misconception that growth is about acquisition and marketing only. It's not just about design community. It's in general. I'm now working with founders, with product people way more than with design people. And they still have this misconception that growth is only marketing. No, no.

If we talk about product-led growth, it's about the product function. So in my definition, growth designer is a full-stack product designer. I will explain later what do I mean by a full stack. But this is a product designer, first of all, who knows how to connect user needs to business goals.

validate these assumptions and achieve impact on business metrics. That's pretty much it. So we connect user needs to business goals. We achieve impact. We do experiments. We learn. We create high quality solutions because we are product designers.

So when I say full stack product designer, I mean, let's say five main components that make this growth product designer unique, right? So it starts with the product design skill set. So you really need to have this fundamental expertise as a product designer, UI UX designer, you name it, when you can design proper user journeys, think through user journeys and design clear interfaces. For example, Joanna, you were a product

designer with AI specialization. So it's basically growth is an additional specialization on top of product design. For example, there are design system product designers, there are platform product designers. So this is just a specialization on top of your core fundamental skill set as a product designer. So this is the first component. The second more unique component to growth product design is data analysis.

So you really need to understand how metrics are defined, why they are defined this way. So for example, if you are working in an activation team, you really need to understand what is the framework of activation, like setup, aha moment, habit moment, how they are defined.

But you don't have to be data engineered to define these metrics. You just need to understand deeply how they are measured to be able to ask questions to your product manager, to your data analyst, to extract these insights because you will inform your solutions based on data insights. So this is the second component.

component is user research, UX research, which is partially a huge part of the product design skill set as well. But in growth, you need to be able to know way more methods that will help you validate assumptions with different resources. So sometimes you don't have the luxury of six weeks user research program. You will need to understand how to do user surveys, how to do user testing, how to do unmoderated user testing to

be able to quickly validate your assumptions, your prototypes. So this is the third. The fourth one is impact prioritization, which is a skill set of a product manager traditionally. And on my course, when I teach the community of user-centric products,

product-led growth. Some designers who come to this course are asking, Kate, why we are prioritizing the roadmap? It's the job of a product manager. And I'm saying like, no, as a designer in a growth team, you need to be able to prioritize your solutions earlier. Because if you don't do that in the beginning, you will create a solution that will cost six months of development, but the team is not ready for that. So you need to create A, B, C, D variations and be able to say, this is a quick win, this is a meaningful shift, this is a big bet.

So you need to do that yourself without waiting for permission from a product manager. So this is the fourth element. And the last but not the least is speed of iteration. It's a little bit about the mentality and mindset. You know, there are designers who are very craft oriented, which is amazing. I love these designers and who are doing big, big projects, which take time.

six to eight months of development, implementation, and seeing first results takes months. In growth, we need to have a little bit different mindset. So we think through what is our first meaningful iteration that we can launch with good quality as soon as possible to start learning, and then how we can iterate on it faster to continue learning.

So we are not thinking about six-month development cycles. Usually we are thinking about a set of monthly experiments. And we need to sometimes switch from this idea of experimenting, doing many things, to, okay, let's pause, let's do a big bet for one conversation.

So this is interesting because I think the misconception of growth is like teams are only doing this enormous amount of experiments. But in reality, when I was leading growth team, sometimes we had projects that took three to four months and it was inevitable. Otherwise, the whole, as you have said, Mira is in good shape just because as a growth team, we were not over-optimizing for local changes. We were not over-optimizing for experiments like, I don't know, booking.com. So we were...

We were experimenting, taking a pause, doing a good cleaning exercise, a big strategic, let's say, onboarding flow revamp, and then we continued experimenting again. So in a nutshell, this is what I believe is growth product design. This was absolutely fascinating for me.

I'm nowhere near the depth of the definition you just gave when it comes to growth design. It was really fascinating and very educational for me as well. So because it's very specific, so it's very to the point, right? I feel like you really gave a definition that stands on tangible pieces, not just buzzwords and growth design is about improving. I don't know what it's like. You really...

broke it down into something that I could resonate with. And it feels like you've really highlighted the differences or the extra things that product designers need to have in order to be successful in a growth role. And it really got me thinking in general that you can extrapolate, giving my example of the AI product designer and stuff.

product designer, but I have knowledge about AI. Growth designer is similar. And I think we'll see more roles like design engineers will also be product designers that have this component of knowing how to code. So in a way, we'll all become product engineers, design engineers with these new technologies that are emerging and enabling us to rapidly prototype, which is from a text prompt. But it's a very interesting deep dive into growth design. And what's your

current vibe or sense of where this role is in the market. So I remember that I think two or three years ago, everybody was talking about growth design. There was this frenzy and many of the positions I saw in the public space were around, this is the role of the future. We're going to see more growth designers. The market will grow for these kinds of roles and positions

What's your feel being deeply immersed in the space? Is it true our company is still hiring growth designers? Was it like a hype that we've seen with design in general anyway? Like design was very hyped a couple of years ago and now we're coming back to reality. Yeah. What's the status of the growth design role? Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting that if we be, again, let's be data informed. I've

done a little bit of check last year about the health score of these positions for one of my research projects. And because the growth trajectory of growth roles in general is very positive. So there was an illustration from Lainey. I think that the graphic that shows like the rise of the discipline as a growth product manager. And if we have a growth product manager, who should work with that growth product manager?

of course, growth product designer. But sometimes these product designers are not calling themselves like I'm a growth product designer. They say, I'm a product designer in monetization team. I'm a product designer in engagement team, in retention team, activation team. So all of them are

basically doing the job of a growth product designer. And we see how I'm working with founders these days more and more. I'm working with growth teams, not necessarily product designers. And I see how the number of these teams is growing in companies. So some companies who have never had a growth team start thinking, let's build our first growth team because we want to build a product-led growth motion. And who should do that? Of course, growth team should do that.

So they are hiring the first growth product manager, the first growth product designer, and it's still super hard to find talent for that. To find specialized talent, to find people who have done this for a long time because the discipline is still quite new. So there are just probably 20 growth design leaders who have done that for five plus years. And I have interviewed almost all of them on my podcast.

So I'm getting out of these people even because the whole discipline started like 10 years ago, the product led growth, but the design discipline started emerging a little bit later. So it's still pretty young, but I believe it's going to grow. And I also believe it is inevitably influencing other disciplines like core product design. So when I was at Mira, I really have seen this positive change.

effect that core team is affecting growth in a good way and growth team is affecting core in a good way so we were really exchanging practices like we were teaching core team to do experiments on their own and core team was always like pushing us for the quality bar and it was really good synergy that inspired me thinking like at some point i believe we will not have all of these

barriers between these disciplines, core growth. I think there will be just ultimate product designer who is good in AI, of course, because it's inevitable. Everybody needs to understand how to deal with that.

So AI will be a component of your mental model. Growth and business understanding will be component of your mental model. The core product design system will be a component. So there will be just an ultimate product designer who is like the best talent in the market, who will be getting all of these messages from recruiters and

And I think this will be a mixture of different things. So that is my belief this day. But nobody knows, like AI is changing so many things. So I would be curious to hear your perspective, by the way. How do you think about the AI influencing the design discipline? Because I'm partially worried, partially not worried, because I'm a positive thinker. I'm thinking like...

If you really want to survive in this reality, you need to be creative. So for example, I'm thinking that I would diversify my positioning, not just in the tech market. I'm thinking beyond that. I'm thinking that one of my revenue streams someday in the predictable future of five to 10 years should be non-tech, should be something like in-person. I really think that I would like to build an in-person experience. I don't know, Eco Village or something like that. I hope...

I'm dreaming of gaining resources to realize that dream. But I believe that with the speed of tech growth, there is also the parallel trajectory of interest in non-tech experiences. Like everybody's tired of that. Everybody wants to get to the nature and do something absolutely opposite. And I'm thinking like, I'm not in charge. I'm in need of that. I need that. But also strategically, if tech, I don't know, will collapse...

I want to have a backup. So the backup will be doing something like non-digital, doing something physical or in person. I have a lot of thoughts about everything that's been unpacked here. Firstly, I want to mention that you just helped me connect some dots, very basic dots. Like I realized I was recently recruited by the monetization team at Meta. Well, monetization...

What do you do there? It feels like very financial, right? It didn't feel interesting. But now I realize it's a growth role. I didn't consider it like that. It felt more like monetization. You're looking at all day and trying to. But that's a very interesting revelation for me that growth actually encompasses a couple of terms and roles and specialty areas, right? Like retention and adoption and so on. So very interesting and basic.

I mean, how can I not connect those dots, but not something I think about because I spend all my time thinking about AI. And to answer your question, yes, I feel that many people are starting to feel this need for counterbalancing the AI hype and all the device craziness and the time we spend talking to AI systems now like GPTN.

and whatever our AI assistant is, we're trying to, even unconsciously sometimes, but other times very intentionally, move into an analog space. So for example, personally, I've become more attracted to arts than I ever was because I feel this need to kind of spend time in what human means.

time and human suffering, human ideas, human experience, right? And so I'm drawn to art and I feel it has to do with this very, the way tech absorbs you. And now you've become this person who spends all their day on a laptop, looking at people that are just like virtual avatars of that people you're talking to. You can't touch them. They're in a way, not even

real, even though they're very real, but it doesn't feel like a very human experience. And I'm talking to a lot of designer friends and your intuition is correct, very much on point. Many design friends that are very senior, so they've accomplished things, they are happy with their design career so far, are now considering moving out of design and out of tech. And I've heard plans for farming, which was...

how do you go from pushing pixels to pushing looks like a trend looks like oh my god i wish there will be a like a huge audience of ex-tech people who will go farming because this will be a good signal for my plan to build an eco village right so we need some farmers there and i think it's

something that I don't know how are you about like nature and getting inspiration from that but for creative people we need these sources of inspiration art is a huge part of that for me as well but I have a lot of plants around me in my room I have plants outdoors this is how I get my source and I don't know it's

If this is the reality, yeah, let's do an Echo Village somewhere and continue doing something in that mode. You'll be very successful with the Echo Village because people just want to build things with their hands. Exactly. We've been talking about the design craft, but the design craft involves just digital instruments. And so I think many of us just feel the need to create things with our hands. And I was recently in a conference in Amsterdam, the AI Design Festival, and they

It's AI and design. So I imagine we're going to be talking about, I don't know, new models and large action models and large language models and all sorts. But we were doing collages with paper and cutting things from magazines. It was very, very tact.

and I missed it so much. I came back very inspired and I realized I have to make this part of my creative routine. Another really interesting direction that I would like to dive deeper with you into is this, I think we kind of have similar views on how our roles are going to change based on how AI is transforming the market and

the world. I also feel that many roles are starting to converge. So I love your idea about the ultimate product designer. And I also believe in it in a way. I'm also curious, how do you feel this will influence different roles in the try-in, let's say? What will happen to product managers if we become better at thinking? I don't know.

And what will happen to engineers if we can prototype and build our own solutions? Like, what's your take on how these roles will kind of morph in the future? I will say something that I will be also thinking out loud right now, because

One concept that was emerging in me since I left Mira, since I started doing my own thing, was the founder mentality and founder mindset. How do you do things with this new mindset? And what I realized that as a designer, you have a huge competitive advantage. You have a huge differentiator because you think differently.

It's very difficult to train a person to think differently, but you already think differently. You think through the lens of a user. You really have attention to details. You treat conversations as an ability to do user research. So all of these elements are...

are differentiators. So when I started thinking about exceptional design founders and why they are exceptional and what makes them exceptional. But then I started thinking in general about the idea of being a founder, being a founder of an agency. My work now feels like an agency or media business or educational business or thinking about a SaaS product. We have seen amazing founders who are doing very high quality things. And I think that's

The further we go, more automation is available to us. We will have not just an ultimate designer. We will have an ultimate founder, probably. A person who is really a generalist in a way, but can think as a good product manager, as a good designer, as a good engineer, but not necessarily doing engineering. Or a

There will be engineers who will be, let's say more capable to do marketing, to do product management, to do design. And with these amazing like products, like Lovable and Coursor, it becomes available. But my husband is sitting next door and he's a developer.

And he has a lot of concerns. So like interesting things that he's saying, like you are not able to really develop a product that will be launched to the market and be sustainable without engineering knowledge. It will be just a prototype. It will be just a fancy, beautiful prototype.

the core skill sets that will not be replaced by AI will become like your differentiators in a way and the force for these ultimate founders. I just think now about founders way more than I was thinking before. I think of myself as a founder and I'm curious to see how more people probably will become founders of something in a way. But my worry is that, you know, in general, in the world of

so many things, services, content, products. Do we need more? And one side of me is saying, yes, humans are creative people. We always need to create something. We constantly create new art. We constantly create new technologies. So we constantly need to create new products. But the other part of me is saying, maybe there will be a point when it's enough and we just don't need to create more products.

But I think we haven't gotten to the point of enoughness as a society yet. And in the reality of the instability of the tech market these days, of the full-time employment situation, I see more benefits to be able to be builders, makers, founders, just as a mentality. Because as soon as you start, as soon as you try to build one small thing,

thing, it becomes like a mental model for you. So now I'm thinking like, I'm not super successful with my business yet. Like there are always things to optimize. There are always things to make it more sustainable. But I'm thinking now, should I make this? Should I build that? Should I create a big ecovillage? I'm thinking as a founder already, not as a person who will be taken care of by an employer. I just don't have this illusion anymore. Nobody will take care of me, unfortunately. So...

Yeah. And I think it's a good preparation for whatever will be happening in the world to be, you know, ready and capable to build your own career, build your own thing for living. Again, we're very aligned. This was a very beautiful way of transposing some of the future trends into what they mean right now and what they will mean in the future. And I agree that this developing stronger agency as a person and this entrepreneurial drive and the drive to do better

build, create, craft. It's also something that even if you choose to stay employed, it will help you very much because you, again, get closer to the shoes of the founder and you can understand their needs, their drive, their goals, how to support them better. And if you choose to go on your own path, then you're mentally equipped with, again, the right mentality.

You have an automatic experimental attitude approach towards things and your own business is another playground for experimentation and trying mechanics and trying types of content and trying types of services and so on. And if you bring this mentality wherever you go, whether it's a job or your business or content, then you will probably learn better, which essentially leads to more success. So really interesting to think about it. And yeah, I'm

I think we can get closer to wrapping our conversation up, but I'm wondering, this is more of a career question or like self-reflection, which you've been doing along this episode and I've picked it up. But just the last question, like when you run your own business, and I'm also in that space as well, I'm doing consultancy, I'm doing a lot of education to companies that are looking to improve AI literacy internally in their product design team. So it's an interesting, juicy space.

But the question I have is what are the downsides of this kind of if people that are listening are now convinced, wow, this sounds so interesting, experimenting and growing and becoming better at many things. I want that. But then what are the downsides or what are the things that they should also be cautionary about when it comes to going on your own path? What's your experience? Absolutely. It's a topic for another podcast, I would say.

However, you know, one good indicator, the way I talk today, the way I'm feeling myself today, regardless of all the chaos that is happening in my business, I've seen how people like even my ex-colleagues from Mirror, when I have a chat with them, they say, Kate, you look so good. You're so happy. And this is a signal that I'm on the right track, regardless of all the mess. So this is one disclaimer.

Then I will tell about all of the disadvantages and all of the risks, because there are so many, so many. First of all, if you consider that pivot or like leap to independent path, you need to be psychologically prepared for dealing with enormous level of uncertainty. Uncertainty starting from, okay, nobody will pay me next month as I used to, and then

The second is like, what am I doing? What is my job? Because you're defining your job and it's changing. And sometimes you get tired, you want to shift, you want to change everything, but then you need to redefine your job all the time. And it's your responsibility. You need to define your own title. You need to define your business strategy. You need to define your positioning and all of that. So enormous level of uncertainty and how to deal with that.

The second thing that I started feeling more and more after almost two years on that independent track is lack of teamwork in the way it was in Mira. So I have, of course, some partners, I have some collaborations, but it's not this dynamic of having a very vibrant teamwork. Even if I'm working with companies, okay, it's a conversation with the founder of a couple of people with their team, but it's not this intense and cool team.

team mode. So this is why I even started thinking of how can I create that now in my situation? And I'm now working on a new thing I will be promoting soon, which is called two-week onboarding design sprint, because onboarding and activation is my core specialization. And I was thinking, what if I can join these teams for two weeks for this cool, intense design sprint? Because I love design sprints. I've been doing them for a long time.

And now I can package that all with my knowledge. And I can get back to this idea of a teamwork. So this is what I'm trying to design with these days. The disadvantages are instabilities of different revenue streams. Sometimes there is seasonality. One stream is working during this month. Another stream is not working during this month. And until you test, until you know that, the first year is like, oh my God. Summertime last year was insane.

because I just launched my GrowthMates website with a huge update, with the amazing playbook that I was creating for three months, I think. And it was so hard to get immediate, let's say, clients because it was summer and I was not thinking about that. But then you start thinking more strategically. So now I have a course which I'm, okay, in summertime, I know that there can be some seasonality with my consulting business. I will do a course there. Okay.

Course is more predictable. Yeah, it helps you deal with this insane level of uncertainty. But as for other things, the further you go into this independent track, if you have this growth mindset, for example, you want to grow, you want to create more, you want to do the thing you have never done before.

Even the idea of, let's say, creating a product someday or a SaaS business. It sounds amazing, but it's so complex. In reality, you realize how many things are inside this sales conversations are very complex. So then maybe the next shift is kind of how to think now as a founder, if I want to create my own team, who I need to hire. And

And this is not the same as you're hiring people to your company as a manager. It's absolutely different. So I have a couple of people who are helping me right now with growth weights and they are amazing, amazing. But this reminds me about myself like more than 10 years ago as a junior because I was also junior at that time and my managers that time were investing a lot of knowledge into me. So now I am in this position of investing a lot of energy into my junior support people.

And this is not as I was at Mira, head of growth design, hiring like senior of senior design people. No, these people are different and you need to create different culture with them. But I love it. A lot of learning. So yeah, I hope people will feel

still positive about this transition, not negative, because it also gives enormous amount of lifelong learnings. Like, if you deal with this level of uncertainty, you can deal with anything else in your life. Anything. I attest to everything you just said. It's true. There's this

feeling of ambiguity and lack of predictability. It's not as stable as a full-time job, but at the end of the day, like one of the reasons for which I decided I don't want a full-time job anymore in my life, at least for a couple of years to try out this kind of personal self-made, self-created, self-designed journey was exactly this. Like I was working so hard, so many hours. And at the end of the day, I was learning. That was my benefit. Of course, I was getting a salary. That was also a benefit. I could influence a product, super benefit.

But at the end of the day, I felt like I was doing it in the advantage of other people. I don't know. It didn't feel like it's for me. And now I have this feeling that I work harder. It reflects back on me. I work less. It reflects back on me. There is a direct relationship between the effort I put in and then the possibility of success and benefits and so on. So it's much more motivating. It's exciting. It's stressful in a way. It's frightening.

But at the end of the day, it feels like you're building yourself. You're designing yourself. You're designing your life. And it's very empowering. And I completely have the same feeling. Like there are negatives, clearly. But from everything I've experienced, and I've been in a full-time job for 16 years, from everything and doing content on the side and doing all sorts of things, from everything I've experienced, this is by far the most interesting and exciting and very diverse

period of my life and I'm learning even more than I was before which is the highest surprise yeah it's really a surprise because I felt that no I need a job because if I don't have a job how will I learn how will I grow and now I got rid of that kind of preconception and

And I'm learning more than ever because I'm talking to all these kinds of teams and structures and ways of working. I'm getting exposed to different industries and really reflecting deeply about what they're doing so I'm able to help them. So I feel like it's the best time of my life. For me, the problem is loneliness. Like I'm a very, very social person. It's really weird to not be part of a team when there's dynamics, there's that team spirit.

You can vent together. You're in this together. I don't have that anymore. And it really sometimes it gets to me. But I also have my own. I'm experimenting with different solutions to that, like going in places where I work with people that inspire me, like cross disciplines. I'm going to this office of friends where someone is a writer and another person is creating art projects and another person is teaching graphic design at the university.

Bucharest University. And so I'm doing my best preparing an art residency at a friend in Sweden this summer. So I'm trying to move, like make use of the freedom I have now to really design my business and my life and the things I'm doing. So I resonate with that. That's super inspiring. I think what you've said is also inspiration for me. I feel sometimes stuck like in my good...

nice room full of plants, but I'm still alone here, like, and my colleagues are, like, plants, and the only thing I can see here are plants. This loneliness, just to highlight that, for these two years, I've been faced with loneliness way more, and sometimes I was, like, rejecting it, you know, just trying to avoid it, but then I realized, let's accept, and let's see what's there. I faced demons, to be frank. I faced

so many things. I faced inner critic as I couldn't face anywhere in my life before, because it was criticizing everything I'm doing, everything I'm sharing, everything I'm trying to do. And I had to sit with that demon, talk to them and move forward. And I think any person would benefit from, let's say, it's not an

a pleasant situation, but having a time or opportunity to face with this inner self when you don't have like a schedule which is packed because sometimes this packed schedule when you have a constant work, constant meetings in a team just doesn't give you any minute to talk to your demons.

And I think this is enormous personal growth as well happening in parallel. And yeah, I think that is something that makes me and probably you prepared for bigger changes in the future. In case we would like to leave tech world someday, it will be, let's say,

more possible for mind to accept to do that crazy thing rather than going with the very linear, very clear track that is designed for you and you just follow that game rather than doing your own thing. I think this is the perfect way to close, wrap up this conversation. I've experienced the same feeling that I can do anything. Not anything, like I can't, I don't know,

not in that sense I'm capable of anything but I feel that whatever happens I'll find a way so however the industry changes I'll find a path I'll find my way and this is a confidence I still have a lot of imposter syndrome I struggle a lot like I'm facing internal demons all the time I've had a very rough year last year before finding the courage to go on this path and so on so

It's not easy, to your point. It's an opportunity for very difficult conversations with yourself. But at the end of the day, I have this new voice that tells me whatever happens with the AI revolution, whatever happens with jobs, whatever happens with the world, you'll find your way. You'll find a way. And it might not be as good as your current situation. It might not be the happiest, but you will, in a way, survive. I'm not a fan of, I can survive anything. Of course, you will suffer. Yeah.

But you will survive. But I do have this feeling very strongly now, like I can create my journey. And thank you so much for opening up and being so, yeah, in a way vulnerable, but also wise. And I appreciate the wisdom you've shared. I've also experienced most of the things you've talked about. And I think our paths are quite aligned also with Lena, this group of ex-women at Miro. Yeah, yeah. We've been discussing about doing something together.

But yeah, thank you for accepting the invitation. Thank you for joining us. And we will continue our conversation. We will, we will, for sure. Thank you so much for having me. And since I wrapped up my season of the podcast, it's been a while, I had to set up this microphone and camera again. And I felt like, you know, in the mood. Yeah, I really love doing that. So thanks for the reminder. And yeah, inspiration. It's Friday, but I feel so inspired. If it would be Monday, it would be better.

I also feel the energy. And to everyone who's listening, make sure to send us your topics or ideas for future episodes. We want to make sure that our honest UX talks are very relevant and meaningful for you. So support us in any way you want. Share, like, you know the story. And thank you for listening. Have a great day, everyone. Bye. Bye-bye.