 places to figure it out. The event will start soon. Okay. All right. I'm just going to say we are live and let's just record. Okay. Yeah, sure. Let's do it. Cool. All right. Let's kick this off. Where am I? Yes. Welcome to designing your growth as a UX designer. Thank you for joining wherever you are and whenever you are. So let's start with some quick introductions. I will go first. I'm Chris, a product designer that quit his job in 2020 and started a UX education company. I help designers of all levels, whether it's building your portfolio, learning fundamental UX frameworks for any project and how to supercharge your career and manage your first design team. The idea is really to take you from zero to unicorn designer. And today we have Philip. How are you doing, man? Great. Thanks for asking. So yeah, I'm going to introduce myself. So my name is Philip. I'm a design lead at MIMO where I've been working for more than six years now. I'm leading a small design team there, but I also design our daily basis as a product designer in one of our cross functional teams. And in addition to that, I also currently work on one very small project, which is like a site most project of mine, which is the icon set of gritty icons. Gritty icons. I've seen it everywhere. I've even got myself a version. It's awesome, man. If you notice, the event banner has the gritty background. Nice. Yeah, I noticed. Okay, cool. Yeah. So today's topic is, as I said at the beginning, designing your growth, right? And this ask me anything. We're going to introduce some topics and then we are going to answer some of your questions. So I would encourage folks who are listening to drop their questions and comments in the discussion so we can address them towards the end of this. I also want to say that, yeah, just drop in where you're calling in from like a city or a country, just to keep this as interactive as possible. So let's talk about our subjects today. We're talking about really this growth topic, right? So let's go to the first question of Philip. What do you think a growth mindset is or what does it mean to you? Yeah, so for me or from perspective as a design lead in a startup company, it means that someone who is acknowledging the knowledge gaps they have, so they're able to spot the areas where they can improve. They can also identify opportunities and areas with improvements. It also means that they're seeing failure as an opportunity to grow and learn, because as we know, design is an iterative process. You will fail a lot during the process. Unfortunately, a lot of people share only the wins, but there is like a lot of fails in the process. And you need to embrace the failure and you need to see the failure as an opportunity to grow and learn. In addition to that, you also need to actively seek for feedback. And that's something that I can also see from younger designers that they have problem to share their work, because they're a bit afraid of the failure or afraid of some negative feedback they might get. But you need to actually actively seek for feedback and you need to embrace that and you need to learn from that. And also, you need to embrace the challenge, because if you feel like you are too comfortable in your work environment, maybe that could be a red flag that you are not progressing that much, because you need to challenge yourself and it needs to be... I'm not saying it needs to be necessarily hard, but it needs to be challenging. But on the other hand, it also needs to be engaging. But for that, you also need to like what you are doing. You need to be somewhat passionate about the design. So that would probably sum up what I see as a growth mindset as a designer. Yeah, for me, the growth mindset is quite broad. But for me, I like to think about it in terms of someone being a curious individual. So if I was to basically meet someone and say, and actually have to judge if they had a growth mindset, so let's just say outside of work, the best question I would ask is like, what do you do for fun, right? Because I think a growth mindset and also I ask this in like interview questions as well to candidates and stuff. Because often the growth mindset or growth minded individuals have crazy hobbies, right? They learn about super interesting things or even if it's boring, they just get so deep into boring subjects or subjects that I might fall boring, but they do a lot of different things and they experiment and go down these rabbit holes a lot. And for me, that's like one of the number one telltale signs where someone has a weird and wacky hobby. I'm like, well, this person is pretty cool, right? And that to me is a growth minded person. But in terms of what you're saying in terms of being a designer and having that growth mindset, I completely agree with you, especially this feedback component where a lot of our times, the work we do is judged by other folks, right? And for folks to actually seek feedback and actually use it as a learning opportunity, I think that's super, super awesome and super growth minded as well. And then the other one is one that you mentioned, which is like embracing those challenges and kind of getting out of your comfort zone. That one is interesting because sometimes I feel like I'm out of my comfort zone and it's okay, but then other times I'm out of my comfort zone and I don't like it. So I guess the follow up question here, Philip, is what kind of comfort zone do we step out of? Or how do you tell personally, how do you tell if it's the right kind of comfort zone to get out of? Yeah, I think that's really hard to judge. I think unless you feel like what you are trying to gain or learn is way more important than like challenging yourself and stepping out, then you should always step out, right? You just need to know what you want to achieve. And I would basically evaluate based on that. Yeah, that's true. And maybe another thing I would add to what you said is like, is it the discomfort now worth what's going to be on the other side of you doing it, right? Like for example, public speaking, a lot of people, it's kind of their top fears, right? But the other side of doing this event or speaking at a local event, the more times you do it, you're just going to get better at it. And is the payoff worth it? That's a very personal question. But in my mind, yes. I guess all of us can be better public speakers in general, or at least be more comfortable with being ourselves in front of other folks, right? So that's maybe an example that I can think of. But that's exactly it's based on what you want to try to achieve, right? That's why you should always identify areas where you want to improve yourself. Because there are so many different things you can improve, right? Even within the design, like the design is very diverse, like there are so many fields you can go to. But you need to identify what you want to actually do, where you want to progress. And then step outside of the comfort zone so you can achieve the progress where you actually set your goal to, right? I mean, and also for the public speaking, I think this is a great example because I never done live video and never done this, right? And I am now stepping out of my comfort zone. But I know that if I will do it more often, I will get better. This is just how the practice works, right? Right, yeah, exactly. It's about getting those reps in. But that's awesome to hear that it's your first one. And I'm glad that you're here today getting out of your comfort zone. So you are putting your growth-mindedness on display while we're talking about growth mindset. So that's awesome. I want to ask you, why do you think it's so important having this growth mindset? To you, why do you think it's important? I think it's, again, it depends on what you will try to achieve, right? For me, or I think would be super relevant for other designers, maybe for the younger designers or for some junior level designers who are actively seeking for a job. I think it's very important, especially now when the job market is highly competitive, it's really hard to get a job and you need to stand out, right? And you need to understand the companies are hiring designers not only for the skills they currently possess and they have, but also for the ability to learn and grow, right? The companies see they're seeing it as an investment into you, right? And they're kind of expecting that those designers will grow and they will learn over the time, right? So we need to see there's a competitive advantage to basically be able to demonstrate that you are able to learn and grow. So I think that's like very important to have that mindset and to demonstrate that mindset, especially now when the job market is as it is. Yeah, I mean, it's so competitive now that literally everything you hear online is like, there's no jobs, people getting laid off and everybody's applying for the same roles and it's really, really crazy. Even we've heard this from designers we know in the community, right? Someone posted the job and he's like, I'm getting too many messages. This is unwritten, like how am I supposed to go through hundreds of messages to find the right designer? So I guess how do you, as a design lead, you probably are involved in hiring. So are there, are there telltale signs for you in terms of growth mindset? Like, how do you figure that out with candidates? I don't have like a specific structure, but one thing you mentioned that you asked some specific questions about the hobbies and that gives you some, some like idea about the person, how it is, like what their growth mindset is. For me, it's more about not about the answers they give me, it's more about the questions they ask. Because I think this is way more important. You can see if they're like very curious, if they're trying to understand the company, if they're trying to understand the product, if they're trying to understand your users, the decisions you made and where might be like the product in the future and all that, right? So for me, maybe the questions they ask are more important than the answers I get when I ask some, some questions, right? Yeah, I really like that framing where it's not really about, you know, your structure, but it's about the question and how curious that individual is. I'm guessing you've had interviews where a candidate has not asked a question. Is that true? Yeah, sure. And is it just an immediate red flag for you? You're just like, sorry, dude. I mean, if you have more candidates and you have candidates who ask the questions, they're standing out and they have way higher chance to get hired. So in that sense, it might be a red flag for me, yes. Yeah. Okay, so you know, in workshops and brainstorming sessions and these collaborative sessions, we typically say there's no stupid questions because, you know, we are the facilitator, we want folks to ask questions if they don't understand, so we can address what it is and then give them some direction. On that note of, hey, asking questions is good and asking questions shows that you're growth minded and curious. Are there such things as stupid questions in interviews? Why are you on the same line as no, there aren't stupid questions? I don't know. I think there might be some stupid questions, like if the question is not relevant to your job or your the product or it's out of the context, but I would still follow on that and I would try to understand why the person asked the question because they might have a good reason, right? So I don't think there is a stupid question. Yeah. Yeah, usually it's, as you said, it's understanding the question behind the question. Exactly. And one of the, I worked with someone who was a CPO and now he runs, is the CEO of a public company and he was my manager at the time. So I was a newbie designer, this guy was super seasoned vet in Silicon Valley and he was my manager, so I would just come to him and be like, dude, I'm having this trouble. And I just said something and he would always assume, he would always be like two layers deep, right? So instead of listening to what I said, he'll be like, okay, so what you've told me is this and do you actually mean this, this and this? And the fact that he could do that on every single conversation we had about work was absolutely amazing, right? Because he tried to understand the intention, the sentiment and what I was actually asking him versus what I was saying. And I felt like that to be such a superpower. And I think, I mean, you know, pro tip, if folks can do that in job interviews to understand why that person is asking you that question. So if it's a, I don't know, a design process related question, they're asking you a technical question about your skills, right? If it's a, if this happened in this situation, what would you do? That's a behavioral question. So they're asking you how you deal in certain situations, they want to know who you are and how you behave in that situation. So I think that's something super underrated. But I might be going on a tangent. Are there anything else you want to touch on when we talk about the, how important the growth mindset is? Yeah, one thing I would also touch is just basically staying irrelevant in the design field, right? Because currently the industry is moving super fast. Like we have new tools, we have new technology all the time, like we have new processes that are, it's constantly changing, right? There are new trends, etc. And just to stay relevant, you need to actively follow the industry. You need to follow the trends. You need to learn about the new technology. You need to try new tools. You need to be really open-minded and embrace that change and embrace that development. Otherwise, you might find yourself not, your skills not being relevant anymore in the future, right? Because this is where we are at the moment. Like we have the rise of AI in the design, right? And I think like everyone just needs to embrace it. Everyone needs to try it. Everyone needs to get ahead of it. Otherwise, someone else will get and will get your into a position or will stand out more in the job interview, right? So just to be irrelevant in our industry, you just need to have that drawn mindset. Otherwise, you will basically get stuck in one point and everyone will be moving forward. Absolutely, man. And we're staying relevant. Yeah, it's like new technology, new tools, and the other is like kind of like new trends or actually new topics that are emerging that people really care about, or that's beneficial in terms of the industry, like accessibility, for example, or inclusiveness. Like that stuff really makes a difference and kind of gives you a new perspective and framing on how you should approach some of these challenges as they're in everyday lives. Quick sidebar, which is what new technologies slash tools do you advise people to get into, or have you yourself been experimenting with? Any sort of insights there? Yeah. I think this also highly depends on what type of designer you are, where you want to go, etc. AI is something you should not miss, definitely. So however you use it, because there are so many different use cases, but I think it has a great use case for the UX design, just for the doing the research for the copywriting, generating ideas, etc. Definitely some if I can, it's really hard to imagine that someone haven't even tried it yet, right? It's like that's something you just you need to do it, right? And from my perspective, what I've been lately, like playing with and kind of learned was Framer. I really liked the tool. I know the tool for years, but it was, I think they started as a prototyping tool. Now they're kind of like focused and it's more about like a no code builder, like you can build a website. And I really liked the tool. It was really fun to learn, really fun to use. And another tool, which I think not a lot of designers know yet, but I think it will be a standard in animation is Rife, at least for flight animation. And I think it's amazing too. Duolingo been using it for years now, they're like closely collaborating with Rife and all the animations you can see in the app are made in Rife. And you can create interactive animations there. It's kind of like lotty, but I think way better than that. The file size is smaller, it's way faster, and you can create those interactions with this mind blowing. So not I'm not saying this is relevant for every product, but for some, it's super relevant. And if they don't know Rife is something they should check definitely. Yeah. And given like, there's kind of like a clash between new technology and tools nowadays with the rise of AI, right? So introduction of like chat GPT within Figma. Figma acquired a company, I think like a year or two ago, that specializes in AI tools, they haven't fully integrated. And I don't know what the deal is, but imagine everyday design tools, having the power of AI, that would be really cool. So instead of it now living in a black box of just, I guess, text to text, or text to images, text to videos, it could actually be in context of the design itself, which is super, super interesting. I've also been experimenting with Figma. So I'm interested to, so Gritty was built with Figma. The landing pages. Yeah, okay, cool, cool, cool. Yeah, that's what I thought. That's great. That's awesome. Okay. That was actually, sorry, but that was actually, I was surprised because I was actually able to build it in two days without having prior knowledge of Framer. So I think that the learning curve is, for me, it was very easy. If you know Figma and if you know all the, like, structure and everything, if you are aware of the auto layout and how it works, you can use the plugin and basically copy paste the designs from Figma to Framer. And there you just need to set it up. And it was mind blowing, but how easy it was for me to set up the website. And that's something I would not be able to do two, three years ago, right? That's what I was saying, that you need to stay relevant because it's changing so fast. The industry is, yeah, it's incredible. So yeah, it's definitely a lot easy on the web flow. I haven't used web flow recently, but I remember a couple of years trying to build my portfolio on it. It took me weeks or, yeah, at least days to learn how it works and the structure and the container and doing all that stuff. But I also launched a website on Framer recently and yeah, within a week, you know, of course, because I want to like mess around with all the other things. But yeah, it was live. And I love also the animations that you could do just real basic things. And over effects and stuff like that. Just like it just adds another layer of polish, but you're so right where, you know, when Framer first was released, it was a prototyping tool that you had to write scripts for, right? Like you had to know how to code. And I was just like, I'm not learning this, I tried it. But it's, yeah, you're right. Like, I think on this kind of tangent of like leveraging or staying relevant, leveraging new tools and new technologies, us as designers, hopefully the folks on the call are some sort of designers or care about this industry, you guys can launch products and services super, super quickly, right? Like, no longer do you need to live in a testing environment where it's like, I'm going to do user interviews. No, you can actually just like launch it on the internet and see what happens and then validate from collecting emails, you know, having a pre-order or anything, like products are now easier than ever to validate. And this is because you've hopefully stayed relevant and you can adapt to this. Like another tool that I would suggest people learn that I've really, really wanted to learn, but I haven't had enough time, which is a bubble. Are you familiar? No, not yet. Yeah. So it's like a drag and drop tool. So imagine Wix for native apps or for web apps. Yeah. So you can connect things on the back end. So like it could be like an air table and you just connect your database in your air table to the front end. So you could, a lot of people are building like chat GPT wrappers. So on top of bubble. So yeah, you could basically like call the API from chat GPT and then display the UI with the result. And yeah, a lot of folks are using it. And I heard it's the learning curve is obviously, I think way more than framework or web flow, but it's still possible to do low code, no code web app development, right? And there are agencies out there doing this stuff right now. So it's pretty damn cool. The world we live in. And if you're not staying relevant, you're kind of missing out on this kind of go to market quickly revolution of what a power of what designers could do and not needing a developer, right? Yeah, exactly. And also, I think there is like seeing the opportunity and being able to spot the opportunity when you see some emerging tool, you can leverage that a lot. Like, we seen the guy who is like selling the notion templates and making a lot of money out of it, right? He just saw the opportunity like notion blew up, everyone started using it. And he started to focus on that. And there are so many opportunities like that, because there are always new tools emerging, right? One of the two I haven't mentioned, but I want to try is spline. I think everyone already like saw some of those crazy 3d animations. And the three days like super trendy at the moment, right? And I really want to try the tool, right? But I think there is opportunity for the designers there, because if you start to focus on that, and you learn the tool, you might be one of few, right? At the beginning. So, yeah. You heard it here first, guys. Stay relevant. What was the other point you had in terms of gross mindset, Philip? Yeah, I think what we... Oh, I think one topic we just touched briefly, but I think we should talk a bit more is actively seeking feedback. And I really like this trend of building in public, because this is basically a showcase how to seek a feedback and how to get a feedback early on, right? And I think this is like a lot of junior designers have problem with. They are a bit scared to get the feedback, because they're maybe like scared of failure and to receive some negative feedback. But this is how you learn the most, right? You need to share your work as much as possible. It doesn't matter what platform you use, but you can use social media like LinkedIn, Twitter, whatever. But also if you are working the company, you can just share it within your team. But it's always beneficial to share early on, not in later stages or not sharing your work at all. You just need to share and you need to get the feedback and then basically iterate on your designs and learn from it, right? Yeah. That's really cool that you said the build in public. I'm a huge fan of folks who build in public. I absolutely love the content. And I think it's something about like reality TV and behind the scenes thing that we've been used to in the media, or at least maybe that's where it came from or where it was popularized, where we want the final product is okay or whatever, but behind the scenes is more interesting. And also you can talk more about it, right? Like showing your portfolio as an example is great. Finish product, you spend weeks, months, however long you've built it, but the process of doing it, you can actually talk more about it, right? You can show why you chose version A of the design version B, how you optimized it. You can talk about your process. There's a lot more to say and hopefully people would be interested in sort of your journey. And you kind of gain a following that way. I know with a lot of these entrepreneurs or even just folks who build on the internet, that kind of content really, really works for them. And I've been following this guy on Twitter and he's building his design agency in public. And I think he got to like 100K within like five or six months. And I'm like, that's crazy. A month, 100K a month. And he shares like his sales tactic, how he talks to client, how he shows work, how he delivers value really quickly. And it's just really interesting, right? And I'm never going to be a customer because we basically do the same thing. But I'm super, I guess, motivated and also inspired by that guy's journey. And I want him to win, right? Like, I want him to do the 200K a year or a million dollars a year or whatever it is, right? So that's really, really interesting. Yeah. And I mean, but it is scary though. So building in public super scary because you know, people can judge you. Once you put it out, it kind of lives on the internet forever. So how do you approach that? Any tips on how to approach building public and kind of not being afraid to put your work out? Just do it. Honestly, you just, yeah, you just need to step out of your comfort zone and just share it. It will never be perfect. But you can gain a lot by doing it. Yeah. It might not be comfortable. But I never got some negative feedback or like anything that would, like, I would consider that it would like hurt me or something, you know? It is, it's definitely challenging. But I think you just need to embrace that and do that. What I would also add is that you mentioned like, guys out there sharing their work and sharing their success is inspiring, right? And we are, you are rooting for them and you can like connect to those people. But what I would also like to see way more is sharing a failure. Because when you fail, you learn a lot and we could learn from others, right? Because behind all those wins they share or the successes, there's like way more failures and errors they made, right? And they learned and they iterated and grew and eventually they got to the state where they are able to share the win. But I think we should share our failures way more because I think we could learn and gain from that. Yeah, totally agree because you're right where typically online was this IG approach where you're sharing your perfect lifestyle or every time you go on holiday, you're at the beach, you take a picture. And then so it's kind of turned into this celebration of wins. Like when you go on the internet, it's just everybody's winning. So automatically everybody feels crap, right? Because it's like, I'm not winning. What's going on? But yeah, you're quite right. Reading failures or people when they're vulnerable or they're learnings is often resonates more because it's someone's been there, they could learn from it. And I'll argue that we didn't model that stuff on the internet, which is what you said. But also crystallizing learning is also something you gain from it, right? Because having to write why you failed and dissect it in a third person view is really hard, but super, super valuable because it's easy to say, I made a million bucks. But it's hard to say, here's where I failed at making a million bucks. And here's how I got to make like, that's way harder, right, than just saying, oh, someone made X amount of money or did something crazy, right? Yeah. The reason why I really like it is that it forces you to reflect on what you did, right? And you can gain a lot out of it. Right. Exactly. So let's move on to some of the strategies. I have a few things, or at least like three steps that I've taken from my growth playbook, but I want to start with you if you have any strategies to share, or did you want me to run through how I would do it? Yeah, you can share yours. Cool. Okay, cool. Because we are kind of missing time and I want to get to some questions. So just give me a sec here. Okay, guys. So this is taken from the growth playbook that I and Camilla worked on. And there's a several steps to this, but I'm just going to tell you the three steps at the beginning when you're trying to think about growth. Okay. So the first is what we call career, how might we use, you might recognize this as UX designers. It's really asking the right question to find the meaning in your professional life. And back to what Philip said, it's really reflecting and asking yourself those questions, being curious with yourself, kind of going within. You're asking yourself like, what are my biggest career wins? And why is that? I learned most when I did X. I feel most energize when I did X. Then asking yourself, why is that? So like taking that specific thing and going down the paths of the five Ys. Why did you feel most energize when you gave a presentation? Why was that the answer for that? Why, why, why, why? Then kind of getting to the root of that, you then can define growth statements or you can call it the definition of success. I want to input action so I can input feeling, right? That will help you crystallize a potential path to grow, right? Based on your previous experience. So that's the career, how might we use? Of course, I'm doing this very fast because I can't explain the activity. I don't have a whiteboard behind me. But the second step is what we call the hacking growth framework. It's super simple. After you have defined these things that you want to do, you actually want to brainstorm potential areas of growth, be it education at work outside the nine to five, fitness, whatever it is, what are the areas that you want to grow? And then within those areas, ideas and things that you might want to do based on already reflecting on what you care about, right? Then the the sub step to this part of the framework is the identifying feasibility and also defining your focus by prioritizing it. You can't do it if it's not feasible. If you want to be an astronaut, it could take a lot of years, right? So having priority is always great. The third thing, let's say you've done that, you said, okay, I've reflected on, you know, what I learned most when I feel the most energized, my biggest career win, and you've decided what sort of action you want because it gives you some sort of feeling. And then you said, okay, here, a bunch of focus areas, I prioritized it. The third, we call the career journey map. It's like the customer journey map that you're used to. So with the career how my ways and the growth statements, you really define, you start at the end, you define the destination first, right? Then you define where you are today, and then you map the steps in between. It's quite simple. You're working backwards even from the destination. That's why it's so critical to define that. And of course, it doesn't have to be the ultimate destination, it could just be on one thing. Let's just say you want to get better at public speaking. So the final destination might be to do a keynote at a UX conference. Okay, cool. Where's your starting point now? My starting point is a LinkedIn live. Okay, what are the steps to get there, right? What do I need to do? Where is the focus? So that's how you could break down of if you wanted to grow in a certain aspect of your career or personal life. That's how you would systematically walk through that. So I want to bring back Philip on. Any questions or anything to add around that framework? No, I think it's really great framework to have actually. And I'm thinking about having something like that for my design thing as well, because I think it would be very efficient. Yeah, there's a lot of ways to plan around goals and stuff. I mean, I also have another technique, but actually everything around goal setting is actually first understanding why and reflecting, right? Then how you get there is, you know, as we are designers, there's always these creative ways to sort of get there. Yeah. Yeah, I think what is also important just to hold yourself accountable, like making sure you are making a progress, right? And tracking that progress. Yeah, that's true. I don't know, do you use goal setting apps or anything? Like how do you track growth progress? I do not, but I do use a mobile app called to do, I guess. Okay. Structured. It's called structured, but it's mostly for tracking my daily habits. Whenever I try to achieve something, I always try to build a habit, right? Because just to make sure I am doing something like on consistent basis, this is probably like the best way how to learn, right? You need to like split the goal into very small, actionable tasks and do it as often as possible and create the routine out of it. This is how you will learn probably anything, right? Whatever you can imagine you can achieve by this. But I don't have structure how I would necessarily try my progress. But for example, we have in my design team, we have like personal OKRs. We are setting for every six months or basically half of the year. And we have every two weeks, we have one-on-ones where we discuss the progress and we try to I try to help and guide my designers to achieve what we set as a goal for the period of the time. And we simply use notion for that. We just like split the goal into a few actionable tasks and they are just checking them. What we find very challenging in the working environment is to find the time to personal growth, right? To find the time to learn and to do something different than your regular tasks. Because that's I think probably a problem in all the companies that you have, you are swapped with this desk. There is a lot of things to do right during the day. And simply finding a time to actually sit and learn and try new things and try new tools and maybe like do some course or watch some videos. It's really difficult and this has been very challenging for us. What we tried now to do is to basically set a blocker in the calendar every week, like every Friday, they have a blocker for two, three hours where they don't need to do any tasks they have for their cross functional teams. But they're able to focus on learning. It doesn't matter what it is, but what I'm expecting is to have some outcome out of it. So essentially, they would probably present something to the team or they will like summarize what they learned. And what I want to see is also to see a progress they are making, right? If it's a book, I want to see like how much they already read, how far they are. If it's a course, how many percent of the course they already done, etc. So we are trying to hold them accountable. But as I said, it's very challenging to find some time, right? That's why we tried now to create those blockers in the calendar. That's cool. Yeah, it reminds me of the Google 20% time where like every Friday they have time to work on a project that's outside of their responsibilities and they can work on anything. But I really like the fact that you guys set a blocker. What do you call this? Do you have a name for it? Or is it just like time to learn? Like is there a name in your company? I think we name it personal growth. Perfect. This is very apt. Okay, great. One quick note, which is if you're a fan of reflection and you need a system, there's this thing called bullet journaling. I did a version of it, but you can go look at it. I really like the notebook that they give you because it's very structured and like that's great and it breaks it down to like micro and macro. So there's lots of different techniques out there, but bullet journaling is one of them to set goals, build habits, build these atomic habits to succeed. So let's go to some of the questions. I have this question I am stuck in an awesome cultured company with an amazing manager, flexible timing and a dream company environment anybody could love, but the only problem is not having enough work which helps me stay with my skill set. They just love to have me, but they're not utilizing my skill set properly. I don't know how to convince them because I don't want to put them down in spite of the numerous flexibilities they gave to me. How would you approach this problem, Philip? I think there might be two solutions. So one solution might be start your own personal project and try to be busy with something else rather than your day job, right? And that way you might learn something, you might develop some new skills, you might be like very passionate about the project and it might not be like that bad that in your day job you are not challenging yourself because you can challenge yourself somewhere else, right? Second option would be reflecting and actually discussing it with your managers and I think you just need to have like very candid, open conversation with them because I think we as designers we love challenge. We really like to be challenged and if that's not the case, even though you might have great culture, great team, great manager, you might also consider leaving the job. For me, I think I have been in very similar position before. Before Mimo I was working the different startup and all that, the product was cool. All of the people there were super friendly. I really liked the environment. We were basically friends. It was very fun to work on the product. But for me, what I'm looking at when I'm reflecting on my time in the company is I'm learning and I'm growing as a person, as a designer and if the answer is no, I start to evaluate the possibility of leaving and maybe this is also the reason why I'm in Mimo for six years because every time when I ask myself if I'm growing professionally and personally, the answer is yes, right? So I'm not even thinking at the moment to leave the company because for me, there are still a lot of opportunities to grow. But if you don't have those opportunities, even though all other aspects are perfect, I would still consider a change because change might be a better option. Yeah, that's great advice, man. I actually have something similar to you. I think my first design job, I was there for around about two years and it was great. It was a good salary. I was leading a team. Bear in mind, this was my first design job. So I was like default lead, but quite naturally fell into this kind of managerial role. But because it was my first UX role, I didn't really have any other super senior designers around me. I didn't know what I didn't know and it was very engineering orientated, but culture was great. People were great, parties were great, everything was great, but I was very complacent. I ended up turning up to work one hour a day, two hours a day, and it wasn't even a hybrid role. This was before hybrid was a thing, but my manager was just super chill with it and I was like, I get the work done. But eventually you just have to, like you said, have that frank conversation with yourself and say, what is the reason for you to come into work every day? If you really wanted to just sit there, get paid and just watch YouTube all day, that's a great life and I'm not blaming anybody for doing that. That's chill, but is that what you want? Where do you see yourself going as a career? Eventually I decided to leave for less money, less certain situation, but it was like that's the kind of push I needed or growth that I thought I needed and turned out it was one of my best career decisions because joining that new role and then being in the country a year later, still with that new company, my boss asked me to come back and this time the salary tripled. It was the most money that I would ever have made as a designer and I was like, what do I do? And I was going to be the head of the organization, head of design, but I was like, well, I've got like three years experience like this is, and will it be exactly the same? And of course it would have been. So I'm glad I said no at that time and because everything was good, but the conditions for me to thrive and grow in the way that I defied it was just not there. The third thing I would say to this person, so Philip actually had some two great points, which is start your own personal project outside of work. So you're not so focused on this like work thing and you have some other energy to put somewhere else. The second is have a frank discussion with your manager. And I believe the third thing actually you mentioned was like, consider if that's actually the right place for you, which is the sentiment that I expressed just then. But the fourth thing is this, is that you could you could just prove your skill set at work without asking for permission. And I think that's a path that a lot of people just don't take. It's like, why do you need to ask for permission to do work? You're already at work. You have the tools that they give you just do the bloody work, right? Extra user research, more user interviews, additional brainstorming sessions, talking to product managers and talking to like, it's all there. You might as well just figure out how to become useful versus for someone to ask you. And I think that could also like, you know, I'm assuming here of course, but the reason that you're maybe underutilized is because they haven't seen proof that you've done this work, right? You might be saying that, Hey, my skill set is not utilized properly, but what and my question to you, and honestly is what evidence have you shown me that you are useful, that you are good at X, Y and Z, because a lot of people just expect folks to know without showing this value up front, right? So that would be the fourth thing to address there. Yeah. Sorry, just kind of responding to this comment at the same time as talking as well. Okay, so let's go to our next question. Let's see what we have here. Okay, it seems like we don't have that many questions today. Everybody's a bit lazy this morning, but there are some just kind of, I guess, like comments versus questions. Okay, so here's one question. But I don't know if we're, I guess, legitimately able to answer. Okay, here we go. What are the best five questions we should ask a lumen client who does not know how websites work, where chat GPT cannot be useful. So basically a client that is non techie, I guess. I think I would need to get some context, right? Yeah, yeah. The question is if, okay, so yeah, I guess my question to this person was like, why do you need to explain to a client how websites work? Like, surely you should be the one who knows how websites work? And I guess the best advice here is like, think of an analogy, a metaphor that the client understands. If he's from like the agricultural industry, do a farming analogy, right? Like, speak the other person's language versus telling him about HTML and CSS and JavaScript like that. That stuff nobody gives a crap about anyway, right? If they're a client. Okay, so there's another question, quite a long one here. Okay, no, that was someone that says the background was distracting. Okay, here we go. I've been laid off and it's difficult to get a proper job as after spending 10 years in the UI UX industry, now the scenario has completely changed. Where easy to get into a toxic working culture in visualless startups and difficult to find a good job. So what do you suggest I can learn and take like take the next steps towards? I think it's really complicated question. I think that you should first ask yourself where you would like to be, right? As a designer. Because, as we said, like design is very diverse, right? You can focus on one, two and become an expert or you can diversify and do more things. But from my perspective as a design lead and who recently or like a few months ago were actively we were actively hiring. I think now the companies are aiming to efficiency. That's why we like we are seeing so many layoffs, right? And I think it's the time where now instead of being like highly focused designer on one field, which is like a UX or UI or motion or whatever. I think that era is ending at the moment. And now I think it's the rise of product designers who are actually kind of like this 10x designers who are able to do multiple things, right? Because companies are aiming for efficiency. It's for them it's way easier to hire one designer who will cover the whole design process from research to handoff rather than hiring two or three different designers, right? And showcasing that you have those skills and you are versatile and you are able to actually do a lot more than just one thing. I think it's very beneficial. Yeah, I really like what you said in terms of like figuring out what this person wants, right? Like, I think the reason that you might be getting into toxic startup culture, they're everywhere, like there's so many different types of companies. Of course, some are going to be toxic. But I think you need to figure out what I call this the job matching algorithm, right? Like, how does it match to what you want? Really, it's really quite simple. It's using the Moscow framework. So your must-haves, your should-haves, your could-haves and your won't-haves, right? If you can list out in those four categories what your perfect job will be, then you'll look at a job description and you say, oh, they don't have any of my must-haves, okay? And then they have some red flags, which is your won't-haves, like red flags that you won't join. So having those questions in your head or having that kind of thinking, you can approach a job much more strategically. And yeah, exactly. The industry is all like crazy at the moment. So for you, it's, I mean, you're going to have to make trade-offs if you're like a designer that's kind of early in the industry anyway. But if you have 10 years under your belt, I would argue you can pick and choose where you want to go. You don't have to go into a toxic environment, right? And I'm sure they have like a probation period where you can just kind of leave after a month anyway. No harm, no foul, right? So it's, yeah, it's really up to you. I think it's like figuring out your decision framework of how you choose a job. And there's multiple decision frameworks out there, but the Moscow one could just help you. Like we're more familiar with it because we're from the product development world, like that's used for prioritization. So you could use that to look at jobs in the market. One more thing I would mention as well is built meaningful connections. Like that can help you get hired a lot. Like if I would have like 100 candidates and I would personally or somehow know 10 of them, of course, like hiring process should be unbiased, but we are naturally biased. And you, we tend to lean toward the candidates we personally know, right? And also like the companies, they offer some bonuses to people who are able to bring some talent, right? So go there and make some meaningful connections, like go on LinkedIn, try to connect with someone, not just like hit the connect button, but try to really connect on a personal level, have some conversation with the people. If you have some, maybe create the list of 10 companies you would like to work in and try to connect with the people who are already working there and try to learn about the company, try to learn about the culture, try to connect with those people, and you have way higher chance to get the position in those companies than because you are already standing out. Exactly, exactly. I have two growth strategies that I want to share with you, Philip. And these are very interesting. But after each one, I just kind of want to run by you in terms of your thoughts on if you think this is a good growth strategy or not. So I don't know if you know Philip, but Charlie Munger passed away. He was 99 years old, 34 days until he was 100. And he has these things called either Charlieisms or Mungerisms, but he is famous for the invert advice. And so these are growth strategies from him that don't sound like growth strategies. And that's why they're so brilliant. Okay, cool. So let me just go to the first one. And I'll give you some examples as well. Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance. That's what he says. Okay. And here's the example. Person one follows the latest diet, takes different supplements, the latest workout routines, different types of fast or tries a new sport. The one thing this person is really good at is trying new things and hoping it works, but ultimately dropping it if it doesn't and they just move on to something different. Person two eats a balanced diet and exercises every day. This person is really good at consistency. They watch their intake and exercise regularly. Who do we think would be healthier? Person one or person two? Yeah, exactly. Right. Person one is always stressed about like routines, doing it right, the new thing, trying to find shortcuts, right? But person two, they just focus on doing these simple things right. So this goes to avoiding stupidity and you'll outperform everybody, right? Things like if you're framing it around work is like beyond time, follow up appropriately, offering help when people need it, putting extra hours and sticking to your word and the deadline. What do you think about that advice where Charlie Munger says avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance when it comes to growth? I think it's perfect. I'm a huge fan of Charlie Munger as a person. He was incredible. The advice that he had, you can, of course, like he was mostly talking about investment, but you can apply that to almost everything, right? And I think it's, yeah, it's exactly as you said, like it makes way more sense to just to be good and have some consistency rather than trying to be perfect or like having these like big swings, right? Because yeah, you might hit one, but it's not, it's really hard to keep it consistent. Right, right. So the last one I want to share from Mr. Charlie himself is to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. He says the easiest way to get what you want is to deserve it, right? So if you want a UX role straight out of school or from a bootcamp, the question I want to ask you is, are you putting extra hours? Are you shipping real products? Are you applying to jobs that you really have a shot at, right? If you want to find a role in a high design maturity organization, are you implementing and experimenting with design ops? Have you sold existing team problems with design thinking this is outside actually building products? Have you had experience getting buy-in from cross-functional stakeholders, right? If you want to speak at a conference, have you spoken regularly at local events? Are you good at public speaking? Do you have original insight that no one else talks about? So to sum up yet again, to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. So ask yourself, if you want to grow and get to wherever you want to be, do you deserve it? Because the best way is to deserve it. And if we can answer that question, growth would be so much easier, right? The path to it. Yeah, exactly. And I think this is something that you hit the nail because there are, I think, very wrong expectations when people are finishing boot camps. Because oftentimes the boot camps say you will be job ready, but that's very, very inaccurate. This is very wrong expectations to have that you, once you finish the boot camp, you're job ready. Simply, you are not. You need to learn way more. You need to practice. You need to put the hours and you need to stand out. So just finishing the boot camp is not enough. Right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we could do another whole hour just like kind of smashing boot camps, right? We're just like, don't do it, guys. Oh, God, yeah. But anyway, I think that's probably a great place to finish it. Philip, where could folks find you and your stuff and, yeah, just give us anything you want to plug, product services, whatever. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm mostly active on LinkedIn. So that's where you can find me. Just hit the follow. And, yeah, I'm also building the greedy icons. The icon said you can try for free. And I'm also as a design lead at MIMO. You can try our app if you want to learn to code. I don't think designers necessarily need to be able to code, but I think it's very important to understand the mechanics and to understand the technology because then you can communicate with developers way better. So, yeah, that's all, I guess. That's cool. Yeah. And another conversational topic that we could talk for an hour about should design us code, right? Okay. So quickly from me, you can find everything from me on LinkedIn or uxplaybook.org. I actually want to give folks who are interested in growth 20, oh no, 30% off. If you just use the code live, I'll paste it in the comment section. 30% off everything. You guys just go to uxplaybook.org and check out those products there. But I just want to say again, thank you so much for joining your first LinkedIn live and I appreciate you taking the time and talking about growth with us. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was very fun and I think I will do it again at some point. Oh yeah. Okay, let's do it again. Another couple of our conversations. All right, man. See you. See you. Ciao.