What specific practical steps, strategies, or actions can I take to successfully break into the Big Tech industry as a Product Designer/User Experience Designer?
Work on your story telling skills. Clearly articulate how you identified the problem. Learn how design skills translate to making an impact for the business. Work on your writing skills. Find ways to measure your impact for your projects. Show maturity in leading but also in collaboration.
Great take!! How would you define maturity and showing maturity for our aspiring designer here? Genuinely curious how other people see this, and I think it’s not talked about enough.
Maturity in leading your team, running projects/workshops/brainstorming sessions, etc. actively participate in planning with leadership, working with other teams to improve the product, relying on others to help out, always being open to new ideas or solutions even if they are not yours.
You have to get a sense of what people actually need. This isn’t often obvious. The points about sharp-looking mocks and great storytelling are legit, and you’ll need to dig deeper into what teams actually look for. There are different altitudes to be aware of. Sometimes companies need folks who can manifest a vision for the future of an app or suite of products. You won’t be vying for these jobs because you need considerable experience for them. Thus, go more detailed, smaller scope. Lots of people need a UI built for things they assume will be easy. Talked to a guy recently who needed a chat/LLM UI designed with “space for additional context. Nothing that complicated!” Okay. Well, everything in this field is more complicated and more difficult than it looks, and by a wide margin. All those tools and apps that look simple and are so easy to use? Took immense effort to get there. I assume you know this but it bears repeating. I’d take a very specific challenge — say, creating a role-based access control flow for a knowledge base — and design it thoroughly, with a coherent, refined prototype. Couldn’t care less about process etc at this level. Someone who can craft an exceptional UI for “basic” shit is valuable beyond measure. (The above example isn’t that basic actually…) It’s also worth practicing even more basic stuff like password recovery or account sign-up flows *without* referencing anything that exists. I do this periodically. It’s like all those great coaches who drilled the fundamentals with their championship teams. I LOVE designers who excel at the fundamentals!
All of the stuff that people have mentioned, but also requires getting pretty lucky. That first one is tough to crack, but once you’re in it’s a lot easier to move around to other tech companies. It’s a quality game and a numbers game in terms of which companies you apply to, the timing, and the people interviewing you.
Should have worked at NVIDIA and retired early
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Well. First, you need to let go of UX and do UI work. Create high fidelity screens and become a pixel monkey. Further, create a fake story around your case studies. Boom you are all set.
Yeah, no.
Yeah, unfortunately true