Navigating Your UX Career: Insights from Chris, Founder of UX Playbook

There are three questions that I got asked the most about the UX career:

1. UX roles
2. What skills you need
3. How you grow in this field

So I bring our perfect guest today, Christopher Nguyen, a great mentor and founder of uxplaybook.org, the actionable guide to your whole UX career in 6 playbooks covering building your first portfolio to leading your design team.

Chris’ UX story

He was born and raised in the UK, and graduated in business. In 2013, he bought a six-month return ticket to Vietnam to travel and visit his retired parents. He eventually ran out of money within 4 months and then got a job in Vietnam to fund the rest of his trip.

He landed his first job in digital marketing at Misfit Wearables. However, he quit because he didn't enjoy what he was doing and became a Product Designer, then Product Design Lead at TINYPulse.

After that, he transitioned to Wizeline from UX Lead to UX Manager, managing the senior members of the Vietnam team. He then relocated to Bangkok, where he was Head of Product Design at TrueMoney, a massive product with 6 million monthly active users and 20 designers across 4 regions.

He also co-founded 5 products or startups in the last 3 years. Currently, he's building UX Playbook.

Job titles & skills needed for each seniority level

Starting a UX career can be overwhelming due to the numerous job titles and roles that are constantly evolving due to the demands and the growth of the market. You can specialize, become a generalist, or move into management, each requires different responsibilities and skills.

Some folks consider switching to being a Product Manager after 2-3 years working as a Product Designer because they don't know how deep they can develop.

Here is a quick overview of the most common roles and skills needed for different seniority levels. Chris sees them in a very simple way:

• UI Designers focus on how it looks / a specialist.
• UX Designers figure out how it works / also a specialist.

• UX Writers figure out how the product feels / a specialist.

• UX Researchers figure out who it’s for. They're a specialist.

• Product Designers, on the other hand, are kind of a bucket, they are generalists. They'll figure out how it works, how it looks and potentially how we should build it. There are some elements of a Product Manager there too.

Skills needed for each seniority level

👶 Junior

• Touching a small part of the product, usually paired with someone more senior.

• Spending most of the days in the design tool and taking in requirements.

• Being in execution mode, implementing someone else's process.

• Having more focused on the craft itself.

Whatever job you're in, it's pretty much the same as a junior.

👦 Mid-level

• Getting to know the development process and trying to figure out how to collaborate better with your engineering partners or other counterparts.

• Experimenting with process improvements because you’ve realised that workshops speed up the process of designing and collaboration.

• Actively involved in research validation, definition of problem and solution, and your project management.

• Building up a toolbox of frameworks, whatever it is, UX/UI/Writing/Research.

🧔 Senior

• Building up great project management skills.

• Driving your own design processes from definition to validation.

• Actively involved in hiring and recruiting designers into the team.

• Providing mentorship to mid and junior designers as a part of your role.

• Frequently communicating with other departments to get the job done.

• Talking about product strategy with stakeholders, providing insights into the conversation.

• Being a holistic thinker, focusing more on system design, not just a specific feature or interaction.

Seniors do a lot of things, wearing a lot of hats 🎩, just outside of the design world.

🧔♂️ Lead/Manager

• Deciding what projects others work on and allocate them accordingly. They are kind of the conductor of the orchestra.

• Talking to stakeholders daily about their problems and how the design organisation can help.

• Actively evangelising the value of UX, like proactively recruiting or providing a vision for whatever they're doing in the team.

• Driving conversations around career growth, helping others level up with these desired behaviours, and making sure they are good.

• Involved in the design community, either attending events, speaking events, or just kind of being out there to promote whatever they believe in.

• The design lead, the research lead, or the writing lead is responsible for multiple projects or suites of products, whereas the manager could be very people-focused.

• Looking at culture design. (It’s not just the manager, but it's also individual contributors or leads or principals who need to build this desired behaviour in the people they work with in terms of executing the work.)

• Establishing influence in their design org, and consider the go-to person outside of the design org. Therefore, Marketing, Customer Success or whatever would be like: “Okay, I need to speak about UX; I'm going to go to this person”.

• Not just really focused on the day-to-day execution but more on zooming out and defining processes for multiple designers, multiple projects, and multiple teams. For example, you lead bigger and more complex initiatives. You make the call on different strategic objectives for developing the team, like training,… 

What skills make a good Product Designer?

The product design field is constantly evolving. New trends, roles, tools, methods, and processes change rapidly. It can be overwhelming to keep up with everything. Many designers feel insecure about this. They wonder where they are in the market. Do I have what it takes to succeed?

Relax! Regardless of the changes, there are three pillars that make a good product designer that you should truly care about:

📈 Product thinking

This means being strategic about the product.

You need to consider its market fit, its user value, and its overall vision.

There are definitely some core analytical skills within product thinking. You've looked at your competitors, you've looked at the data and what it actually says versus what you think it says.

There’s one that people don't speak about much, which is actually the domain expertise to be a good Product Designer. Let's say if you’re designing something in the health industry, you need to know about that industry, and the people within that. Domain expertise is really important.

With that domain expertise comes intuition. Maybe some righteous designers would be like, “No, you need to base everything on research”. However, some of the best products out there are based on intuition.

🧑💻 Execution

This means you have to do the work or be able to speak to a lot of people and figure out if it's the right path to go.

You need to create wireframes, and interactive prototypes, design micro-interactions, and have the skill to deliver, to execute; basically, all the hard skills necessary to do the job.

💬 Communication

This means being collaborative. You have to communicate, facilitate discussions and working sessions between a lot of different complex stakeholders, parties, and KPIs/OKRs…

Within communication, you have to get buy-in by being persuasive. You actually have to sell, as a Product Designer, why this solution is the right one, or if it isn't the right one, hypothesis why this is a better bet than anything else on the table.

How do you evaluate a good UX course?

UX roles can be confusing and frustrating for beginners, especially when there is a lot of misinformation and hype. Some courses and boot camps claim to help you master your UX career in a few months, but some of them only focus on teaching how to use Figma or how to make a UI kit.

So how can beginners find a good course that really teaches them UX? And how can they learn more about the business impact of UX after they master the UI basics?

Paid courses can be a good way to learn UX, but they are not the only option. The courses sometimes offer UX certificates. This is not that important and WON’T get you hired; applying what you learned and showing evidence of what you did and learned will.

Paid courses can be expensive and time-consuming. You have to consider your goals, and ask yourself: “How much time you are willing to dedicate each week; how much flexibility do I need in terms of scheduling; what is my budget?”.

To evaluate a good paid course, look for these 5 things:

1. 🎧 Human support: that offers you at least one industry expert, be a mentor, a tutor, or both in the ideal scenario.
2. 📈 Project-based learning: a course that requires you to get hands-on to master the right practical skills and not just theory.
3. 👨🏫 Expert curriculum: the course syllabus should be written and updated continuously by UX professionals, not third-party writers."
4. 📋 A tangible piece on your portfolio: that leads you to at least one portfolio project, and helps you refine it. You are ready for the job market; you have thought about it and put it down on paper.
5. 💼 Career support: the course should help you with your job search by offering you coaching on resume, portfolio, and interview skills. This one is sometimes less apparent in some of these courses.

Business impact of UX

After learning the basics of UX, you may want to dive deeper into the business impact of your design work. Typically these courses don't really teach you that. So how can you do that?

There are a few companies out there that do white papers and studies on the impact of design or the ROI of design. You can find that with a simple Google search:

• Invision is one of these companies that write a lot about this and they also do yearly white papers.

• McKinsey has research or a report called The Business Value of Design. McKinsey does this quite often.

There are things out there that if you found it hard to pitch the idea of the value of UX or hiring someone, there are industry reports that you can say, “Hey, this is actually how it affected a person's business.”

You can start from there and then you can use the Google HEART framework to evaluate how your software is doing, and measure the impact of UX specifically, not the business value, but the impact of UX.

Apart from all these paid courses and all these reports, there's so much free education out there. Folks who are trying to learn UX are actually quite lucky at the moment. In 2024, there are tons of courses, books, and resources on YouTube that are completely free.

Start just with the fundamentals and read a book called “The Design of everyday things” by Don Norman, the grandfather of UX. Start there because it's high-level zoomed out and it's more conceptual thinking and asking the question why.

Then read a book called “Sprint” by Jake Knapp, which gives you fundamental, executional frameworks and processes.

You can also check out UX Playbook.

This bundle takes you from the fundamentals, like “I don't even know how to build a portfolio” to “I want to be a kick-ass leader”.

It's easy to follow like a step-by-step cooking recipe. The bundle provides some of the “groceries” in the form of templates. You don’t have to worry about setting up or creating things from scratch - it’s all there for you to copy and paste.

The best way to learn is through examples, and this guide provides plenty of them. That’s why people really like it - it’s not just theoretical but focuses on execution.

The Fast Track Bundle of UX Playbook is separated into six products:

1. UX Portfolio Playbook: covers how to build a robust portfolio with good case studies. What do people care about when they're trying to look at me and hire?
2. 7-Day Job Hunting Challenge: a step-by-step guide that helps you write a decent CV and cover letter, apply for jobs and track your hunting progress.
3. UX Interviews Masterclass: teaches you what school doesn’t teach you: how to impress the hiring team during an interview, how to stand out during whiteboarding, what a typical hiring process looks like.
4. UX Playbook: a playbook that focuses on UX and executing a design process. It provides some of the most-used frameworks and problem-solving techniques that work for every project like how to do personas, how to run a design sprint,…
5. UX Growth Playbook: after you get a job and practice with UX Playbook, you’ll think about how to grow and level up. The book helps you to step back, think about your own growth and how to get there plus lots of components with that.
6. UX Management Playbook: guides you on team management, emphasising people skills and cultural understanding. It offers advice, experimental approaches, and best practices for leadership, with a focus on fostering a robust, open, and collaborative team culture.

Climb up the UX career ladder

In low UX maturity firms, designers often get promoted based on their tenure rather than their skill set. Some seniors lack key skills like stakeholder management, mentorship, or presentation, while some managers lack managerial skills. They merely progress from a senior role due to their longevity and technical abilities.

Another common scenario is when a designer wants to advance in their career but doesn’t know how to initiate the conversation with their manager. In larger companies like Figma, there’s a clear career ladder with defined criteria. However, in companies with low UX maturity, it’s often up to the individual to advocate for themselves, devise a plan for growth, and initiate discussions about their career progression.

Here is some advice from Chris for designers seeking long-term career development in such situations:

🔥 Find others that will inspire you.

It's having others around you that make you better. It's not what you work on, it’s actually who you work with.

If you can't find that then listen, read, watch, and get inspired by others. If you're insecure, at least, you're going to work harder. You're going to work harder than them in order to friendly compete with them. Or they just inspire you in different ways that are intrinsically motivating.

🤔 Genuinely follow your curiosity.

What do you like learning about? What do you like talking about? What motivates you intrinsically again?

Chris was with Misfit, a thriving company that later sold for $250 million to Fossil. Despite the great benefits and smart colleagues, he still left.

He was following his curiosity and wanted to design. He went freelance, dictating his own journey, working for startups and others who valued his UX skills. This curiosity-driven mindset is why he got into UX.

👑 Taking full ownership of your career development

Many people are just being passive, waiting for something to happen rather than taking purposeful actions. If you're not happy, that's on you. If you're not growing, it's your fault.

Often, those who complain about their inability to advance are playing the victim instead of taking ownership of their long-term career development. Everybody's career is inherently different. You have your own.

Naval Ravikant calls it specific knowledge. You might be very good at communicating and like growth marketing, but you can also code. That's a three-pronged approach. When Chris was younger, he wanted to be a cartoonist, then a pro skateboarder, then a designer, and now he wants to be an entrepreneur and educator. Who's had the same career he has? That's a very natural progression.

Confucius said “Every man has two lives. The second starts when he realises he has only one.”

“Every man has two lives” means two distinctive phases or perspectives in a person's life. The second phase begins when one becomes cognizant of the limited time they have in their life. It is basically the awakening or self-realisation.

You recognise the importance of making the most of the remaining time. When applied to long-term career development, this perspective can inspire individuals to be more proactive and intentional in shaping their career paths.

Need help to create your dream career?

What about strategise how to get there, step-by-step? Check out UX Growth Playbook

UX Growth Playbook is a comprehensive guide with various tools such as the Career Journey Map, Brag Sheet, 4Ms Framework, and Personal Branding Canvas.

It is divided into four main themes, each designed to help you navigate your career growth.

1. Career Questions: Career How Might We’s
2. Defining and creating focus: Hacking Growth and Career Journey Maps.
3. Manage Up: How do you have this two-way communication with your manager and communicate what you want and also align with their goals?
4. Sell Yourself: How do you become self-realised? “Hey, it's not me selling myself. It's just me being me.” But how do you push that message to the world? That's what the UX Growth Playbook is about.

Wrap up

It’s perfectly normal to feel a bit uncertain in the early stages of your career. Embrace the opportunities that come your way and put in the time and effort.

What truly counts is whether you love what you’re doing and can see yourself doing it for the next few years.

If you’re in this career for the right reasons, you’ll find your path.

Long-term career development is all about taking ownership, following your curiosity, and drawing inspiration from others.

And remember, career growth and change are part and parcel of the journey, so make sure to enjoy it!

After all, work should be a blend of effort and enjoyment. 😊

*This article was originally published on UX Playbook.

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