10 Learnings From My 10 Years in Tech as a Product Designer

Hi, this is Arek! Welcome to Fundament, a newsletter that enables growth in UX and product design. Not subscribed yet? Join for free now:

January 2014.

A cold winter in Kielce, my hometown in the south of Poland.

It’s the fourth semester of my CS master’s, and I’m about to start my first gig as a Designer at one of the local agencies.

For the next five months, I’ll be designing websites, illustrations, icons, and motion graphics for the web. I’ll quickly discover that changing contexts quickly and jumping from one project to another after a week or two is not really my thing.

Luckily, I’m starting to build my online presence quite early, and I’m getting an invitation to Dribbble as one of the first designers in my country. This is going to open the door to another local firm, but this one will be more of a software development organization.

I’ll quickly learn what online software is and how it’s built. I’ll hear SaaS for the first time and see how mobile apps are made.

I’ll also have to …