I Pivoted Twice in my Career. Here’s my Career Change Journey.
From bootcamp to boots on the ground, here’s a walkthrough of how I researched my options and my day to day in both UX and Product Management.
WHY UX
🦋 I wanted a change
I lost the wind beneath my sail. I didn’t dislike my job per se, but I didn’t see myself doing it for the rest of my career… So I quit. But then what? 🤷🏻♀️
Let’s rewind the clock for a second to provide a little bit more context to my decision: I am a multilingual culture nerd with an entrepreneurial streak so naturally I studied International Business & Language with a concentration in French and a minor in Anthropology to better understand how culture impacts work and drives behavior and decisions. A few months after graduating, the recruiting life found me.
I loved the human connection element of my job as a recruiter and staffing manager. I loved helping people, and still do—that’s why I started Two-Dots Co., but ultimately I wanted to do more creative problem solving in my work. I needed new skills.
PIVOTING TO UX
🏯 Building the foundation to my new career
Disclaimer before we jump in: my career change journey started in mid-2018. Things have evolved rapidly since then! Whatever worked for me at that time may not be available or apply to you. Please take any mentor’s journey with a grain of salt, but find wisdom and inspiration when you can.
I looked at several bootcamps to kickstart my journey. As a recruiter I was most familiar with General Assembly, Springboard, and extension programs at various universities. Ultimately I made the decision to go with General Assembly for the mix of:
Onsite, full time classes in 2.5 months
Opportunities to collaborate and work on a team
The breadth of the curriculum and the projects it’d be applied to
Dedicated time to create and review a design portfolio
GA was the most expensive program ($15k) I evaluated, but it checked off the right boxes for me, so I enrolled. (Thankfully, I’ve earned that back at this point, so investment returned.)
📝 Things to note
Finishing a bootcamp does not guarantee you a job. You will get out of it what you put into it, so you’ll need to work hard to make the most of your program and to differentiate yourself from other bootcamp grads. You will also have to learn quickly as those who studied HCI or any related major for 2-4 years will have a strong advantage over you.
Secondly, bootcamps tend to have a bad rep that stems from their low barrier to entry. It’s relatively easy to get in and finish the program to call yourself a UX Designer. Therefore it’s all too easy for students who put forth a sub-par effort to saturate the job market and poorly represent their bootcamp. While job searching, you may experience the stigma hiring managers feel for bootcamp grads, but don’t let it discourage you.
Lastly, as a single adult with very little financial obligations, I had enough personal financial runway to commit to a full-time bootcamp instead of full-time work. With that said, there are many part-time or self-paced programs. This will evidently extend your learning time, but you can also try to incorporate your new UX skills to your existing work and create unique projects to tout on your portfolio.
⏭ TLDR/Moral of the story
This won’t be easy, but if you want something you’ve never had, you’ll have to get uncomfortable and hustle. You can do it! 💪
📃 I didn’t apply for my UX job
After completing my bootcamp, I worked part-time as a recruiter for a few months while applying online for entry-level UX jobs. They’re out there, but senior UX roles typically far outnumber junior ones, which means competition can be pretty fierce for those few coveted roles. Looking back, I don’t think anyone responded to my applications.
So I turned to networking and information gathering as avenues to generate more momentum. Interested in service design, I filtered and searched for “service designers” in LA that are a 1st or 2nd degree connection to me on LinkedIn. I then started messaging the folks who came up in the search results asking if I could pick their brain about service design in the LA area—how they started working in it, where they see the practice going in the next few years, etc.
One of the individuals responded, asking for my resume + portfolio, and referred me to their recruiter. The rest is history. I was exceptionally lucky that they were in need of a junior UX designer, but the most important part is that I made the effort to reach out and connect with others. In doing so, I created my own luck. ✨
☀️ A day in the life of an agency UX Designer
The LA Wunderman Thompson office is a powerhouse for Customer Experience and for two years, I had the pleasure of working with Fortune 500 brands on creating amazing experiences to tell their story.
My day to day really depended on the projects I was on as well as the team set up for that client. Some teams were very robust and had Strategists that conducted research and strategy while I focused on UX and UI Design. Other times, the teams were nimble and lean, so I’d tackle those tasks, too. In either case, I spent a lot of my time wireframing recommendations for our clients based on data and presenting the ideas and the rationale behind them to stakeholders.
PIVOTING TO PM
🏋️ Embracing strengths, accepting weakness
We’re often told that we have to improve our weaknesses, and while that is very sound advice, it ought to be considered holistically with the rest of your skillset. Leveling up takes time and energy, and sometimes you can get more return by polishing your strengths to an outstanding level and accepting some average skills. This, of course, depends on how critical the skill is in order to perform your role effectively!
There are two main reasons why I pivoted from UX to Product Management:
Accepting my weakness: After 2 years of UX in a rigorous agency environment, I became quite proficient at wireframing and UX strategy. Knowing that the job market often looks for designers who can also provide beautiful, high-fidelity mockups—something I didn’t do much of because my deliverables were low-fidelity, boring, gray wireframes—I felt that even if I were to level up that weakness, I still wouldn’t be super competitive compared to others. I intentionally chose to lean away from that skill.
Embracing a strength and interest: Personally, I’ve always been a hyper-organized and collaborative person. Professionally, I’ve always been curious about the business side of things and getting work built and implemented. I learned about product management later and it really resonated with me.
Fortunately, there’s a role that leverages UX thinking, implementation processes, business insights, and product strategy, and that’s product management.
⏭️ I was referred to my PM job
I met a Product VP while networking, and due to shared common interests and values, we stayed in touch. He must have realized even before I did that I was a good fit for product management because he reached out two years later when he was hiring for a Product Owner at Recharge.
The role was not intended for a newbie like myself, but I demonstrated something to the hiring team that can be more valuable than skill and experience in the right hiring conditions: initiative (I purchased something to try out the product), coachabilty, humility, a positive attitude, and an aptitude to learn quickly.
📚 Product Management crash course
Having someone to refer and advocate me for the role helped jumpstart the process. In preparation for my interviews and to get a clearer sense of the responsibilities, I took a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) course. It was a solid 2-day crash course over a weekend for about $500 to get something tangible under my belt while also learning about the role.
🛩️ Building the plane in mid-air
You know how when you learn something in school and then try to apply it in real life, it never always plays out the way you were taught? There was definitely a discrepancy between what I learned from the CSPO course and how product was organized at Recharge, though realistically, I didn’t expect a 2-day course to ready me for the day to day details anyways.
Everything was new in my new adventure: new people, new product, new processes, and new job—that I had to learn how to do on the spot. It was like building a plane in mid-air while trying to fly it. The imposter syndrome was so real during the first few months.
Luckily, I was surrounded by kind and patient people. They were always willing to share their knowledge and help me get up to speed.
☀️ A day in the life of a Product Manager
I started out doing more tactical work, managing the product backlog and ensuring that the engineering team had a steady stream of detailed tickets to pick up and work through. Being so close to the work and the details, I was in constant communication with other teams like product marketing, support, knowledge, and more.
Eventually I moved on to own the product vision, making informed decisions backed by data and user insights to determine the most impactful work to satisfy users and drive business growth. I’m currently owning the mobile app experience for Byte! 🦷
Quick Commercial Break
LOOKING BACK
🧠 The beauty of Design Thinking
It’s not limited to mobile apps, websites, or other digital experiences. Through informational interviews with UX professionals and secondary research, I learned about Design Thinking, Lean and Agile methodologies, and how ultimately they can be applied to services, businesses, job hunting, etc.
I did what you are doing right now: gathering information, learning from the transition experiences and mistakes of others.
This period of discovery and uncertainty can be a little nerve-racking: will it be the right investment or will it lead to a fulfilling lifelong career? Only you can answer that for yourself eventually, but what I can tell you is that learning the skills required to be a UX Designer (conducting research, synthesizing information, validating the right problems to solve, and prototyping explorations) can be applied to anything. You could one day pursue something that normally isn’t associated with UX Design, but leverage those skills and methodologies to create an end to end experience to remember. To me, that’s the beauty of Design Thinking.
🌱 The grass isn’t always greener on the other side
My career change journey is an ongoing one, but I’m happy to report that it’s worked out very well for me. I learned that what I thought was the ultimate goal (UX) wasn’t actually it, but it did help me get towards that next, better step, and I absolutely love product management. As a bonus, I’m still able to lean into my UX strength as a PM.
Tech isn’t for everyone though. Changing careers to UX, Product Management, or Engineering is not for everyone. I know some engineers who just want to quit and open a flower shop! If you’re considering a career change, know that it may not be the end-all-be-all and that’s okay. Also know that it may not be the right move for you and that’s also okay because you can find a way to connect the dots and leverage your collective skills and strengths.
🤗 Good luck!
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