For three years, my LinkedIn headline said “UX Consultant.” It sounded professional. Legitimate. Like I knew what I was doing. It also meant absolutely nothing. “UX Consultant” is the professional equivalent of “I do stuff.” It’s a job title that could mean everything, so it means nothing. Like saying you work in “business” or specialize…

Five years ago, I hired a UX designer with exceptional soft skills. Articulate in meetings. Diplomatic with stakeholders. Created beautiful presentation decks. Responded to Slack within minutes with encouragement and emoji. Three months later, the project failed because they’d agreed to every terrible idea anyone suggested. Seventeen stakeholder requests. Fourteen contradictory features. Zero pushback. The…

The most common advice for building an audience is “just be yourself.” This is terrible advice. Sarah spent 6 months testing it. Posted every real struggle. Every unfiltered opinion. Every messy process photo. The vulnerability everyone said algorithms reward. Result: 247 followers (64 were bots), zero client inquiries, one LinkedIn message asking if she was…

If you’ve been avoiding social media because it feels like a scam, the algorithms just caught up to your instincts. A designer friend spent six months torturing herself with “growth hacking.” Posted three times daily. Used 47 hashtags per post. Follow/unfollow tactics. Bought engagement to look legitimate. Took every course on social media marketing essentials…

If you need seventeen different skills just to get an entry-level job, maybe the problem isn’t your qualifications. A designer friend spent eight months “upskilling.” Eleven courses. $6,200. Figma mastery, design systems, user research, prototyping workshops, accessibility certification, motion design fundamentals — learning UI UX design skills from every angle. Zero paid projects. Just portfolio…

Your beautiful portfolio won’t survive first contact with a real stakeholder meeting. Here’s what no UX design in education program wants to admit: most of what they teach you is performance art. You’ll spend months learning to create pixel-perfect prototypes, conducting user interviews about hypothetical problems, and crafting case studies that read like design fiction.…

I rejected a designer last month whose portfolio had perfect case studies, consistent branding, and a clear CTA to “Request Full Deck.” It looked like every other portfolio I’d seen that week. Which was the problem. The work was fine. The presentation was polished. But I couldn’t tell how they thought, how they handled ambiguity,…

Award-winning. Passionate. Strategic. Driven. You’ve read that sentence before – probably on my old LinkedIn profile. And on 47,000 other designer profiles. It wasn’t a lie. But it also wasn’t helping. Zero DMs from potential clients. Plenty of recruiter spam for roles I didn’t want. I’m a designer. I’ve led product design across enterprise tools,…