Some of my most impactful posts on this blog have been around navigating UX/Product designer careers. I’ve had a lot of people contact me, whether to get more in-person information or to thank me because the information I provided helped them land the jobs they were looking to get into. I haven’t done a “how to get started in UX/Product design” post in 2025 for a few reasons, but the main one has been that there’s just so much going on and a lot of changes are coming in this space. If you’re interested in what I think the UX role should look like, then read this article: Re-Imagining the Product Designer Role for 2025 and Beyond.
In this post, I want to take a step back—back to principles and back to basics—and just speak about work. What work really is, what it means, and if we find more meaning in the work we’re doing, then we can do our best work.
I’ve lived an unconventional life since the tail end of 2019, when I left corporate to be a cozy entrepreneur and full-time stay-at-home dad. I’ve tried to unlearn most of the things I had learned in my corporate years around toxic productivity, climbing the corporate ladder, and being an ambitious individual. I had fallen into working habits that had started destroying my relationships and even my personality and hobbies.
I was all work and no play. I did not have any sort of what they call work-life balance, and over the past five years I’ve tried to get rid of the work-life balance idea because I realized work is also part of our lives. If we find it meaningful enough, it becomes fulfilling and may even start to feel like play.
I had to ask myself questions not only about what work I want to do—not what I enjoy, but what is really meaningful to me. It became more than the money, more than customer satisfaction, but what are we architecting as a team to shape the current and future states of humanity differently? I’ve been coasting in the consulting space over the past five years, helping corporates do the same thing they were doing five years ago, and it’s all about selling more and more of the same product or service they have. I’ve gone through hundreds of millions of dollars in projects and created probably more than that in customer value, but what is the benefit of all this energy? To get more people to get bank accounts? Buy more food and gadgets? Bottom line: just spend more.
I’ve recently started to find the impact of the work I do meaningless to humanity. As much as it has dollar value, what is the value to our customers and how are we changing their lives? I could go down a very deep rabbit hole on this topic, so let me resurface and make my point.
Today I was having a conversation with one of my daughters about why I find computers so fascinating. Computers are at the core of our economies, health, and just keeping this modern world running. In every computer there is a chip. On this chip are billions of things called transistors—the tiny switches that do all the computing at the core of our gadgets and computers. This chip is made from silicon wafers, and silicon—the second most abundant element in Earth’s crust—is extracted from common sand through an incredibly complex purification process.
Humanity has evolved and gotten to the stage of being able to invent things literally out of the dirt. The components that make up the device you’re reading this from were all once just materials in the dirt. Have you ever stopped to wonder how we got here? What were people solving for back then when electricity and the light bulb were invented? How did we get to communicate through a wire, transmit millions of megabytes of data across the world in milliseconds?
Does reading this make you feel you’re not solving the right problems that humanity needs solved? Then you get my point.
Humans have been able to etch their mark on earth and light up the earth so that it’s visible from space, and we’re out here optimizing for a 2% increase in burger sales?
Now we can’t all be rocket scientists and engineers, but at the core of the UX/Product designer role is empathy and problem-solving. We understand humans more than most people in business or in the world do, except for people who are studying actual human behavior. So we know what people actually need in the world and what solutions will make people’s lives actually better—not just drive revenue. We need more inventions and not just innovation.
We have become the custodians of tradition that boxes our thinking into believing “this is the way to do it.” We’re not creating new roles and new technology fast enough. Rather, we’re just remixing the past in the confinements of tradition: traditional UX, traditional Agile delivery, traditional computing, traditional code, and so on.
I’ve recently gone through a huge personal life-changing experience that has taught me to start thinking about things deeply and what really matters in life. If you live up to the age of 80+ and you’re just 25-30 or even 40, you still have so much life ahead of you that you could press the reset button and start over about 2-3 times to live a 25-30 year life all over again. People always say life is short, but fuck—it is so long. Are you going to spend the best years of your life selling more sugar water and merch? Is this what humanity has settled on as productivity and progress?
I don’t know what the details of your answer will be, but the answer is we need to do more impactful work and meaningful work. For me, it’s building products that reshape the tech space to be better and serve humanity—not just shareholders. Our products need to mean something. Success of a product should not be how many users and how often they use the product and spend, but how much it has actually changed their lives.
Take this how you will about how you think of work—whatever work you’re doing. This has given me focus and an anchor to wake up every morning and serve not only my family and loved ones, but the humans we have on this little blue ball we call home.