Navigating a Design Career with Jenny Wen | Figma at Waterloo

Good evening, everyone. How's that? You guys are a really good crowd. Usually I would have to clap or make a really loud noise or something. But yeah, welcome to our Figma at Waterloo event. Yay! We are super excited that you're here to join us. As you can tell because I'm sitting down on a stage right now, this is a super chill and informal intimate event. We're very lucky to have our very, very special guest Jenny Wen. I'll introduce her more properly though after, so you can save your applause for now. But yeah, we did not expect this many people to show up. We have a lot of people on the waitlist, and so we want to thank you all for coming out and supporting the things that we're doing. My name is Bryden. I'm one of the campus leaders here at the University of Waterloo.

I'm Nina, and I'm also one of the campus leaders. Hi guys, my name is Cassandra. I'm also one of the campus leaders, and we're so excited for you to be here finally.

Yeah, um, so together we make up the Waterloo Figma Campus Leader Team, which also happens to be the only one outside of the US. Leave our friends here at Den 1880 a glowing review. Um, they have very kindly offered to give the space to us for free. And so, how many people are here for the first time? Raise your hand. Basically everyone in the room. So this is a super, super new spot, but we've been lucky enough to work with them for a couple of different things, and they're absolutely lovely. And so thank you to Denny T. Nady for hosting us, and please give them 5 stars. Take a picture, show them what's going on. But it's gonna be a good time. And one thing we like to do at these events, and we'll keep the tradition going here, is that we'd like to do a host pledge, where we believe that everybody in the room is a host. It's not just the people on the stage. And what that means is everybody's responsible for maintaining the vibe. And so we're going to ask you to follow along here. I louder. I insert name here.

Insert name here.

Solemnly swear. Solemnly swear to adopt a host mindset.

To adopt a host mindset for the duration of this event. For the duration of this event.

Here's the important one. I will not be a menace.

I will not be a menace.

I will clean up my own garbage.

I will clean up my own garbage.

And the occasional additional wrapper.

And the occasional additional wrapper.

But most importantly.

Most importantly.

If I see someone standing alone in a corner.

If I see someone standing alone in a corner.

I will go be their friend.

I will go be their friend.

Awesome, give yourselves a round of applause for that. I know it's a fun little quirky thing, but you know, we do truly believe it. I think there's a lot of creative energy here flowing at Waterloo, and the fact that we're able to assemble a bunch of these people who are here to hear about, you know, sort of what a pathway design looks like, I think is super interesting. You know, we're often regarded as very like— Laurier and Waterloo is very like tech and business focused, and to be a place where we have such incredible creatives coming out, creative minds and people in the creative space, is so incredibly exciting to see. Anyway, today we are very, very lucky to have Jenny Wen, Figma's Director of Design, coming all the way out to us from New York City. I believe it is your first time back in Waterloo really since you graduated, and so let's give her a round of applause for welcome back. So Jenny supports a variety of portfolio projects including FigJam, where she is also the founding designer, Figma Slides, Figma community, and 2 new and top-secret initiatives, as well as user growth. She actually led the FigJam design team and brought it to market and helped grow it into a whiteboard that people love and use every single day. Many of you probably do. Still, some of her proudest achievements at Waterloo were one, making the new WUX logo that's still in use today, being the decorating chair for IRS, and making all of E564 food-themed. I'm not sure what that means. I have to ask you about that after. And starting a few systems design engineering class traditions. So yeah, without further ado, please give it up for Jenny Mohan.

Oh my gosh, okay, this is like, this is so weird for me. It's like, I'm actually very honored to be back here, and it's very encouraging for me to see so many of you guys on a Friday night. Like, when Brandon was like, oh, we're gonna do it on a Friday, I was like, are people gonna show up? But like, it's fine, it's fine. I'm really impressed that you guys showed up, so thank you for coming and thank you for spending time with me. Um, but my name is Jenny, like Brayden mentioned. Um, I asked Brayden what would be good to talk about, and it sounds like career stuff would be interesting to you all. So this is what I'm going to cover. Um, I'm going to share a little bit more about my time at Waterloo. I'm standing right in front of the text. I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about what it was like at Waterloo, um, because I think it's important context for the rest of my career. Um, share some so-called advice And then give you a sneak peek into some observations that I'm seeing in industry, as well as leave you on a note of optimism and then give you some time for a Q&A. But I also wanted to set expectations and let you know, like, this talk could be about a lot of things, but it's not going to be, even though I'm sure all of these things would be great topics. So it's not going to be about how to improve your design skills. It's not going to be Figma tips. It's not going to be a Figma info session. I'm going to focus on the career stuff, and hopefully that'll still be interesting to you. And it's actually really funny because I was looking back at old work and like, you know, my time at Waterloo and stuff like this, um, for this talk, and I realized I've actually given like 2 versions of this talk before to, uh, Waterloo students. So, uh, there was one time in 2017 right when I graduated that was about, you know, becoming, uh, going full-time and getting internships. And then there was one in 2020 that I did that was just about design career. I did not fully watch these, but I'll send like my deck out later and give you the links, and you can tell me if they hold up or if I am giving you totally contradictory advice now. Okay, so I did want to talk about myself a little bit, um, both my experiences at Waterloo and in my career broadly, just because I think it sets up context into like what school was like when I was here and how my experiences really laddered up into the rest of my career. Um, but I also think it helps because, you know, you're all in university right now, and It can just feel like pure suffering. Like, I literally remember just being like, I'm suffering so much, and it's actually hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel and feel like there's, you know, something, something more at the end of it. Um, so it can feel like, you know, is, is all this studying, is all this work worth it? Um, and I want to share my experiences and, and how Waterloo impacted who I am today. Okay, so I actually probably had a pretty different university experience than a lot of you. Um, you know, when I was in high school and I was applying to university, I applied to a lot of graphic design programs because I was really into art. So I applied to like OCAD, I applied to York Sheridan. Um, I wasn't a super focused high school student, and I really wanted to get into Waterloo Architecture. Um, I don't know if anybody here has tried, but it's like really hard, and I did not get in. Um, and at the same time, I had these offers to graphic design, but I wasn't sure I wanted to do like full fine arts. And the alternate offer in— for architecture was actually in planning in the Environment Faculty at Waterloo. So I just decided to take it. I was like, okay. But ultimately, you know, I did planning for 2 years and I wasn't in love with it because in high school I really liked math and science. And I was also like, hey, I'm at Waterloo and like Waterloo has a good engineering program and I think engineering will get me a job at the end. So I basically did 2 whole years of planning. I was like halfway through the degree, and I was like, actually, I'm gonna switch to systems. And so when I switched to systems in 2012, um, the, the program was super strict and they didn't let me transfer any of my credits. So I had to start university over again, and I joined this new cohort in 2012, um, of all these really great people, and I was the oldest person in the class. Which was weird for me, I think. Like, 2 years when you're like 18 versus 20 just feels like a lifetime, so it's very weird. But ultimately, I am like very, very grateful for that switch since I had a lot of great but also very hard experiences throughout. I spent a lot of days and nights in the E5 computer lab just studying, crying, doing problem sets, prepping for interviews, wearing sweatpants, having no life. And it's funny because even though I spent all this time and all this effort in engineering, I actually decided to pursue a career in design, which I think made my path even more nonlinear. But one thing I did really like about systems was the community in that class. If you're not familiar with this program, there's about 90 people in this class. And it's just a really tight cohort where you sort of study all the same thing. You're in the same classes. And you spend like 40 hours a week together every week. So I personally just really liked the existing amount of community. And I made it my personal goal to just bring a lot of that together. So like Greta mentioned, some of my proudest accomplishments in the school are just in school where these community moments where, you know, for example, I started 2 class traditions that I don't actually know if systems kids do anymore, so maybe they're not great traditions. But we did this like canoe trip in the summer that I started where we float down the Grand River. I started something called Side Coffee Chats where we get the 4th years to connect with 1st years to create that sort of like I was also IRS decorating chair, so Iron Ring SAG decorating chair, where the, um, the theme was food. So Brayden, you asked, what does food look like? We all dressed up as food, and then we turned the 6th floor into like a marketplace, a coffee shop, a farmer's— a farm. Um, and this is what we looked like. And I think this is the best IRS theme. I maintain that. I think it's the best. And since I didn't study design, I tried to find all these outlets to do design work and stuff. So one example was Hack the North, which had just started when I was in school, and I joined the team I think the second year, and I just spent a lot of time designing their website, designing their apps. And I think it's really cool to see now that Hack the North actually has this really strong design culture, and like the landing page and the apps are always just really well designed. Also, yes, that's Jason Liu, famous data scientist, AI ML, Jason Liu, if you're familiar. It's actually very funny to me that he's like so famous right now. And then, um, of course UW UX, I think maybe some of you know about it, um, was a big part of this. It was a club that I didn't found but I joined, um, in 3rd or 4th year, and it was just a good way for me to spend a lot of headspace in design even though I was doing a degree in engineering. But honestly, the best thing I got from Waterloo and from systems were the friendships. I was in this big friend group of people. We all lived on the same floor in this like Leicester Street apartment, and we would like walk freely between our apartments, and we all like dated each other. And truly, truly, actually though, and we— yeah, we did, we did a lot of side stuff. And this is a bunch of them. And they're honestly some of my closest friends still. Um, these are all of those— a lot of those people at my wedding. Um, and it's just been so touching to like see all of these friends actually get married to each other. Um, and these are the people that, you know, like I go on Costco runs with them. Um, we just like sit at our houses and like look at our phones, and it's just like the best thing ever. I couldn't have imagined, you know, like 10 years ago that I'd still have these friends that are so important in my life. I also met my partner, my husband, inside. We did sidecest. And now we live in Brooklyn, New York. And my humble brag also about my husband is that my husband Joey was one of the people who was behind the class profile, the first ever UW class survey, which he did for our 2017 class. It's really cool to see how the different classes at Waterloo have actually adapted the survey, made it way better, and just continued the tradition. So, and now I'm— like I mentioned, I'm Director of Design at Figma. I've been at Figma for 5 and a half years, and all the co-ops I did at Waterloo just like created this incredible foundation for me that I think contributed to my career trajectory after university. So I'm definitely looking at all of this with rose-colored glasses, and I think like You know, 7, 8 years ago, it would have been very hard for me to like think about my time at Waterloo this way, but I'm generally like very, very grateful. Okay, so that's a good segue into my career. Um, I'm going to share with you how I progressed in my career and give you a perspective of how, you know, co-ops can build on each other in a longer-term career. Um, so I mentioned I was in urban planning at Waterloo, and I did 2 different co-ops. at the City of Hamilton in their community planning department. It was my first desk job. It was pretty boring, but I felt pretty blessed to have it because it was pretty hard to get a planning co-op at that point in time, and it paid pretty well. But it was a lot of like, you know, looking at reviews, like development reviews, doing paperwork, not super exciting stuff. Then I switched over to systems design engineering. I did my first co-op at a tiny 5-person startup in Montreal where we literally worked in the co-founder's house. I got this co-op and it was in UI/UX design at the time, and I didn't really know what that was, but, you know, I had applied to OCAD for graphic design, so I thought maybe this was similar. This app was like essentially what WhatsApp is today, where you could like communicate from any device, whether it's your phone, your laptop, whatever, but it's dead now. Uh, then I worked at an agency in Miami called Rocker Labs, um, in my 1B co-op, and I was a front-end engineer, and I got to do like a little design work. Um, it was a lot of CSS and JavaScript, and I got to just like work on a lot of different, different projects because it was an agency. And then I did Cali. Um, after 2A, I Calied. Um, it was, uh, honestly actually very cool for me to go to the Bay Area and just see what was going on. Because at that point in time, there's just like a lot of energy that I'd never seen in tech before. Um, this was around the time that Silicon Valley, like the TV show, was created, and it was like the zeitgeist. Um, and I think a lot of money was just being thrown around in the Bay. There was lots of startups that like really didn't make sense. Like there was one app that just all it did was send your friend a yo called Yo. Um, uh, but lots of good energy. Um, and at Coursera, uh, I was essentially hired as a software engineer, but This was the first place where there was like a legit product design team, um, and it was a team of like 5 people or so, and they let me sit with them. They let me go to design crits for the first time, um, and I got to work on design projects. And this is the first time I really felt like I knew what a product designer did. And after these internships at Coursera, I actually decided, you know, I did want to become more of a designer than an engineer. I thought So then I decided to look for a full like product design internship, and at that time there honestly weren't that many, especially during the winter term, which is what I was looking for. But I did get one at Shopify at the time, and I think they had only had a few design interns at that point, and they were going through this like really exciting period of growth where, you know, they're like— the company was just growing, they were just getting really successful, so it was cool. And I basically just worked on some admin stuff, you know, a team that was just helping their, helping their users ship their products to their consumers basically. And this is kind of what some of the work looked like. Then after that, I worked at Square in New York on the Square Foot Retail team. I worked on as well as some admin settings because that's what a lot of Square is, as well as some explorations and some prototypes for the retail point of sale. The thing I'll be really vulnerable about here is like I actually didn't really jive with the team. I joined Square being like, because this is my last co-op before fourth year, and I was like, okay, this is like the co-op where I'm going to get a full-time offer, and then I will land here full-time, and then I'm going to go work at Square in New York. But I didn't get a return offer, so I was like pretty stressed out after because I yeah, this is just like this pressure point where you feel like you're going to make it or break it after.

School.

So I did spend a lot of time in 4A interviewing, and I got turned away from a lot of great companies at that time. So things like Palantir, Quora, Facebook— I feel like these were like the top design companies at that point in time. And I think it made me feel really insecure because I didn't know if I could like make it as a designer because I didn't go to design school. But then I was actually really lucky, and I ended up landing something at Dropbox after interviewing. I worked on Dropbox Paper, which I don't know how— if you guys even know what it is anymore, but it's essentially like— it was like the modern text editor. And this was really before Notion came along and took off. I took— I learned a lot about craft here, and this was a good time because the company was about 2,000 people or so, so it was just like not too big, and they had a pretty large design team, so I just kind got a lot of support and mentorship. But after spending 2 years there, I felt like I wanted to go to a startup. I wanted to, you know, really early in my career just execute, ship a lot of stuff, and just really feel like I'm moving really quickly. So at that point in time, Dropbox was actually using Sketch, which I am like, do you guys even know what that is? But if you don't, it was just before Figma, there was Sketch. And instead of multiplayer, it was single player. Uh, but Dropbox had just switched to Figma at that point in time, and I didn't— I had used Figma in university, and it was just this like new scrappy tool that was sort of buggy. But once I saw Dropbox switching to Figma, I was like, oh, like, okay, there might be something there to Figma. Um, so then I was doing my— that the video interview just now, and they asked me like, how did you land at Figma? And Ultimately, the head of design DM'd me on Twitter and was like, hey, do you want to interview at Figma? And I was like, okay. And the rest is history. I joined Figma. I started on a team called Collaboration, which was basically everything outside of the Figma design editor. So things like search, comments, community admin, file browser. And at that point in time, the Figma design team was 5 people. And the company overall was about 100. And as Figma was starting to think about building a second product, I got to join the team, um, that was building that second product that ultimately made FigJam. Um, I was the first designer on it and design lead, and I got to take it from idea to launch. And honestly, this was some of the most energizing work I've probably done in my career. And at the same time, I also built out the product design internship and new grad program. And then later my manager was like, hey, we want to hire a manager for FigJam sometime next year, but do you want to do that maybe? And at that point I was only 3 or 4 years out of school and I didn't know if I was ready. I was like, I feel like I still have a lot to learn as a designer. Like, should I? Are my skills gonna atrophy? But I just said yes because I was like, okay, sure. And then I got to basically take the FigJam team from myself and grew it to 9 designers. The team shipped a bunch of stuff, which, like, a lot of this work here is actually not mine. It's the stuff that my team did, which is kind of what, as a manager, you hold your bar to. It's like, what does your team create? That's what you're accountable for. And then also within my team, we wanted to continue expanding Figma's product offering and expanding to new audiences. Also, we're the team that launched Slides, which came out earlier this year, which I am using, just so everybody knows. And whenever I do a presentation, I'm like, oh, I have to do it in Slides so people know that it works. So it is in Slides. Don't worry. I'll send it out later. But then also, similar to how we spun up Slides, my team is also now known internally as the team that's sort of responsible for expanding Figma's business and Figma's audience overall. So under my portfolio, I have FigJam, Slides, Figma Community, 2 secret products, user growth, and my team is 2 managers and 12 designers. Which is wild because I mentioned the Figma design team was 5 people when I joined, and I literally have more people than that reporting directly to me, which is, I don't know. So wild, but extremely rewarding, and I just feel like I showed you in these slides, my job changed. essentially every year, which was like the really fun part for me and is a huge part of the reason why I stayed at Figma for so long. Okay, so that's my career. Hopefully that gives you a lot of context for all the next stuff. I'm also happy to answer questions about my career later on in the Q&A, but here is the advice section. So I actually heard this quote somewhere and it really resonated, which is, when people give you advice, they're not giving you advice. They're giving advice to themselves in your shoes. So I'm not gonna call this advice because these are things that just worked for me. I think that might not actually work for you because we're all different. We learn in different ways. We have different goals. And I also just want to recognize how much luck plays in everything. Like, it's— I don't know, like, somebody— they could have asked somebody else if they wanted to design FigJam and What would I be doing? I don't know. So first thing is saying yes a lot. Like, you might have noticed, like, even in the past few slides where it was like, oh, do you want to manage?

And I was like, yes.

Do you want to work on FigJam? Sure. One thing I did when I first started out my career was just to say yes to a lot of different opportunities. Like, nothing was too unsexy or below me. You know, things like, oh, do you want to fix the banners on Shopify? I'm like, Okay. Like, it's just like fixing little bugs and whatnot. I did stuff like organizing team happy hours, or whenever the company offered a training or workshop session, even if it wasn't something I knew I wanted to do, I went to a bunch of public speaking and sort of professional skills workshops just because I was like, oh, I think I just need to figure out what I like and what I'm good at. Just saying yes to a lot and exploring those opportunities helped me kind of understand that. So, um, I just said yes to a lot of stuff that wasn't— that just didn't necessarily align with any sort of goal. Um, I think there's like a thing you do later on in your— when you're seeing more senior, where you have to start saying no because you only have a certain amount of time. But once you're like first starting your career, I would just say, say yes a lot. Second thing is filling in the gaps. I still do this. For example, when at work there wasn't a lot of PM support, or we didn't have a PM on the team or something, or there was an engineer who wasn't on the team who wasn't very good at frontend and wasn't really detail-oriented, I just did it. And I just sort of filled in the gaps that I saw as long as it was something I felt I was capable of. I didn't hesitate to feel like there's role boundaries. I wasn't like, this is my job, this is yours. I just sort of did it because I felt like, hey, I'm just on this team and I'm just trying to make everybody as effective as possible. And that even helps me today because as a design director, I work with an eng director and a PM director, but at this level, we're not responsible for different pixels and it doesn't really matter what our role is. We're just sort of— all working towards the same goal. And I think it really sets you up well to collaborate well with other functions. Um, it just like makes you a more impactful person. Um, and I think people just generally like people that are resourceful and like know how to fill in the gaps. So that's one thing I did was just add in different roles. I just tried to go beyond my role boundaries and fill the gaps. Um, third thing is I tend to lean into my weaknesses Um, so I hear a lot of like career advice that's like, you should focus your time and energy on the things you're good at and not waste your time on the things that you're bad at and just get really good at the things you're good at. Um, but my strategy in my career has been like actually the exact opposite, um, mostly because I'm like just curious, I like learning, um, but also because I think at least when it comes to design, um, being good at one design skill actually makes you more powerful than the other. So specifically, when I graduated, I graduated from systems with like no design, formal design, sort of like visual training. I was obviously more technical and I was better at product thinking and strategy, and I was less good at visual design and interaction design. But when I left school, I actually really focused my time on, you know, getting mentorship, taking classes, and seeking out projects to be— to just get better at visual design and interaction design. And now I would actually say it's a strength of mine and something I'm known for at work. And I actually think because I was strategic, learning how to be more craft-forward actually helped me be a better strategic person and vice versa. So I leaned into my weaknesses. Um, the other thing is, um, picking a high-growth company and getting really lucky was really, really helpful. For me, at Figma, I honestly got really lucky. Like I got the company is growing, and I got promoted almost every year. I got to manage a team for the first time, and that team got to grow to the point where I was like managing managers, and I became a director. But often, like when you're at a company and it's not growing a lot, there aren't like opportunities abound. So one equation, one part of the equation of my decision to join Figma was. You know, I bet on it being a high-growth company. I saw us start to use Figma at Dropbox, and I was like, I think it's growing. I think it's gonna be something. And my thought there was like, if the company grows, hopefully my career can grow with it. Because at these fast-growing companies, like, it grows faster than you can sort of hire for, and you just like let your existing staff essentially just like fill in those roles. So if I was at a larger, slower-growing company, I don't know if I would have have been able to manage like 3 or 4 years into my career and like have reports. And I think I was just really lucky that at that time Figma was just continuing to grow. This is something that I will continue to do with like my next roles and something I think about each time I sort of am like thinking about changing jobs. But like I said, it's like not guaranteed. You can't guarantee that even if the company looks like it's growing, it's going to continue to do well. So there's lots of luck involved too. I also like to follow what feels scary. In moments where I have to make big career decisions, I'm actually very gut-centric and I follow my gut. I still make the pros and cons table because I'm like, this is what adults do, they write the pros and cons. But inside I'm like, I know what I want. But I get this feeling that I call go good scared. And it's usually associated with like this, these internal thoughts of like, am I good enough? Will I fail at this? And it's like fear about my own abilities, uh, mostly because I think that shows this is such a stretch opportunity that it's going to be an opportunity for me to grow. So for example, you know, when I was asked if I wanted to be on the team to make Facebook's second product, I, I literally— it took me like 3 days to decide when my manager asked me because I was like, oh, I'm only 2 years out I'm not the best designer here. Can I even do this? I've never designed anything this big. And am I going to fail? And is it going to fail the company? But once I had those feelings, I was like, okay, because I'm having these feelings, it means that I should lean into this. I had those same feelings when my manager asked me if I wanted to become a manager. And I honestly think this feeling shows me the highest growth moments that I can have.

Thank you.

And the last thing I call going slow to go fast. I think this one, for me, when I was going into— when I was in planning and I was already 2 years in and then I switched to engineering, that's a super hard switch. And it was, you know, I had to start over again. And I had to watch all my friends that were my age graduate 2 years before me, get jobs, move on, etc. And I felt very behind in life because of that. But ultimately, what I think it did is once I graduated, I think I just had more experience and maturity and whatnot. And I think that's set me well to collaborate better with people at work. It's helped me take on managing earlier in my career that I don't know if I would have had if I was personally 2 years younger. Maybe other folks, but I didn't feel like I had that emotional maturity. Similarly, I'm a director now at work, but I'm actually going to be switching roles pretty soon and going back to becoming an individual contributor or designer, because I actually think this is going to help me more in the long term. So it's sometimes not doing the linear thing and slowing down and doing what I believe is the right thing. So this is your summary slide in case you wanted a summary. Saying yes a lot, filling in the gaps, leaning into my weaknesses, picking high-growth companies, Following what feels scary and building slow to go fast. This is a set of work for me. Okay, I feel like I have a lot of stuff, but time maybe— how do we feel about time? Should I go faster or should I go slower to go fast?

Pretty good.

Okay, good time check. Okay, so what I thought I could also do to help you guys is share some of the observations that I'm seeing because I'm in industry, right? And I can sort of see the trends, and I can try and help you and say, this is what I think that means for you. So I think the first thing is return to craft. So when I graduated, design thinking and user-centric design and design process were just like hot shit. But I think what we have all been realizing as designers is that a lot of those processes felt more like busywork, and they didn't actually help us make a better product. We could just do all these maps and all this research, research, and then it would be like this app that looks terrible. You know, it's like you can't trust the process. And so I'm noticing that companies and products are valuing well-crafted experiences again. And I do think it's actually much harder to get a job now as a designer if you don't have great craft. So what this means for you is I do think you should find more opportunities to practice visual design and interaction design. This talk is too short to tell you how, so I'm not going to try, but focus on this. And think about this in your overall design journey, I think. Okay. Design engineering is a second trend that I'm seeing. It's this trendy role that gets tossed around a lot. Maybe you know about it. But I think this is also coming from the return to craft theme, where design engineering is essentially this role of somebody who is part designer, part engineer, and they write mostly frontend code, and they're focused on prototyping and just refining really great experiences. I think this is really necessary if you want to ship a well-crafted thing. You need these people who are able to actually implement these experiences. And so given that there might be some of you who are in engineering, I actually think you should consider this because this is a new role, there's a lot of openings for this, and you have a technical background. I was technically sort of like a design engineer for a few of my co-ops, but This wasn't a rule back then, and it really felt like you needed to choose a lane, like engineer or designer, and there just didn't feel like there was a path forward for both. Okay, the third thing I'm seeing is smaller teams, which I do think is kind of depressing because I'm noticing that companies that between 2016 and 2020, they just grew a lot. There was just endless hiring, and they sort of realized that more people doesn't necessarily make your business more successful. It can actually make it slower, and it's just harder to communicate and coordinate across all these folks. And there have also been a lot of layoffs in tech in the past few years. I think we're just not hiring as much for roles we don't need, for lack of a better term. So for example, there are fewer management layers. We're not hiring as many researchers and writers for teams. And We're just finding that, hey, it's better if we let a small team go off in a corner and build something than to install a huge 100% org. We often know 5 people can do this faster than 100. And that's what's going to make better software. And I think that can feel very disempowering as an early career or new grad designer. But what that does mean is I think you should differentiate yourself. I think especially for folks who might come from a nontraditional design background, like you're in engineering or psych or something else, I actually think you should lean into the fact that you have that background because that makes you different and you're not just another designer with another portfolio. And then the opposite advice too is actually just become a generalist. I think similar to the fill in the gaps thing, if they're smaller teams, it's actually more valuable for someone who can almost do 2 or 3 different roles. It could be like a PM, designer, engineer because you can actually be more helpful and more flexible. Okay, AI question mark. Obviously, we do have the technology to make designs and websites and images and stuff like that that used to be created by humans, but I don't think we've fully seen the full impact of AI taking a design job yet. We still have a full design team at Figma. We haven't laid anybody off because of AI or anything. There are still lots of design jobs out there. I think that's a really good point. But I do think like what AI is able to create at a design level is like it's getting better and it's going to get better. And so I think that could feel daunting as an early career designer because you'd be like, oh, can I just be replaced by an AI? Or what opportunities are there for me to actually make design work? I do think though, like our bar for design will just change, you know, as as AI is able to just create this sort of rinse and repeat kind of design. And that ceiling of what's possible is just rising. So I think I would encourage you guys to just explore and design with it. I think students are some of the most open-minded and creative people. And you can come up with ways to design with AI that we honestly could never think of because we're so rock solid in the way that we're thinking. OK, so that's a good dovetail into the next bit, which is around optimism. I think it can feel really rough to feel like the industry is shifting underneath your feet even though you're not in it. But I have optimism for you. I see all this stuff. You guys are doing very cool stuff. Socratica seems cool as hell. I was at 535 in Toronto because I have a few friends who are part of that. It's just so cool. And actually, we just didn't have this stuff in school. We were just so focused on getting the right co-op job in school and doing Cali or Bust or whatever. That we weren't concerned with just exploring, being curious, and creating community this way. So I am very jealous that you guys have this. I would say keep going. This brings me hope every day. Similarly, stuff like this, like design community at Waterloo is growing. UWx was the first and only design club. At our events, we could get like a third of these people to show up. This is crazy. This is Friday. And when I was in school, I only knew a handful of people at Waterloo that were interested in design. design, and I like know all their names and know who they are. Um, and there's just like not that many designers coming out of Waterloo, so I think it's incredible that you guys have this community and it is like flourishing. Um, people know about Waterloo like generally now. Um, uh, when I went to work in the Bay Area in 2014, I think like some people knew about Waterloo because they'd hired Waterloo interns. They knew it was a good engineering school, but I think recently it's like sort of become a meme, and it's like, holy shit, Waterloo's a dope school, there's amazing people coming out of it. Like this meme that was like, this is the highest signal for ability to generate shareholder value, and then the CEO of Figma retweeted it or something and was like, yes, we have some of these at our company. But I think it gives me a lot of hope because I remember being at Coursera in 2014, and I worked with people from Stanford and Harvard and CMU, And I was like, oh, I feel like such an underdog. I don't belong here. But I think it just gives me hope because I'm like, oh, you don't need to go to expensive US private school and be like hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and be great at your job. I actually think this is like somewhat better because you guys are here cutting your teeth and you're not focused on the status of being from an Ivy League school and you're focused on doing great work and you're humble. Um, and, and I think also like it's easier than ever to make software. Um, I think we haven't seen this fully pan out yet. We're seeing people play with like Claude and with, uh, with Cursor and whatnot. Um, but I actually think that we're in this like upcoming incredible era of people just being really creative, making their own software. You don't even have to be that technical. Um, instead of like using us, you know, only having 5 apps on our phone, I imagine this world where everyone's sort of like makes their own custom apps, and software is just going to be like so incredibly creative in the next few years. And I think— this is so corny— you guys are the future. I know things can feel sort of short-sighted and bleak while you're like in— within the city of Waterloo. You know, like winters in Waterloo are hard. I spent a lot of time here studying, like I mentioned, in like a dark computer lab. And but I just want to let you know there's a lot out there to be excited about. Um, and I also think you will look back on this time at like Waterloo or Laurier with rose-colored glasses and be grateful for this experience, like, like I am, you know. I, I truly think it's a special time, and you might not be able to see it now, but I, I guarantee it will be. So here in the future, uh, that's what I really wanted to talk about. Thank you for letting me ramble. I feel like it was cut really fast.

That was absolutely fucked. Is this gonna work?