It took me 9 Years to realise what I’ll tell you in 16 minutes.

This month makes it 9 years since I got my first design role. Since then, I've been the only designer at a large organization, I've hired designers, I've become a manager, and I've gone back to being an individual contributor, which has been one of the best decisions I've ever made. And I've had the opportunity to work with some global design-led companies like Deliveroo and Monzo Bank. My name is Samuel Fabayo, and in this video, I want to share 9 lessons that I've learned in the last 9 years of my career as a UX designer. If I saw this video like 9 years ago, I believe it would have literally changed the course of my career, and that is the reason why I'm making this video. Number 1 is to never ignore your unfair advantage. Honestly, I wish I knew this way earlier than now. I didn't realize that I have any kind of unfair or unique advantage from like my personal experience and from my background. There are some things that actually makes me quite unique. Like I have a degree in architecture. I did a lot of graphic design before I even became a UX designer. And as someone that studied architecture, one of the things that you're going to do is to constantly present your work. Your work is going to be presented literally every semester, and this means presenting up to 60 sheets to architects that are going to criticize that work and rip it apart if you are not able to explain your design rationale. I was also a graphic designer back in university, and one of the ways that I made money was to actually create cartoon characters of people's portraits. I was also making money by designing posters for parties in, in school, and this is how I was able to like build like my visual design background and experience. And until I realized that what I'm going to do throughout like a UX design career is to like show my work anyway, convince people to see the reason why I'm thinking or why I'm thinking about like a design solution. And this is the whole point of being a UX designer, the fact that you have to present your work every time. And I've literally gone through 5 years of university experience presenting my work and having to defend my work. So until I realized that people that were also becoming UX designers at the same time when I was also becoming a UX designer, didn't even have all of these experiences. Like, that makes me completely different from them. One of the worst mistakes that you can make is to think that you don't have an unfair advantage, to think that, oh, I didn't study architecture or I don't have a graphic design background, and therefore I don't have an unfair advantage. That is going to be a really, really huge mistake on your path. So you should make sure that you actually find what that unique unfair advantage is and try to make use of it. Do not ignore it. Next one is that the fastest way to learn is by doing it. And to go even faster, just teach. This career path as a UX designer is very, very self-taught. You're not going to learn— you're not going to learn much from maybe bootcamps or even university. I have a master's in user experience design and I didn't learn much from that, right? But you are going to learn a lot of things by teaching yourself. And the only way that you can actually put what you've learned into practice is if you do it. You know, you don't just consume. Don't just watch this video, for example, and then you've watched another YouTube video and then you scroll on to the next one. You should make sure that you're actually taking things from the video into practice. And that is what it means to learn by doing. But to even go further, you should actually teach what you've learned because that way it will help you to reinforce the mental model and you don't have to set up a camera and start teaching in front of like YouTube. You could find a peer, somebody that is trying to do the same thing as you are trying to do, someone that's trying to achieve the same thing as a UX designer that you're trying to do, and then use that person and start to like teach. Okay, this is something that I learned today. You know, the best way to learn is by doing, and to even go faster, teach. The third one is learn how to speak in public. Your major thing that you're going to do as a designer is you're going to convince people. So your work is split into like maybe 2 or 3 different sections. The first section of your work is really understanding the problem that the user might be facing. The second step of your work is actually settling down to think about how you will solve that problem. The third part is actually convincing people to understand why that is an important problem to solve and why your solution is the best solution to the problem. If you can't speak in public, you're going to have a problem. So you have to start getting comfortable speaking in public. Most times when I also want to speak in public, my heart beats a bit. But the reason for those anxiety is that your mind knows that you are about to do something that you don't normally do. Yes, it knows that you're about to do something. So it is fear that is causing that. The only way to conquer the fear is to face it head-on and try to actually approach the fear with like what you actually want to do. So for example, with the speaking in public scenario, when you go to meetings or you go to events, you go to conferences, stand up in front of a crowd and ask questions. You have face this fear of like speaking in public, because the more you throw yourself at something that you're afraid of, the easier it gets for you. So find ways to put yourself in situations where you're going to require to speak in public, because at the end of the day, when you start trying to convince people about like your idea, it's going to be so easy for you because you've built that mental model already of speaking in public. Number 4 is to go where the hard problems are. And this one is one of my favorite ones because initially, you know, once I— when I started working, I would I would really just do what I'm told to do. Like I would really just say, okay, this is the problem that we're trying to solve right now. Or this is the projects that we are working on. Then I'll just focus on that problem, which is great because, you know, it means that, you know, as a junior designer, you can have work that you need to do and you can be assigned a project and then you can just take it on. But you need to keep looking around you. You need to keep looking over. Don't just put your heads down on like the work that you are doing. Look at the most difficult problem that the company that you're working is facing. Try to identify, okay, what's this company actually struggling with the most? What is the thing that actually drives revenue for this company the most? And what's the major problem that they are actually facing? When you understand these problems, you might not be in the best situation to actually go and start solving those problems, but to go where the hard problems are, one of the things that you can do is to find the people solving that problem, right? If you work in a team and you have other senior designers that are solving like really hard problems, you need to get close to those people to understand how they are solving the problem so that when any opportunity opens up for them to have like maybe somebody that can help with a problem or somebody that is junior that can help do anything or that can even be a fly on the wall, they're going to remember you. So when I say go where the hard problems are, I'm not saying that you should dump everything that you're doing and go find the hard problems and try to solve them because you might not be able to do that, but find the people solving the hard problems and become their friends. Number 5 is that curiosity will lead you to amazing outcomes. And by this, I have a really amazing story of how curiosity has helped me over time. Like most times I really just find information online, not because I need them immediately, but just because I'm curious. And one of the really good examples of this is how I got my role at Deliveroo. I was just scrolling on YouTube one day or on Spotify, I think, or YouTube one day, and I saw this podcast by Diary of a CEO. Diary of a CEO is a very popular podcast now, but in 2021, Diary of a CEO wasn't a popular podcast. So Steve Bartlett, the host of Diary of a CEO, had Will Shu on the Diary of a CEO podcast. And Will Shu is the CEO of Deliveroo. And Steve Bartlett was having a conversation with Will Shu about how he got to build Deliveroo, how he got to develop Deliveroo, and how Deliveroo came to become such a big and stable food delivery business in the UK. And Will Shu mentioned how he is so customer obsessed and how he would even go and deliver goods. So from that interview, I realized that, okay, the CEO of Deliveroo is a customer obsessed person that even go and do deliveries for customers just to learn about the customer. A week later, I saw an application to apply for a role at Deliveroo, and I applied for the role. And they asked me, why do you want to apply for the role? And all I did was just talk about the story of the podcast that I watched a week ago. And I strongly believe that that was the only reason why I was asked to come and interview. And this is something that you need to do. You need to constantly be curious. Don't just focus on finding like information around like what you're learning. For example, if you're learning Figma right now, you're trying to focus on like UX design, that is great. But find 10 to 20 minutes of your time to dedicate to being curious about like other domains of life or just things that are not essentially related to design, because you never know when that could come really handy. Number 6 is to understand that people want your opinion, so you have to share it. People want to hear from you and you have to share that opinion. The reason I'm saying this is that I used to be someone that really holds on to their opinion because I'm always thinking about like, what would people think about me? Like, what would people think about this opinion? Am I even qualified to be giving this opinion? A lot of people that I'm working with are like way smarter than me. So why should I be the one to share the opinion? And what usually happens is that I hold on to the opinion and I don't share it. And the next person that I feel like is a lot more smarter than me brings up that opinion and the team is like, oh yeah, yeah, that's good. We should actually totally do that. And I just feel like a piece of shit, right? And since I've learned that lesson, I've realized that, you know, once I have any thoughts in my mind, any opinion, any questions, no matter how dumb they are, I always share my point of view. I always share my opinion because when you are in meetings or where you are in places where you need to share your opinion and you're this person that doesn't really contribute much, you're only digging a hole for yourself because when you actually have really important stuff to contribute, you haven't built that relationship with people to understand how you think, to understand how you approach problem solving, to understand how you present your ideas for them to get your point of view. So the moment when you feel like, oh, you actually have like the right solution to this problem, or you actually have like the right opinion to deliver on a topic and you haven't been doing it before. If you are doing it for the very first time, it's going to be difficult to get people to see your opinions. But one thing is also very, very important in when you share your opinions, right? Have strong opinions, but you should hold them loosely. So once you know that you have like evidence around why something is important or why you feel like this is a line of action that your team should take, right? Share that opinion, but don't hold on to it so strongly, especially when somebody presents another kind evidence to see why that opinion might not be the right line of action. You need to listen and understand where they are coming from. And while you are having strong opinions, make sure that you're not just holding tight to those opinions. Number 7 is that you can never be overprepared, honestly. Like, the thing is, you really can never overprepare for like any kind of situation that you find yourself in. Like, maybe you have like an interview, or you have like even small things like 30-minute meetings, right? The thing is, a lot of people that you have meetings with every week do not come prepared for those meetings, right? So your edge is to find, like, if you have a 30-minute meeting, at least you should be able to spend about 20% of the time that it will take for the meeting to prepare for ahead of the meeting. So if you have a 30-minute meeting, you should be able to prepare for about 5 to 6 minutes for that meeting to say, okay, what is this meeting about? What do I know? What do I need to know ahead of this meeting? What don't I know? What questions do I want to ask? What am I going to contribute on in this particular meeting? Once you have those ideas top of mind for you, then you'll be able to share your thoughts and your ideas while the meeting is going on. And also you'll be able to contribute. And like I said, if 10 people are doing meetings like that, there's a very, very high chance that only about 30% 3 people have come prepared for that meeting, and you want to be part of those 3 people because if you are one of the prepared people for that meeting, then there's a chance that you're going to leave an impression after the meeting. You can never be overprepared for anything in life, meetings, interviews, or anything, because that is how you actually build confidence. Because you've prepared for a meeting, you prepared for all of these things enough, you feel competent about what you're about to do, like the meeting you're about to attend. And then once you have that competence, I always say that competence is what actually builds confidence. The reason why people are confident about their idea or their opinion is because they feel competent, and that's because they've put in the required amount of work to prepare well. Lesson number 8 is to learn how to do it all but choose not to. If you're watching this channel for the first time, I'm a huge believer of being a generalist, right? I'm a huge— especially at the early stages of your career. And if you're at the later stage of your career, then you can start to find areas where you can specialize. And if you've been watching this channel before, you would see that I've made a couple of videos about this. It is very, very important to learn how to do it all. Honestly, like, do not take learning things for granted. Always learn how to do it all, but you should be able to choose not to do everything. Like, make sure that you have an idea of how to do most things around your domain as a designer. So for example, you should be able to design a really good UI. You should be able to talk with an engineer to understand how to implement it, not necessarily knowing how to code, but you should understand when the engineer is telling you that, okay, this is the direction that you need to follow. You should be able to write copy because when you learn how to do it all, you're going to understand what good looks like. And it is not just about understanding what good looks like in your own personal work, but in other people's works as well. And that is what people throw around as the word— I think they call it taste, right? The only way you have taste is because you've exposed yourself to like a lot of things and you understand what good looks like. And then once you learn how to do it all, then you then find what you want to choose. So you don't have to do everything. Choose what you really want to be like good at. Like you might say, okay, I just want to like focus on being extremely good at designing good micro interactions, something as detailed as that. But that doesn't mean I can't design a good user interface. And that doesn't mean I can't design a good user experience as well. But what I want to be obsessed about is the tiny micro interactions and tiny details to put together to make a design really look good. Lesson 9 is if you can't give it your all, do not do it at all. Anything that you commit to, to say, okay, I've taken up this project, I want to work on this thing, you have to know that you're ready to go all the way because there's no point in doing something that you're not ready to commit to. And it is better for you to assess things before you commit to them and say, okay, yes, I'm doing this thing and I'm committing to it 100% fully. That is the only way to do good work, especially with like projects that you're working on with your team and all of that. You do not spread yourself too thin across 5, 6, 7 different projects and then you are average on everything. It's better to choose one or two that you give your all. Personally, I try to make sure that this reflects in everything. As I'm here right now in front of this camera, I'm not thinking about nothing else. All I'm thinking about is like you know, delivering as much value as I can in this video. I'm not going to pick up this camera to start talking right now if I feel like I'm going to half-ass this session that I'm doing right now. There's a bonus lesson: always find the bigger pond. The thing about this is to make sure that you're always looking for the next opportunity, and I feel like that's something that has really helped me all through my career. Once I started like my very first job, I realized that, okay, this is a really great company to work as tech company. It's good. It's at a good growth trajectory. So I'm not necessarily focused on trying to get another job or move into another industry or move into another company. But I have to be looking at what's the next big opportunity here. So the next big opportunity could be the next big projects that you're going to work on. It could be the next team that you're going to work with. It doesn't have to be like the next big company or the next big move. But you should always be looking out for the next big opportunity. The thing about always looking for the next big opportunity is that if you're doing that, you're going to get to a point where you've had so much opportunity and maybe you have such great names on your resume that you won't even need a portfolio. I can't remember the last time I updated my portfolio. I probably get like 5 to 10 people coming into my DMs on LinkedIn every month with like new job opportunities. Basically what I'm saying is that if you always find the next opportunity, you're going to get to point where you've gotten such great opportunities that you don't have to apply for a job. The jobs will come looking for you. If you really enjoyed this video, there's another video I made on the top skills that I've learned from like the top UX designers that I've worked with. You should go watch that video next. I'll see you there.