Work Blog
Out of context: Reply #45
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- mg3321
I'm a month into my new job as a lead ux strategist / designer in the corporate world for an international financial business. I've been in the agency world for most of my career, but for the last nine years that was an independent agency that morphed from UX/creative work with enterprise businesses, to content marketing and advertising where I was leading B2B and B2C web projects, wearing way too many hats, and generally being concerned with every single aspect of what went into web projects. So much "get it done yesterday," so few concrete processes, too few people who knew how to run web projects, too many opinions, too much eccentricity, too many egos, too much of the "this work is AMAZING and we're the best in the business" ethos for work that was good, but average.
When I got laid off in March, my fork in the road was to either continue pursing the kind of work I was doing, kind of XD creative direction which I'm really suited for, or, going in house and finding a more narrowly focused role in a mature UX / tech / design department where I can see a path towards defined career growth, great learning opportunities, and something that reduced the number of hats I had to wear.
I chose the latter when an opportunity came to me and while I'm still early in new projects, the difference between what I was doing, and this, is so night and day it's as if I went to a different planet altogether. So many new things to be exposed to from massive high quality design systems, to defined processes for getting work done, to business teams that know what they're talking about, to UX colleagues who are kind and knowledgable and helpful. I'm putting in a more focused day each day than I think I did in the past five years, and I'm finishing my work day not feeling exhausted creatively and affected by the stress of off-the-rails projects, creative indifference, and know-it-all crap that can come in the agency world. I'm not burning myself out using that part of my brain all day, which makes it so much more enjoyable to spend my evenings on my own creative projects, whether that's the album I'm working on, the generative art tools I've been building, or making art on the pen plotter I got over the summer.
So glad I took this path instead of holding out for agency opportunities. It's been so refreshing - it's still UX work but for enterprise applications, and I don't have to worry about so many of the things I used to. It's a proper UX role whereas my previous role was so much more than that.
My eight months off were nice, but damn am I glad to be working again, and enjoying it.
- Congrats! I miss the benefit of in-house ux of really digging into the tools and having a longer-term vision.akiersky
- I happy to hear this.utopian
- Awesome congrats!YakuZoku
- Very happy to hear this.monospaced
- I've experienced the exact same thing this last year contracting w/a major corpo (evil insurance co)—Ridiculously organized, no egos, very kind, helpful folks.PonyBoy
- ^ the banality of evilmonNom
- Thanks! Really apprecate it. :)mg33
- I feel your gain :) Made a similar move on a smaller scale 8 years ago.mort_
- Made similar move 5 years ago from ad/web/brand world (of 20 or so years) to UX in a tech company. Best move ever,microkorg
- better work life balance, no egos, back stabbing nonsense etc.
I do miss photo/video shoots and sh*t like that but the higher salary makes up for that haha.microkorg - Its not as 'creative' a job, but with me having evenings and weekends always free from work I do art/music and that exercises my creativity.microkorg
- Very true microkorg. Some of the creative aspects I really miss are little things like picking fonts and colours.mort_
- happy for you mg! :-)
congratsHAL9001 - Micro and mg33 and others, been thinking about doing something similar, getting tired of wearing 100 hats, getting tired of working around the clock_niko
- Getting tired of no work life family balance, and getting tired of the little reward at the end. It sounds like blue chip tech and financial companies are the_niko
- Way to go. Are you guys doing product development UX? Are you leading a team? Curious what your role entails._niko
- Thanks again! microkorg, we could probably have a long convo about everything you said.mg33
- _niko - I'm leading enterprise application projects, working with big teams of BAs, product owners, devs, etc. There's a lot of ambiguity in the project I'm onmg33
- but I've always enjoyed that sort of thing. I like making sense of things that are a big puzzle and since this is so much more narrowly focused than what I'mmg33
- used to, it just feels... relaxing. A lot more process, more use of Jira, more meetings, but nothing feels like a surprise and it's nice to not be evaluatedmg33
- constantly on the advertising/marketin... aspects of things because that's not involved at all. It feels more analytical, yet with it's own kind of creativity.mg33
- Truth is, for several years, I wasn't doing projects where I could even interview users. Our clients had research, personas, and for content-centric sites wemg33
- didn't need user feedback. But it was so much intuition and guessing, which we were good at, but just totally different UX than what I'm doing now.mg33
- I can be a bit OCD and probably have undiagnosed ADHD, so to be more focused is a really nice thing.mg33
- I also came in at the tail end of a migration to Figma from InVision, so that's been fun as well.mg33
- cheers mg, very insightful._niko
- Great post! Happy things are going wellstoplying
- So... sounds like your getting old? Good stuff. Love it.falcadia