About a year and a little more ago, I was hired as a UI/UX designer without experience. I was a completely self-taught UI/UX designer and this March, I created a definitive guide to self-teaching UI/UX design in 2021. In July, I joined Polymerize, a deeptech startup in materials science-based in Singapore and India as a product designer.

This marked my 3rd jump in my UI/UX design career in 1.5 years.

It was an exciting time for me as I could flex my design muscles in a completely new environment. It is in SaaS. It is a B2B startup. It is scaling. The founders are brilliant, hardworking, and extremely empathetic and supportive. It was almost serendipitous, the way I found myself in this role after six weeks of job hunting on LinkedIn.

Then, came the opportunity for me to transition into product management. about two months into the role. I took it without hesitation.

Today, I’m a struggling “product manager”, and here are some words of advice for any product designers who find themselves in the juncture of “should I consider product management?”

While I may be a generally emotional person, I am extremely rational when it comes to my career choice—I wouldn’t take this opportunity without having a strong justification, both objectively and subjectively. I can sum up my justification into three points:

• Boredom as a designer
• Stronger interest in humans than design
• Being a complete mess of a generalist

If you’re interested to read about my reasons for the career change, continue on below. If not, feel free to skip ahead to the next section to read about my experience and my advice.

Boredom as a Designer

I was bored out of my mind with predictable design patterns, the constant grind in doing user research projects, interviewing users, conducting usability tests, and running analyses to create the best solution. I was passionate about creating the best visuals, though not as much so with solving the problems of the users through my endless Figma prototypes.

This is going beyond boredom that can spark creativity, as evidenced by this research by the Australian National University. This is the boredom that comes from missing the mark with fulfilment, purpose, passion, and financial stability.

Think of Ikigai and I’m smacked right in the middle of the “Profession” intersection in the chart below.

I got exhausted and started feeling “boreout”, a state where one feels that their job is completely meaningless. It extends outside of their work, and eventually adversely affects other parts of their life.

Beyond feeling like a pixel pusher, I felt like I had plateaued. I started to find little to no joy in activities that I used to love like powerlifting and painting, and eventually began feeling stressed out about them. “Why don’t I feel happy doing this?” is a very common thought back then.

Granted, I may be feeling effects from a possible burnout, but I knew that I was feeling more under-challenged than being overworked. As an individual that likes to solve problems, I tried to find other things to do to feel “challenged”. This leads me to my second point:

Stronger interest in humans than in design

While being a first-year Computer Science student, I figured that I could extend my skills further by looking into developing applications on the web. I also looked into machine learning in Python. This led me to build my first-ever commercial project as a freelancer, and subsequently, I started to build more applications on the web for fun.

Throughout the many design-to-development processes, there were a few touchpoints that I felt most comfortable and excited in:

1. Listening to my client's requests and creating requirements based on their requests
2. Coming up with a plan that documents my approach to the problem and triangulating my research
3. Testing and validating the solution in an iterative process

This made me realise that I was more interested in designing a solution, and not the “design” itself. I definitely loved drawing frames on Figma, but I was more interested in whether my solution was the best and whether I got the problem right.

Sure, they are also part of a designer’s skillsets. However, as a UI/UX designer, I was only focused on the design aspect of the solution, and not so much on its eventual impact. While freelancing, I could see the impact of my solution on the business in full. It wasn’t about behavioural metrics, it was about whether they garnered revenue or not.

I am definitely generalising a lot of things here. However, this realisation pointed me towards one final justification:

Being a mess of a generalist

“Jack of all trades, master of none” is a figure of speech used by Robert Greene in 1592 in his booklet, Greene’s Groats-Worth of Wit, which was used to refer to actor-turned-playwright William Shakespeare. We all know that today it is used to put down a person or to be unflattering, and in modern times, society has even added a couplet: “though oftentimes better than master of one” to make it less unflattering.

I am a huge generalist: I started off in mass communications and was mainly working in radio and local newspapers. After that, I ventured into doing graphic design before trying my hand in marketing, mobile app development, video production, and even starting my own HRtech startup (which fizzled really quickly).

After that, I landed myself in UI/UX design, and that stuck with me for the next 1.5 years.

Much like the Bulgarian mish-mash, I had a mishmash of skillsets that were seemingly related to one another. It proved to be a weak point for me while being a designer as I couldn’t make recommendations for things outside of my scope (e.g. I couldn’t make marketing recommendations because I was a designer). I had to churn designs that either didn’t solve a real problem or solved a problem that was backed by little evidence.

As an autonomy-seeking generalist, I knew what I needed to do. Hence, I bit the bullet.

“I know nothing about this.”

What was I thinking? Maybe I actually love product requirement documents and reading them to see what I’m designing for. Maybe Figma ain’t that bad. Maybe I should have stuck to doing user interviews to understand if my solution worked.

I’m working with scientists, researchers, people who wear white lab coats and lab goggles on a day-to-day basis. I used to fail physics and biology.

I’m working with scientists, researchers, people who wear white lab coats and lab goggles on a day-to-day basis. I used to fail physics and biology.

I’m screwed, I thought, just a week into my career transition.

#1: There’s an Imposter among us

Let me apologise for this reference, but I simply could not resist.

Instead of being able to get away with knowing half of the problem, I now need to know the full problem and more. What is more? Who knows! That’s what I have to find out.

While being a product designer, my role was to produce designs that solved the problems that were outlined. Occasionally, I would do research to build up our knowledge of our customers, but that is mostly requested from Product. I felt like I was in a greenhouse: the environment was right, it was comfortable, and it allowed me to thrive.

Today, I’m in an accelerated, constant state of learning. What do my users feel? What do they do on a day-to-day basis? Why would they care about our product? I had to try and understand scientists without having a single piece of knowledge in that field. While I was supported by a materials engineer in the company that was a former researcher, it was definitely not enough.

I was insecure with my knowledge. Back then, I was a subject matter expert as a product designer, but right now I have to make product decisions based on… what?

It is easy to see why I had imposter syndrome. Traditionally, product managers are business or computer science-trained. I am still a computer science undergraduate, and I have zero knowledge about the world of science.

As a designer, the design thinking process was merely a small part of the entire product development workflow. Having only been involved in one small part of it, my confidence was low. Even if I successfully executed once, I naturally attributed my achievements to sheer luck.

How did I overcome this?

I didn’t, but I’m trying.

Imposter syndrome is difficult to overcome. You downplay your achievements, you think you’re a fraud, and you believe you’re incompetent. Consequently, this makes me work even harder because I believed that I was “underqualified” for the role.

Garry Tan, the co-founder of Initialized Capital and former co-founder at Palantir, has a video about how to seek real wealth. In the video, Garry mentioned that “the only way to be a good startup, is to be a good startup”, citing the infamous Theranos and other fraudulent companies as examples.

Perhaps, I’m similar too: the only way to be a good product manager is to be a good product manager. Perhaps my actions made me look like a good product manager, but in reality, I was not convinced that I was doing my job well. I was, at least somewhat objectively, not succeeding as a product manager.

On the flip side, perhaps Garry’s words struck me profoundly because I was “Stockholm-ed” into believing that I was an imposter. While I’m actively trying to overcome this by finding evidence to invalidate my downplaying, I don’t always succeed.

#2: Less Design, More Product

Alas, I had to start abstracting myself away from design and start focusing on the product. I had to care about behavioural data, product metrics, and business goals. I had to learn about setting goals for products. I had to think about things in a cross-disciplinary manner: how can I achieve a product goal with design and engineering?

This meant that I started to lose control over how the product looked like. Although I am not opinionated in design, I definitely still have preferences and as such, I usually like to pitch alternative ideas.

However, what I needed to do was not focus on alternatives, but on whether it was solving the users’ problems or not. A small change in the user flow may help the user, but I had to decide if the help was a time-savings of 0.1s or uprooting of a long-standing problem.

How did I overcome this?

Trust. I trusted my designer a whole lot and I created an environment to allow them to thrive. That meant that I communicated requirements clearly, involved designers in the solution creation process, and made product decisions with full knowledge of my designers’ perspectives.

I believed in the power of collaboration and team play, and I sought to focus more on making product decisions than design decisions.

#3: Self-stunting My Career Growth

I was on track to being a senior product designer.

I had my own roadmap: I would stay on for a year or two before moving on to another slightly larger startup. Once I graduated, I would then head towards a larger corporation, aim for FAANGs (it should be MANGA now, right?). I’ll gun for a Head of UX position in an agency after biding my time before I seek out startups that are interesting during my 30s.

Who knew life could be so unpredictable?

It wasn’t. Unfortunately, humans don’t learn from history because of human nature. Despite my constant career changes in the past 3 to 4 years from media to marketing, I was naive enough to believe that my career path will finally stabilise and stop manifesting into new forms.

Would this stunt my career growth? I’m still worried about it. I am very early in my PM journey, and I can easily pull the plug and head back to Figma, Sprig, and Dovetail.

Yet, this mindset is poisonous: it fuels my imposter syndrome and constant, overarching self-doubt.

How did I overcome this?

I’m still figuring this out. Perhaps, if I find some small wins (or better, a big win) in my PM journey, I might be able to feel more secure about my career growth. While I’m not one to care about materialistic wealth, I am still worried about not being able to finance a $400K mortgage on 1200+ square feet apartment units while affording an estimated average cost of living of $5K, according to Numbeo.

What’s the conclusion of this post?

Nothing. This is simply a chronicle of my current problems as a designer-turned-PM. In reality, such a transition is actually quite common and it has been addressed quite a lot of times on Medium, so this isn’t an uncommon topic. However, the reality of problems that any designer-turned-PM can face, especially at a junior level, is still there.

I’m looking forward to overcoming my insecurities and issues over the next few years, and I sure hope the same for other designers-turned-PMs. I may head back to product design, or may I double down in this career path.

Who knows? But excuse me, I’ve got a backlog to manage. I’ll be right back by my next sprint cycle.