Design Table Podcast

Everyone says AI makes product designers ten times faster. So why does so much of what product designers create feel like the same copy-and-pasted template? Speed is one thing; managers tell you to 'just ship it' within two weeks instead of four. And maybe, just maybe, we're all missing a few key design skills. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick make the case for deep desi...

Your manager asks you to build a design system. It feels like you're in demand and people appreciate your product design skills. Right?! Maybe. Or maybe it's the first step toward a company that thinks it doesn't need you anymore. Lots of product designers have that uneasy feeling that they're next... towards the exit. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick talk about the sign...

Has any of the following ever happened to you? Your product manager shows you ten screens they vibe coded over the weekend. Or, and this is probably even worse, your CEO wonders out loud why you need a product designer at all now. Situations like this is what makes designers quit. At the same time, others feel like they can suddenly build anything. Both sides have a point, which makes it hard to d...

Design school taught us you should explore before you settle on a solution. In reality, most designers sketch two or three options, pick one, and hope nobody asks about edge cases or anything outside of the 'happy flow'. Now that prototyping is so much more accessible, going wide has never been easier. With that in mind, why are so many designers still designing for that happy flow only? In this e...

Every designer wants sharper craft and better taste. But with the new tools generating close to all of your work, it's tempting to skip the design fundamentals entirely. I mean... who knows anything about gestalt or color theory anymore?! Also, social media is full of hot takes claiming UX is dead and the double diamond is over. None of this or the above helps you to enjoy your job as a Product De...

Junior product designers know what it is like. To get a job you need experience; and to get experience, you need a job. How do you break free of this annoying circle? The internet is full of generic suggestions that do not really get you anywhere. Luckily, there's a better way. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick tackle the experience-job circle mentioned above. They skip t...

Imagine you found a bug on your client's website. Back in the day, you'd have to get that issue on the agenda and agreed on before even starting to work on it. Today, Nick's website fix went live twelve seconds after he clicked 'sync', and the whole setup costs about twenty-five dollars a month. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick kick off a ten-episode series on how to bec...

Nick's first freelance invoice was for six hundred euros, quoted with a straight face, even though he half expected the client to talk him down. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick dedicate the full conversation to the business side of freelancing, the part that never makes it into a portfolio case study. Nick walks through how he landed his first clients without ever doing...

Nick's biggest newsletter open rate was fifty percent when his list was small. Now that it's grown, he's happy with thirty, and neither of them can fully explain why. In this quick-fire episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick answer a stack of rapid questions on product design and careers, each in under five minutes. They cover why email and newsletter design remains such an underrated...

Nick's first freelance client paid him fifty dollars an hour. He said 'yes' before he  knew what the market rate was, and it turned out to be exactly the right way to find out. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick spend the whole episode on money, salaries, hourly rates, and how you should ask for more. Tyler walks through the salary research tool that showed him his entire...

In 2015, Nick drove to an interview in his moms car. Three minutes in, the hiring manager told him he would never make it as a designer. 10 Years later, he loses his product design job over Christmas. And that's just the start... In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick share the worst moments of their careers so far. Nick gets torn apart in his first ever interview, prints a ba...

You can master every product design AI tool that exists and still get overruled in the meeting that matters most. That's because tools matter way less than what you read online. There are way more important things to learn if you want to make it as a modern-day product designer. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick lay out the four skills they think actually separate strong...

Someone on your team just built a landing page with Claude and skipped you entirely. It used to be a product designer's nightmare, but now... it is called 'Tuesday'. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick get into the question lots of product designers are asking right now. Is AI actually coming for your job? Or is that all social media nonsense? They map out why the risk of l...

Zero to one product design work. That's the main skill companies are hiring designers for right now. You'd expect Figma knowledge or being 'native' with the latest AI tools to be the main thing, but that's not the case. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick react point-by-point to a breakdown of what companies currently want from product designers according to Tom Scott, recr...

Two seconds. That's how long you have before a hiring manager bounces off your portfolio. Most product design hero sections that time. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick roast real, anonymized hero sections pulled straight from product design portfolios. Examples include the generic portfolio, one that looks like a resume-dump, and the rare ones that work. They break down...

Four hours of unpaid work. Seven rounds of interviews. And then a generic rejection email that reads like it was written by a robot. If you're hunting product design jobs right now, none of the above is news to you. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick have their opinions on the modern design hiring process; take-home challenges, endless interview rounds, and the red and gre...

One of our listeners wrote us while being stuck between two things: loving the product design craft and needing a job badly. He likes doing the actual product design work by hand, because that's how he learns and how he gets better. That's how he finds solutions. Yet, every job posting wants you to be "AI native" with a ton of "AI experience." So what do you do? Fake it? Give in? Hold the line and...

Every product. designer has had this thought at some point: "Someone's already built this. Am I even doing anything original?" It creeps in during a login screen, an onboarding flow, a pricing page, and it makes you second guess whether you're actually adding value or just repeating and copying something else. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick tackle a listener question:...

Every new product design AI tool feels like a deadline. You have to use it or you're left behind. That's what you read on social media at least. In this episode, Tyler and Nick have perhaps their most important talk of the Design Table Podcast so far: the anxiety of constant updates, managers demanding you become a '10x product designer', and how the product design community's mental health under...

Product design is becoming more collaborative, more technical, and a lot harder to control. In this episode, Tyler and Nick talk about what happens when your design work stops being “yours” and starts becoming a shared thing across designers, developers, PMs, stakeholders, AI tools, and codebases. We get into the emotional side of design work too. Why product designers get protective, why feedback...

Product design workflows are changing fast and nobody has a clean answer for what to do about it. In our first ever live episode, Tyler (in-house at a fintech SaaS company) and Nick (freelance product designer working with clients across the world) get honest about what modern design actually looks like right now. Neither of us have touched a wireframe in months. We talked about why. And then we g...

Everywhere we look, product designers are sick and tired of AI this, AI that. It feels like every day, there is a new tool, a new workflow, a new “Figma is dead” post, a new vibe coding demo, and another person telling designers they are either 'cooked', obsolete, or about to become '10x'. Reality is completely different. So try and relax! In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nic...

Two episodes of telling their career stories, and Nick and Tyler kept noticing the same thing: the lessons that actually mattered came from the rejections, the steps backward, and the ego traps nobody warns you about.   In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Nick and Tyler sit down for a third session to digest their two previous story episodes and pull out what they actually learned. No new...

Most product designers want to have the clean career story. First, you go to school. You build a portfolio and get hired. Then you get promoted and become a senior product designer. Post something painfully inspirational on LinkedIn about “the journey” and you're there. Cute, but Tyler’s path was not that. It started with trying to get into animation. He soon realised the job market did not care a...

Lots of product designers dream about going freelance. No boss. No performance reviews. And you decide where and when you work. And then reality shows up. No guaranteed paycheck. No HR department. No sales team. No legal department. No one magically handing you clients because you updated your LinkedIn headline to “freelance product designer.” So… how do you actually become a fully booked freelanc...