Career Strategy Podcast with Sarah Doody | UX, Product Design, UX Research

This episode is a full walkthrough of how you'll get hired in UX faster with Career Strategy Lab and exactly what happens after you join. Sarah shares what genuinely helps UX people in their job search, after coaching UX and Product people since 2017 and running Career Strategy Lab since 2021. What You’ll Learn in This Episode: ✔️ The six things that help UX and product people get hired faster ✔️...

The UX job market is rough right now. If your LinkedIn feed looks anything like Sarah's, you already know that. But while everyone is complaining about the market, almost nobody is focusing on the part of the job search they can actually control. In this episode, Sarah breaks down why the job market feels so impossible right now, including the surprisingly outsized role that one-click apply has pl...

Most UX professionals spend years trying to be good at everything. Eric Shumake, founder of HXR Labs, spent 20 years getting really good at one thing and it kept opening doors he didn't expect. Eric is a principal UX researcher and a well-known voice in healthcare UX. His career has taken him through companies like Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Myriad Genetics, and AliveCor. He also tea...

Re-entering the UX job market after years away is harder than most people expect, especially when you're doing it alone. After 12 years at Constant Contact, growing from associate interaction designer to principal UX designer, Emmanuel relocated, took a deliberate career break, and then tried to re-enter a job market that had completely changed. He spent three months rebuilding his portfolio alone...

If you're sending dozens of applications per day and you aren't hearing back, this podcast is for you. Carlos was applying to dozens of UX jobs a day, swiping through listings like a job board version of a dating app, and hearing almost nothing back. Out of hundreds of applications, he got two responses and both were rejections, but he knew he was a good designer. In this episode, Carlos shares ho...

Are you getting ghosted in your UX job search despite knowing you're qualified? When you have 5, 10, 15 years of experience and you're applying to 20+ jobs a week without hearing back or you're not making it past the first round, it's natural to start thinking you're the problem. You're not. You're just unpositioned. In this episode, Sarah makes the case that ghosting is usually a positioning prob...

What do you do when you have years of experience, you're making it through rounds of interviews, but you still aren't getting offers? For Andrew, the answer was scrapping his entire UX portfolio and starting over. Andrew had been applying to jobs for a year. He was making it to the final interview rounds at companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google, but he wasn't getting offers. On paper, everyt...

NDAs stop a lot of UX professionals from including their best work in their portfolio, but they might not be the obstacle you think they are. Sarah has spent nearly a decade coaching UX professionals, and one of the questions she gets most often is how to handle NDA-protected work in a portfolio. In this episode, she walks through what NDAs typically do and don't restrict, how to write about prote...

Have you been applying to UX jobs you know you're qualified for and still not hearing back? Chances are, your experience isn't the problem, it's how you're presenting it. After nearly a decade of coaching UX and product professionals and reviewing thousands of resumes, portfolios, and LinkedIn profiles, Sarah has seen the same red flag mistakes show up again and again. The candidates making them a...

Do you ever wonder what happens on the other side of a UX job application, like who's reading your portfolio, what makes them keep going, and what makes them close the tab? Sarah sits down with Jeni Bible, a UX Manager at Home Depot who has a uniquely full-circle perspective. Jeni went through Career Strategy Lab, landed her role at Home Depot just four months later, and is now the hiring manager...

What does it take to build a UX portfolio that makes a hiring manager stop scrolling? Alexander Zeh, Head of Product Design at ManyChat, is here to share how he approaches hiring and what many candidates get wrong. In this episode of the Career Strategy Podcast, Sarah Doody sits down with Alexander Zeh, a design leader with over 20 years of experience who has scaled UX teams from 5 to 43 people. A...

Are you spending hours on your UX job search but not actually making progress? The problem usually isn't effort. It's focus. Most job seekers stay busy tweaking portfolios, scrolling job boards, and hanging out in Slack groups, but at the end of the day, they can't point to anything that moved them closer to getting hired. In this episode of the Career Strategy Podcast, Sarah Doody shares a simple...

After being laid off, Jonathan spent months applying to everything and getting almost nowhere. Even with 20 years of UX experience, 75% of his applications ended in silence or rejection. In this episode of Career Strategy Lab, Sarah Doody catches up with Jonathan now that he's landed an Executive Director of Web Experience role at the University of Houston Downtown He shares what changed in his jo...

Every month your job search goes on is a month of lost salary. And the thing is, most UX and product people who are stuck aren't lazy. They're working hard, spending hours a week on their search. But they're also spending a lot of that time just waiting: waiting for a response after they apply, waiting after an interview, waiting for the right job to show up. In this episode, Sarah Doody breaks do...

What does it actually take to get hired in UX Design and stand out to UX recruiters? Steph McDonald, a UX Recruiter from HubSpot is here to share how she approaches UX hiring. With 300+ applications often coming in for a single UX design role, the competition is intense. And behind every application is a recruiter making real decisions about who moves forward and who doesn't. In this episode of th...

If your first move when updating your resume, building your UX portfolio, or preparing for an interview is to Google "how do I…" — you're falling into a trap that's slowing down your entire UX job search. In this episode, Sarah Doody breaks down the "Who Not How" framework and explains why the question you should be asking isn't how — it's who. You'll learn why DIYing your job search with Google s...

UX hiring insights from a UX veteran with 25+ years in UX and product. In this episode, Sarah Doody interviews Dan Maccarone, co-founder of Hard Candy Shell and Charming Robot, fractional Chief Product Officer, and a UX expert who's worked on products for Hulu, Rent the Runway, Foursquare, and the Wall Street Journal. In the episode Dan shares about what he actually looks for when hiring UX people...

Feel like your UX job search is full time job? Here are 5 things you can start using today to save time, reduce overthinking, and make real progress in your UX or Product job search. These are tips that Sarah sees working for people inside her UX career coaching program, Career Strategy Lab, and some she uses in her own work every day. Topics discussed in this episode of the Career Strategy Podcas...

Career maximalism is a mistake that many high achieving professionals make. When you care too much about your job, you can actually become worse at it. In this video, learn what Career Maximalism is, and why this behavior is everywhere, often rewarded, and quietly working against you. Career maximalism is when your job becomes a major source of your identity and your emotional state rises and fall...

The idea of career minimalism sounds healthy. But this trending philosophy of your job being a tool, not your identity (especially popular with Gen Z) could be quietly weakening your career if you're not careful. In this episode, Sarah Doody breaks down what career minimalism actually is, why it's gained so much momentum (spoiler: burnout, broken loyalty, and unpredictable layoffs), and the hidden...

Erica Jiminez went from facing a potential layoff at the CDC to landing her dream role as the first-ever User Experience Officer at WK Kellogg Foundation. In this episode, Sarah Doody chats with Erica about her experience in Sarah's UX job search coaching program, Career Strategy Lab. Erica shares how she got clear on what she wanted, made sense of a non-linear career path, and landed a mission-dr...

In this episode, Sarah Doody talks with Jared Tredly, a design recruiter at Shopify, about what really happens behind the scenes when UX and Product Design candidates apply for roles. Jared shares an honest look at how generalist recruiters interpret design briefs, what they scan for in the first few seconds of reviewing a portfolio, and why so many designers accidentally bury the most important i...

In this episode, Sarah Doody chats with Faith, a Product Designer who successfully transitioned from a layoff to a Product Design role, all while navigating UX career uncertainty. Faith shares how she used Career Strategy Lab’s intentional UX job search framework to slow down, get clear on what she wanted, and create a UX portfolio and application strategy that aligned with her career goals. In th...

In this episode, Sarah talks about how AI is reshaping the UX landscape and why three key skills are more important than ever for professionals looking to stand out in the evolving job market. Despite the rise of AI tools, it’s not about being replaced—it’s about evolving your mindset and skills to stay relevant. In this episode, Sarah explains why UX professionals need to stop thinking like "doer...

In this episode, Sarah interviews Vasudha, a UX Designer at Amazon AWS Applied AI, to talk about what it really looks like to invest in your career early, and how the impact compounds for years. Vasudha joined Career Strategy Lab's UX job search accelerator in late 2023 while finishing her master’s degree, navigating the uncertainty of the job market as an international student, and waiting to see...