Agency to in-house
The work gets slower and the ownership gets longer. People who loved agency pace often find that out too late to plan for it.
Design
Show your work to someone who has reviewed a hundred portfolios.
Design is the domain where the feedback loop is worst. A portfolio gets views and no replies, and nobody tells you which of the twenty possible reasons it was. Twenty minutes with someone who has sat on the hiring side is the shortest path to the actual reason.
Guides
The moves Design Guides get asked about most.
Every Guide is a working professional in Design, with their work history, a rate they set themselves, and every rated session on the profile. These are the conversations they have.
Agency to in-house
The work gets slower and the ownership gets longer. People who loved agency pace often find that out too late to plan for it.
Visual to Product Design
The portfolio that got you here is the thing holding you back. Beautiful screens with no problem attached read as decoration.
Design to Design Management
Your taste stops being the deliverable and starts being a service. Not everyone wants that, and it is hard to test in advance.
Guides in Design set their own rate and their own hours. Browse who is on, read a full profile, and pay only for the minutes you talk.
Find a Design GuideFree to browse. No account needed to look.
In their words
What people in Design actually ask.
Not topics. The questions people type, from the situations they arrive with.
- My portfolio gets views and no callbacks. What is a reviewer seeing that I am not?
- I have been at an agency for four years. What breaks when I go in-house?
- I am the only designer here and I have no one to learn from. What do I do about it?
- How much should I be talking about process versus outcome?
- Do I need to learn to code to stay competitive?
Common moves
Three transitions, and what makes each one hard.
The difficulty is rarely where people expect it, which is most of why a conversation beats a search.
Visual to Product Design
The portfolio that got you here is the thing holding you back. Beautiful screens with no problem attached read as decoration.
Design to Design Management
Your taste stops being the deliverable and starts being a service. Not everyone wants that, and it is hard to test in advance.
Questions
What Design Seekers ask before booking.
A problem stated in one line, the constraint that made it hard, and what changed after. Most rejected portfolios are strong on craft and silent on all three. A Guide who has reviewed them can tell you in one session which one yours is missing.
It is a growth risk more than a career one: the title moves fast and the skill does not, because nobody senior is reviewing your work. Worth talking to someone who has been in that seat about how they got feedback from outside.
Enough to know what is expensive, rarely enough to ship. Where that line sits depends on the team you are joining, which is exactly the sort of thing to ask someone already on one.
Ask someone who has already been through it.
Browsing and reading full profiles are free and open. You only pay when you decide to talk to someone.