Peeling Back the Curtain on Recruiter Interviews for Designers

What really happens inside a recruiter to designer interview, when no one is performing for the camera or talking in hindsight?

We decided to show it.

In this new conversation, Meg Rye (Founder, Good Maven) interviews senior product designer Mrinal Bhatia in real time, exactly as it happened.

(Transcript below)

Transcript

Hi, I'm Meg Rye, founder of Good Maven. We hire and coach designers and we open up the process so it is easier to understand. Today you'll see an actual recruiter and designer interview with myself and Mrinal recorded as it happened. Most candidates never get to watch recruiters interview designers. That lack of visibility can favor people who have had many interviews already.

Our goal is to peel back the curtain, show the questions and the flow, and give you practical insight you can use. Now let's start.

Meg: Hey Mrinal, thank you so much for being with me today for this chat. It's been really exciting to get to know you through our coaching together,  as well as meeting in person since you're looking to transition over here to London. So yeah, thank you for being open to this chat.

Mrinal: Thank you, Meg. It's great to be here.

Meg: So let's jump right in. It would be great if you could take us on a whistle stop tour of your career from start to finish. And what I really love to ask folks is, what actually got you into design in the first place?

Mrinal: So I've always been a very creatively inclined person, and I think when I was in Bahrain as a child, I was always painting and drawing and naturally drawn to creative experiences and that eventually led me to New York, where I moved for my design education at Parsons School of Design. I majored in Communication Design, which is sort of a multidisciplinary design program.

It ranges from everything in graphic design to UX design and also creative coding. So Parsons was an amazing place to explore how design could shape ideas, not just visually, but also in terms of systems and experiences.  So I really built a strong foundation in visual storytelling there. But I soon pretty much found myself more and more drawn to how design solves problems for people.

And that curiosity is what pulled me into product design.

Meg: Love that. So, you mentioned a little bit about coming from Bahrain and then you obviously came to the States to study at Parsons. So I guess I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit about how your personal identity has shaped your journey.

Mrinal: I think my personal identity has shaped my career path in a few ways. At the core, my values really lie in empathy and they really influence the kind of projects I'm drawn to. As a designer, I'm interested in problems where design can make people's lives easier, whether that's simplifying technical workflows or for engineers or making AI tools more approachable for researchers.

Like empathy for me helps me see the human behind complexity, and that's what keeps me motivated. And personality vibe wise, I'm genuinely a curious person. I love talking to people, understanding their context, really diving deep into how they work, and that curiosity naturally fuels my skills and into being a thoughtful designer and researcher.

So,  I don't just make something look good, I wanna know why it matters and how it fits into someone's day to day. Another part of my personality is obviously being a woman of color from South Asian descent. I think that really impacts my unique perspective. Having worked across multiple cultures, it's made me very aware that there isn't one single user and there's no one way of doing things. Context and inclusion really matters in the design process. So that kind of global outlook really helps me approach problems with openness and humility. So for me, this identity isn't really separate from my design work, it's really what makes it empathetic, curious, and accessible in everything I do.

Meg: Thank you for that. So, I'm hearing that being a woman of color is something that you bring to your work and in fact that you've lived and designed in different cultures means that you bring that multicultural fluency to whatever project it is or whatever problem that you're solving.

So after Parsons then, I'm curious to know what your career path was and the kinds of positions that you had after that.

Mrinal: So actually while I was at Parsons, being in New York City you're open to a lot of opportunities while you're at school, which is really exciting, and I was super lucky to have that opportunity.

So my first design job was actually during school with my first tech company which was Seven Rooms. Seven Rooms at the time was a very early stage startup. It's now been acquired by DoorDash, as you might know. So I was working on designing products to facilitate restaurant management and the service industry.

It's my first kind of peek into B2B SaaS tools. And then I kind of just jumped into early stage startups right after I graduated, and I really enjoyed these scrappy environments where I often was the only designer. That meant doing everything from user research to sketching flows and collaborating with engineers to get things shipped.

Meg: Lovely. So, and that, that's pretty iconic that you were working for Seven Rooms back in those days. So that must have been exciting. So it sounds like. You've had the opportunity to work with a number of startups. You've also been a single designer, so you've had a chance to work really broadly across research, sketching flows and things like that.

So I guess through your internships, did that shed any light to you as to what path you'd like to pursue? 

Mrinal: As a designer, I knew I was really drawn to very complex systems, and so from there I kind of dove into unknown territory, something very unique. I worked at nTop, which is a high performance 3D modeling software for mechanical engineers.

I did not come from a technical background, but I was really driven by this challenge of diving deep into a user's mind that I have no idea about. So I spent four years in that space designing for incredibly specialized users in industries like aerospace and medical. The challenge really was taking technical CAD and simulation workflows and making them approachable without sacrificing precision for the users.

So this experience really sharpened my ability to design for complex and intricate systems. It taught me to listen to expert users and understand their mental models. So I really valued that experience.

Meg: So I'm really curious about this. I don't talk to many designers who've worked in 3D design software.

And you're also working in these domains that are so aerospace and medical. So you're solving really unique problems or you have unique use cases. So I'm curious, did you have a design mentor or someone who I guess gave you guidance for how to solve these unique problems? How much of it was you sort of figuring it out and sorting out yourself, and how much of it was you taking guidance?

Mrinal: I think one of the great things about being at an early stage startup is that there's a lot of experts in their own domain, and they often wear a lot of hats. And so a lot of engineers, designers, the CTO, the CEO, they were so passionate about what they were building.

And they were also acting as mentors for me to kind of help me get behind the users' mental models. So yes, mentorship played a huge part in this experience.

Meg: And I'm curious, so how, when you say for example, you had to solve a new workflow or a new problem for one of your clients, are there certain paradigms in the industry that you could look to or is it something that you had to completely create from scratch?

Mrinal: So what was cool about N Top is that we were building something really revolutionary in the industry. But we were really inspired by computational design software as well as architecture tools which are different from what we were building, but a lot of the UI patterns were quite similar. For example, we drew inspiration from Grasshopper, which is a plugin used by architects to use Rhino.

And this design pattern was really applicable to also a mechanical engineer's workflow. So that was one of the many inspirations.

Meg: I love that. So I guess, what skills and perspectives from this particular role do you think you've brought through, or carried a thread through to the work that you do today?

Mrinal: My product thinking skills definitely come from that experience, and I've carried it throughout my career for designing for not just one type of user. We were designing for many different user groups in different industries and kind of approaching it all at once within one software. So really taking these complex systems and thinking about not just the user, but enterprise businesses as well as our business and how we want to scale.

Another really important skill was just to listen and understand product familiarity for users. And understand when to break patterns and when to create new patterns. Often as designers we tend to want to follow trends, but I think it's important to have that insight of what's usable in our product.

Meg: Understood. Okay.  And in that role, I noticed you were a product design lead when you left, so you were promoted to product design lead.  Who did you report to in that role?

Mrinal: I ended up reporting to the VP of Product Design, but when I had initially joined I was the 15th employee, so I was just reporting to our CEO and CTO and the head of product.

But, eventually our team grew quite exponentially. We had more product managers to report to. We also had our own independent squads that we were leading and mine was native desktop platform. And so I was working quite closely with a technical lead, a product manager, but I did report directly to our head of product design.

Meg: Okay, nice. Thank you for that. So I guess I'm curious then, what led you to move on from nTop to Pixley?

Mrinal: I think I realized quite early that I was there for four years and I was very niche in a very specific industry, and I felt like I needed to understand different design domains and different design patterns better.

So I transitioned more into traditional B2B SaaS cloud software. And this was a really fun experience as well. I knew someone who worked there, my friend Mirage, who ended up hiring me and teaching me quite a lot about this industry.

Meg: Lovely. So I guess I'm curious to know a little bit more about the nature of the B2B SaaS world that you were working in there and the kinds of problems that you were solving.

Mrinal: Sure. So I joined Pixley when they had just merged with another company called Turn Two.  It's basically an ad tech platform that helps brands like Nike, West Elm, ALO Yoga to collect content all in one place. This was primarily driven by UGC and ratings and reviews. So it was a very powerful e-commerce strategy tool for a lot of brands.

And so when I came in, I came in as a lead for our influencer marketing product, which was a new vertical that the company was trying to push, called creators. So I led the creators product, which is a mix of B2B tooling and consumer-facing workflows for the influencer itself. Yes, this was really exciting.

It was one of the most impactful products that I've worked on. I built a lot of tools that were focused on growth initiatives, such as amplifying adoption, making sure that we were maintaining retention and also just growing user familiarity on this product.

Meg: Could you share with me a little bit more about the scale? So where were your clients and customers? I know you mentioned Nike. Where were the customers and also like yeah, what was the size and scale of the operation?

Mrinal: We had a range of small to medium businesses, but we also had a handful of large scale enterprise companies such as Nike, Sephora, ALO Yoga that we catered to more personally.

So for about a year we were working with those customers. After that, we got acquired by a company called Amplify, which was trying to consolidate all of these e-commerce strategy tools in one place, and that kind of opened up our customer base to a larger enterprise tooling software. 

Meg: Okay. What parts of the world were your customers located in?

Mrinal: Mostly North America, but after the acquisition from Amplify, which was based in Prague, we were targeting customers that were also global.

Meg: Nice. So I can see how, again, there's a little bit of a thread of your multicultural background that you're able to bring to bear here and think about, okay, how can we expand and be designing for folks from different places with different needs?

So since in this role you're focusing a lot more on growth, retention and adoption, what were some of the KPIs that you were tasked with to improve or decrease?

Mrinal: We identified a lot of early metrics about our software. Such as very low adoption to start. So one of our main goals was to increase that number significantly. We managed to do that after the introduction of a gifting tool that I led the design efforts for. This included an integration with Shopify and, and eventually resulted in a 20% increase in user acquisition rate.

So this was pretty exciting for us. Eventually after that, we got acquired by Amplify, which opened us a lot of doors, including creating a TikTok marketplace creator adoption which also attracted us a handful of new users.

Meg: So you mentioned that you led this initiative, the gifting initiative. So what was the impetus for deciding that was even something to be designed for, and what was your role in that?

Mrinal: We had always been doing continuous research by just talking to existing customers as well as potential customers. And through that research we discovered that we had some opportunities to really own the market by combining our UGC efforts with gifting payments and a few other user engagement improvements. So really it came down to prioritizing what came first. And for that we did some benchmarking and road mapping with the larger product team.

And then I set off to kind of research the impact of the initial design workflows. And then we started to build the feature out and, you know, recruit engineers to the project and really build it out.

Meg: Nice. So it sounds like you were involved from the early stages. I noticed you use a lot of “we” language there. So I guess I'm curious at its earliest stages, what was your part in identifying like, this research is coming up or I think that there's something important here that we need to pay attention to.

Mrinal: By we, I'm referring to my core squad, which is the product manager, tech lead and I. We're all three kind of experts in our own domain.

And as the design lead, my role was often to be the voice of the customer and also identify these pain points and understand how we can. Upsell our product. And as I said in the beginning, we knew that creators had low adoption and so I was also trying to identify these opportunities.

Meg: Nice. So it sounds like the three of you were working sort of like a small startup in a larger organization, and so you were sort of in charge of your own destiny and you were one of the three who were, who were determining that together?

Mrinal: We had a lot of support from leadership as this was like a new vertical that we were trying to bring to life. And so it really did feel like a bootstrap startup.

Meg: Nice. Okay. So at this point you've now had two pretty big roles and a number of internships as a designer. So I guess I'm curious at this moment in time, what would you say were your strongest skills as a designer?

Mrinal: I think of it normally in three key areas, and this is probably my meta brain, I still think in these three key areas. So product thinking or strategy, interaction design and visual design. 

Meg: Where would you say at this point, are your strengths?

Mrinal: I love that because I also think in that same way I would say my top strength is definitely product thinking.

I think I mentioned that before. This is where I'm definitely the strongest. I like to start by deeply understanding the business goals, the user needs, and shaping overall product strategy.  After that interaction design is probably my second biggest strength, and it kind of goes hand in hand with the overall product experience, turning that strategy into clear, usable flows and systems.

That's all interaction design, that's an essential piece of the puzzle. Third would be visual design. I'm strong here as well, but I see it more as the layer that brings clarity to experience and its kind of delight is super important for a user experience and to make a product addictive is important. So visual design is definitely the third piece of the puzzle.

Meg: Is there anything else to note about Pixley before we move on from that particular role?

Mrinal: I think the Pixley experience really taught me how to step into a really autonomous role. When I was trusted with the job of being a design lead on creators, it really allowed me to step into a more creative thinking process and be extremely scrappy with my approach.

I think that's the beauty of working at startups and scale-ups. You really get to exercise a lot of these skills. And that's what I really valued about this experience.

Meg: Nice. So when you were in that role, who did you report to? Within the org?

Mrinal: The head of product design, who was also one of the co-founders of Pixley.

And then when we got acquired by Amplify, I still reported to the same person. However, we joined a larger design organization, which was really exciting. We had access to more researchers and content writers, and I've really never been in that type of organization before.

Meg: Oh, nice. So how, how did that change the way that you approached your work?

It was definitely a challenge. At first, we were working on building design systems and, you know, merging these design systems that were separate from each other. And as I said before, we were building quite scrappily, so it was really nice to have support from researchers whose job was just to research or content writers whose job was just to focus on how the content and the voice was coming across.

And as like one full stack product designer you don't get to spend a lot of time making everything perfect. And so that support was really great.

Meg: Okay, great. In a way, it sounds like you sort of worked for a different company or a different version of the company because you had all those resources and, and then you were operating in a somewhat different combination. So what led you to move on from Pixley?

Mrinal: I definitely wanted a different experience after my three years with Pixley.  so I decided to move on to freelancing. I took a little break and moved back to Bahrain after 11 years in New York.  so it was nice to be home for a little while. And since then, I've just been taking on projects that are closer to my heart and exploring different markets across the globe.

So for example, I worked with a company called Grid Insight, which is based in India. And what we were focused on is launching an MVP for AI powered renewable energy dashboards that essentially empower Indian businesses to make actionable decisions on going solar which was really exciting. I also had the opportunity to collaborate with Mozilla AI, which is a company founded by Mozilla Foundation.

I was building zero to one MVP for a project called Blueprints. Blueprints was focused on building trustworthy and open source AI tools for developers across all skill levels. So this was also a very important project. So across all these projects, I think the common thread in the work is that it's approaching global markets and also making very complex technology super accessible and usable for people to rely on it.

Meg: Lovely. So what were the folks that you were designing for in this role? Were they primarily in Europe or that was just where the company was located?

Mrinal: Mozilla has an office in New York as well as in Portugal. So I was working with both of those teams.

Meg: Okay. Sounds great. So bring us up to speed to today. What are you working on? And tell us a little bit about what's next.

Mrinal: So now I'm looking for my next full-time opportunity. Today I bring over eight years experience designing very complex products, and I've had a chance to build across many industries and many markets. And now I'm excited to be moving to London pretty soon.

I wanna shape products strategically and I wanna create experiences that make advances to technology. And I really think that the UK has a strong geographical position, but also they really care about making technology responsibly, which I align with. And so I've recently applied for my global talent visa, which is a path that I didn't know about.

You're the one who pointed me in that direction, actually. So I'm really excited to hope that works out. Fingers crossed, but if not I'm also targeting skilled worker visas. For people who don't know what a global talent visa is, it's a path for any technical role to potentially be moved to the UK to be part of really groundbreaking innovation. And you can apply on your own independently and you don't need to be sponsored.

Meg: Yeah, that's the nice thing about the global talent visa is it travels with you. So, it's not attached to a company, so you can move in between companies with no friction. Whereas the skilled worker visa that you are talking about is usually attached to a company.

And so that means, let's say for example, you go with a Meta or a Google, they hold your visa and your position is made redundant. You have a short window to be able to find a new company that can sponsor a visa. Whereas with global talent, you're good to go and you have a lot more choice as to where you work.

Mrinal: I just wanted to say that I was quite limited by the H1B visa in the US and I couldn't take on freelance projects because of it. So part of the reason I could come home and do that was like H1B was so limited.

Meg: Understood. So in terms of locations, it sounds like London is the one. Are there any other locations you're open to?

Mrinal: I'm definitely open to exploring different cities in the UK. I know that Cambridge is doing a lot of exciting innovation as well, but my heart is in London for sure.

Meg: Okay, great. And in terms of work authorization, so you said you're pursuing a global talent visa or skilled worker visa. So is it that you have work authorization for Bahrain in any other countries?

Mrinal: Just Bahrain for now and India probably.

Meg: Okay. And then in terms of work mode, do you have a preference in terms of remote, hybrid, or on site?

Mrinal: I think I definitely value hybrid or onsite more than remote. Remote was great for the last couple of years, but I think human interaction and collaboration is essential for me and essential for creating impactful design.

Meg: Okay, I hear that. And in terms of your notice period, so I guess it depends a little bit on your visa status, but how long do you think it would take you to be able to come over to the UK and get started?

Mrinal: So as soon as I hear back from my global talent application, which should be processed in the next six weeks, I hope I can start to make the move to London. So I would say four to six weeks would be my notice period.

Meg: Okay. Sounds good. Do you have any guidance for me on comp expectations?

Mrinal: I think in the UK for my role as a senior product design independent contributor? I'd be looking for between 70 to 75 base salary, but it would really depend on the role.

Meg: Okay. Are you open to getting to that number through a combination of base bonus and equity?

Mrinal: Yes, absolutely.

Meg: Okay, great. And are you also open to freelance roles? I guess that depends as well on the visa situation, but yeah, theoretically are you open to it?

Mrinal: Yes, I am open to freelance positions as well. But yes, like you said, again, it's dependent on the visa.

Meg: Okay, sounds good.

Do you have an active portfolio that you could share with us? 

Mrinal: Sure. It's just my name, mrinalbhatia.com. You can find it there. I'm going to be updating my portfolio this week , so I'll share that with you and then we can take it from there.

Meg: I didn't have a chance to ask you about leadership, so it sounds like you prefer looking for individual contributor roles. Have you ever mentored or led other designers on the team?

Mrinal: I haven't directly managed a team of designers, but I've led a lot of cross-functional projects, which also in turn ends up making me the design lead for other designers as well.

But in those cases it's usually aligning stakeholders and making sure that execution is matched with product vision and everyone's on the same page. In terms of mentorship, I do a lot of mentorship outside of my day-to-day work. I volunteer with AIGA New York, which is an organization that was affiliated with Parsons back in the day, and it's been a part of my life for a long time.

So through that experience, I've learned a lot about other designers and listening to different stories and learning from different experiences.

Meg: Lovely. It sounds like you yourself have a learner's mentality and also you like to teach. So I can see that sort of going in multiple directions.

I guess I'm curious then, when you think about what's next. So when we started talking,  at the very beginning, you mentioned a little bit how your identity is an important part of how you show up in the world and how you show up as a designer. So how does that play a factor in your choices about what's next when you're looking at the types of companies that you're interested in working in or the types of problems you'd like to solve?

Mrinal: Yeah, I mean, I think I definitely thrive in collaborative and scrappy environments where craft is valued. As a designer, I think craft is often overlooked in traditional B2B SaaS, and I think my identity as a designer and also a curious person, I really want to give that a seat on the table as well.

So I'm excited by teams that leverage modern tools to scale strong design as well as creating genuinely, genuinely enjoyable experiences. So a team that values design, a team that's collaborative and open to learning. And geographically, I think London is also the place because it's focused on responsible technology, as I mentioned before, is quite important to me. So work that is ethically aligned.

Meg: Understood. Thank you for that. How do you feel about being in… would you prefer being in a mature design org where you are one of a number of strong designers who may be owning different feature sets or different parts of a product? Versus being in like an earlier stage startup?

I know you've done a lot of zero to one work where you might be more of a founding designer, so maybe it's not as mature of a design environment, but you're the one bringing the maturity in. How do you feel about those two options?

Mrinal: I'm quite open to both. I think that's less of a priority for me when it comes to making a decision on where I want to work next. Because in both of those experiences there's different things you can take away from that as a learning experience. But I would definitely love to try something new.

Meg: Okay sounds good. So may I sort of reflect back to you what I'm hearing and you can let me know if there's anything I've missed or anything you'd like to add or I left out.

So you're looking to relocate to the UK either on a global talent visa or through a skilled worker visa. And that would take you about four to six weeks. You prefer a hybrid or on site salary of 70 to 75K plus. You've worked across a real range of industries and platforms, such as B2B, SaaS design tools, ad tech, e-commerce, renewable energy developer tools, just to name a few.

You've worked for diverse companies like Nike, Sephora, Aerospace, Mozilla, you've worked across markets, Bahrain, US, Europe, India. I noticed that this common thread that you really like solving complex problems, you like taking complex products and making them more elegant and simple and you like to do that ethically and responsibly.

So the next role that you're looking for, you're open to full-time or contract, individual contributor roles. You have full stack design expertise, and as long as it's something in London, in a relatively responsible area where the design team is like open collaborative, I can bring those to you and we can discuss them and see if they could be a fit.

Mrinal: For sure. Yes. Perfect.

Meg: What didn't I ask you or anything else that would just be important to know about your search and yourself as a designer?

Mrinal: I think you covered a lot but I think just on an ending note, I haven't had a lot of opportunities with direct to consumer products and I would like to explore that as well potentially if it aligns.

However, I think the reason I'm drawn to more B2B  sides of things is because it touches on very complex user models. But that's not to say that there's something I might be missing in my experience with direct to consumer products as well.

Meg: Yeah, understood. I feel like what I'm seeing and hearing from you is that you have the propensity to like working in a B2B SaaS or complex space, but you have the craft level of more of a consumer facing craft space, which is kind of like music to my ears 'cause I feel like what I'm seeing in the market now is a lot of B2B SaaS companies that want that higher level of craft and execution. It's a differentiator. So I will make sure to bring you both B2C, B2B and sort of, you know, we can take a case by case and, and look at them together.

I guess one other thing that I'm thinking about is, you know, AI being such a hot topic today and a lot of companies are asking for experience in that. And I know you mentioned a little bit of work around like dashboarding and some intelligence solutions, some AI powered MVPs that you've worked on before. So could you tell us just a little bit more about that piece of your experience?

Mrinal: Sure. So I've had opportunities to work on design around generative AI, but not necessarily the technology behind AI just yet, which I think is also an important piece of the puzzle. I mean, it affects the environment quite drastically, and I think I would like to understand that deeper and be a part of that.

Another way that AI is definitely a part of my toolkit and every designer's toolkit is that it definitely scales the product development process and speeds it up. I think what's interesting about AI in our tool stack as designers is that our tools are gonna be changing faster than ever, which means we need to stay on top of the learning curve.

So, yeah, I'm definitely interested in working on more AI related projects, whether it's generative AI or AI technologies. I know there's a lot of companies in the UK that are doing that again responsibly, so I'm super excited about that.

Meg: Lovely. So if anyone who's listening would like to get in touch with you about an opportunity on their team, what's the best way for them to get ahold of you?

You can find me on LinkedIn. And you can also find my website, which is just mrinalbhatia.com 

Meg: Thank you so much for that. I'm wondering if there's any questions that you may have for me, Mrinal.

Mrinal: Specifically in London, are you seeing any main industries that are hiring for product designers at the moment?

Meg: Yeah, so I would say the lens through which I see recruiting is that a lot of people come to me for the relatively senior sophisticated product designers, right? So we're talking about people who are solving unique problems or working in nascent problem spaces staff and principal level and leadership roles.

So I would say what I'm seeing in the market, especially in the UK, is more roles that are full stack product designers, relatively senior. What I'm seeing less of is like mid-level manager roles. And things like that. In terms of industries, I'm seeing a lot of B2B SaaS now. I'm not sure how much of that is the industry as a whole versus what's attracted to me because, you know, the complexity and, and those sorts of roles just seem to come my way.

So I'd say a lot of our clients are like monday.com, so B2B SaaS in the collaboration tool space; N8N, which is a developer tool, really advanced in terms of the work that they're doing with AI; and sanity.io, so again, developer tools; and they're looking for folks who have like consumer grade visual design experience as well, but also the complexity of thought.

Those two can work remotely. So UK or Europe monday.com is on-site hybrid within London. But I think what's also important to mention, as you said, working with highly collaborative teams and open curious teams is important to you. And I think those also tend to be the kinds of folks who gravitate towards me as clients.

So we directly know the hiring managers and within Monday, Sanity and N8N, they're extremely empathetic, also very high crafts people themselves. So they hold a very high bar in terms of product thinking and craft. But also they foster a strong team dynamic.

So yeah, we also get roles that are, you know, in, in FinTech financial services.  We've hired for some major tech companies whose names I'm not allowed to share, but we've hired some of their first designers outside of the US. So I'm also happy to bring those opportunities to you, and we can just look at each one as they come and turn it over and see how it maps to your desires and then we can decide together.

Mrinal: Sounds good. And one follow up question, what is the most attractive skill from a designer in the market right now, do you think?

Meg: Ooh, that's a good one.

So I think again through the lens that I see the market, it's full stack product design. So real strong product thinking, interaction design. Being able to think about not just typical flows, but how you deviate from typical flows and create unique new flows and a very high level of visual craft and design.

I think also with the way the market is headed in terms of there's a convergence of tools and disciplines. So we're seeing more user experience engineers, front end engineers, designer combos or like AI plus product design. So not only solving complex problems, but how have you solved them with tools in AI and how have you done it in an ethical way, right? In a way that respects the data and the folks that you're working with. So I think that's some of the shift that I'm seeing in the market. So full stack designers who are good at solving complex problems and doing it at scale and scrappily, I'd say those are the folks that are getting roles the quickest. So certainly your archetype is a strong match for the kinds of roles that are being hired in the market. I think, in terms of your seniority, I guess that's probably where we get a little bit more on the staff and principle. So I'd be keeping an eye on roles that were maybe like lead level or like owning a major feature or a major feature set.

Or maybe startups where you could be a founding designer or one of the first on a team. Does that resonate with you in terms of what you think might be a good next fit?

Mrinal: Yes, absolutely. I think the main blocker here is the visa situation is what I'm noticing as well. But that's good to know that those are attractive skills.

Meg: Yeah. And for some of the bigger tech companies, the visa is a non-issue. They should be able to sponsor a visa. And then for some of the smaller or startups where, you know, it might not be possible, hopefully the global talent will open those doors as well.

Mrinal: Yes, for sure.

Meg: Cool. Well, it's been such a pleasure, Mrinal. Thank you so much for sharing your story with me and also with the world since we'll be sharing this more broadly. And I'll be in touch with you about new opportunities as they open. And yeah, thank you again so much.

Mrinal: Thank you, Meg. It's always a pleasure.

Meg: Thanks for watching. If this lifted the curtain for you, please pass it along to a designer or hiring manager who might benefit. You can find more resources and coaching at goodmaven.com, and you can subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Substack to catch the next episode.

Until next time.