Having Confidence in Your Skills and Experiences with Adidas's Jake Rudin

Our guest today is Jake Rudin, Senior Manager Digital Technologies at Adidas, and Co-Founder of Out of Architecture. 

In this episode, Jake Rudin discusses his journey from architecture to leading digital innovation at Adidas, emphasizing the importance of confidence in showcasing one's skills in job interviews. He shares insights on translating architectural skills into various industries, the power of visual representation in presentations, and the significance of treating your career like a design problem. Jake also delves into the founding of Out of Architecture and the impact it has had on helping individuals navigate career transitions.

Jake provides valuable advice on redefining oneself, embracing career changes, and utilizing architectural skills in diverse contexts, inspiring listeners to explore new paths beyond traditional practice. The episode touches on the essence of being an architect as a dreamer and problem solver, capable of making a positive impact in various spheres.

Highlights:

• Designer, Educator, Maker
• Following A Passion for Architecture
• Not Being Limited by Job Descriptions
• Communicating Your Abilities in Resumes and Interviews
• Confidence is Key
• Treat Your Career Like a Design Problem
• Demand for Out of Architecture Advice
• The Power of Visual Representation
• Get Started with Out of Architecture
• Defining An Architect and Redefining Yourself

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Creators & Guests

Host

Silvia Lee

Host of Tangents

Producer

Erin Pellegrino

Co-Founder of Out of Architecture

Producer

Jake Rudin

Co-Founder of Out of Architecture

What is Tangents by Out of Architecture?

Welcome to Tangents by Out of Architecture, hosted by Silvia Lee. We’re highlighting some of our favorite stories from the amazing people we’ve met along our journey. We will hear how they created a unique career path for themselves from the variety of skills and talents they developed in and out of architecture.

Out of Architecture is a career consulting firm started by two Harvard-educated professionals interested in exploring the value of their skills both in and out of the architectural profession. We’re here to help you maximize all of the expertise you have honed as a designer to get you a role that fulfills and challenges you. We have the knowledge, experience, and connections to help you put your best self into the market–and reap the benefits.

Having Confidence in Your Skills and Experiences with Addias' Jake Rudin
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Jake: [00:00:00]

Intro
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Jake: The goal of that story is to showcase not only some of the most incredible things that you've done, it's also not just to answer the questions that are being asked of you. What it's really meant to do is to leave the listener or the person who is interviewing you with the impression that the next step in the story can only be that position that you're interviewing for.

Silvia: Welcome to Tangents by Out of Architecture.

Out of Architecture is a career consulting firm helping designers apply their incredible talents in untraditional ways. We're highlighting some of our favorite stories from the amazing people we've met along the way. We will hear how they created a unique career path for themselves from the wide variety of skills and talents they developed in and out of architecture.

Our guest today is Jake Rudin, Senior Manager of Digital Technologies at Adidas. Jake is a strategic thinker and designer with a decade of experience in building things from the ground up. At Adidas, he leads [00:01:00] teams in computational design, digital technologies and pattern engineering.

He also runs out of architecture. Our podcast Tangents is based on the conversations and work that Out of Architecture has been doing over the years.

Three Words: Designer, Educator and Maker
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Silvia: Welcome to the show, Jake. We're really happy to have you here today. To start i'd like to ask you how you would describe yourself in three words.

Jake: I think that for a long time on my LinkedIn, my bio was designer, educator, and maker, and I think those are really interesting nouns because they all somehow circle around this sort of one noun, the architect, which is the person who creates and designs and thinks through. And for a very long time, I wanted nothing more than to call myself an architect.

I would say that many of those attributes, the designer, the educator, and the maker, they still remain today, even though I am somewhat far from the traditional architecture practice.

Silvia: Those are great words. you can describe many [00:02:00] architects that way. I'm curious, can you share your journey through architecture from those words and where you are today?

Following a Passion for Architecture
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Jake: Absolutely. I really kind of came to architecture through landscape, actually through this enjoyment of gardens where I grew up in Nashville. We had this beautiful garden called Cheekwood Botanical Gardens. I used to go there with my family and walk around and they had this incredible Japanese garden, a beautiful manner house perched on a hill with a pergola coated in mysteria, and you just wonder for hours and hours and.

And I always thought that designing something like that would be a really interesting job. I didn't know any better as a high school student, so I Googled landscaper and eventually kind of came to this term landscape architect. I had no clue that something like that existed. So when I found out that you could actually just design gardens as a job and not necessarily even have to [00:03:00] assemble, I thought that was really interesting.

And then I looked up the average salary of a landscape architect, , and thought, Oh my God, there's no way I could ever do this. So I thought, Okay, I'm gonna look up something else. I'm gonna come up with something that might have a little bit more of a hand in other kinds of design. And so I ended up finding architecture and going to an architecture summer school.

I was just blown away. I couldn't believe that you could go into a course of study thinking that you knew exactly what it meant to, let's say, create a cube, right? That it was six sides and they were all exactly the same dimension. They were square, that they were rectillinear let's say. And then to come out of that with this understanding that you could examine an object even once so simple as a series of edges or nodes or connections or [00:04:00] implications of space or solid and void simultaneously, That the cube might have thickness, that the cube could be lit, it could be dark, it could be patterned, it could be ornate.

All of these things. It was just a completely new way of looking at the world, and I went through my bachelor's of architecture degree. I enjoyed almost every minute. , I thought that it was an incredible education, albeit, uh, a very intense course of study and I had a series of experiences that really started to remove the wool from my eyes to allow me to see a little bit deeper what was coming for me in professional practice rather than just what I was experiencing in architectural education.

And I quickly realized that that wasn't going to be a path in which I was gonna find the same sense of satisfaction that these nouns, for example, maker, that many architects and those in traditional practice don't always have the [00:05:00] opportunity to go physically make things or to be present for a large portion of the construction of whatever their projects are.

I felt as an educator that I really wanted to continue my learning. And that exploring new, innovative technologies and applications of design was something that would continue with me. And I also learned through a series of very poor interviews and internships. Um, and on that note, I knew that that wasn't really what the profession wanted for me either.

And so it came to pass that maybe I thought I would stay in academia, so I went for my master's degree so that I would be prepared to continue teaching. And after going through another year and a half, almost seven years of school, in fact, I decided to try my luck at not architecture and went to work for a very young ed tech startup.

Uh, I was there for a couple of years in which I had an amazing experience as the director of business develop. [00:06:00] And then I moved across the country with my amazing wife and landed in Portland, Oregon. I applied to pretty much every single design role that I could possibly find, and I managed to luck out and find this incredible position that I currently hold five years later at Adidas, working in the design technologies team and managing computational designers working on footwear and apparel, and pretty much any project that suits my fancy.

And I think it's one of those very few roles out there where I could still see myself doing all the things that I loved in architecture school, and yet not calling myself an architect or one of those three specific words. I.

Silvia: I'm so glad you found that because I think architecture school is so different from practice and then it's kind of a shock when you get there. That's how people get burned out so quickly. I imagine that the road where you transitioned away from architecture and as you said, applied to every job, that was somewhat design [00:07:00] related. I bet there were some highs and lows along the way. What kind of thoughts were going through your mind at the time and how did you know which path to follow? If you had any doubts along the way.

Job Descriptions, Imposter Syndrome, Learning the way through
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Jake: Some of the lows from the transition out of architecture definitely included quite a bit of imposter syndrome. When I started at Gather Education, which was a startup that I went to out of grad school, having the title of Director of Business Development, I pretty immediately felt that I had no clue what I was doing.

I certainly wasn't a director level person. I had really not managed a team or a budget or any kind of immense projects at this point. I had no idea what I was doing in terms of the startup landscape. It just felt completely out of place. What I wish someone had told me was that over the course of that year, year and a half, I would learn very quickly. That most of these terms were translations of things I had learned in architecture school [00:08:00] that the ability to stand up and demo a project to a client was very similar to giving a presentation in school. That sitting down with a client and asking what their needs were was very similar to starting a brief or discovering a site or context in which to.

And I started to put this puzzle together and realized that if I could actually do this for something so distant from being an architectural designer, I could probably do this for most other roles. So if I could look at a job description and tell that I was qualified enough to understand the concept than really what was standing in the way of me getting that job was being able to show the person across the table that I had those skills. and to describe it in a way that wasn't completely reliant on my architecture portfolio, that wasn't talking about circulation, that wasn't talking about the facade, that was talking about the scope and the desire and the outcome, and the way in which I was able to [00:09:00] achieve those things. It was also about the myriad number of tools that I knew and I could pull from in order to get a certain desired goal.

I think it was really an incredible realization. , and that was definitely one of the highs.

Silvia: After convincing yourself that you had all these skills, how did you translate that to your employer? I'm imagining most employers aren't familiar with what architects do. you wait for the interview process to display that? Or did you have any other maybe untraditional ways of communicating that?

The Interview and Communicating Your Abilities
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Jake: Yeah, I sent my portfolio with every single application, so even where it just asks for a resume, I would always include that work. I think one of the best things that you can do in modern times also is to make sure that you have a website where you have access to all of your projects and all of the different kinds of work that you've done.

We often get the question, Well, I only have architectural work, so I definitely am not gonna [00:10:00] be able to apply for this kind of position, which I think is a load of. I really would encourage people to see their work in a different light. That it's not just the subject matter as much as it is the ways in which you're executing something and the quality and the attention to detail that you put into it.

I have told the story of my Adidas interview many times, and in short, it involves me sitting down, walking through my architecture portfolio, which. Built projects and theoretical and designs and drawings and renderings. And the resounding response was both one of a kind of impressed state of awe as well as a curiosity about what else I knew.

Confidence is Key
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Jake: And the question that was asked was, you know, what do you know about thermo mechanics? And of course I said nothing, but I'd love to. . And I think what is hidden in that story that I haven't really spoken about in detail is that there is a sense of confidence that needs to [00:11:00] be portrayed, that your abilities will translate.

Now I am and probably will always be an overly confident person, and in fact, I would go so far as to say that it gets me in trouble sometimes. Um, maybe I come across a little too. I don't expect everyone to be able to stand up and say, I am perfect. I am incredible. There's absolutely no reason why you would ever not wanna hire me.

But I think having confidence in your skills and knowing that they're applicable in a number of ways is a very easy first step to that process. I think in the details, being able to read the room as a second step is probably the most important part of any I. And what I mean by that is there are going to be generic questions.

What you want to do is you want to take your resume and you want to analyze it for some of the projects and the pieces of work that you are the most proud of. I think [00:12:00] if you can look at those outcomes, what you're gonna do then is you're gonna tell a very. Fluid story. We call that drawing the red thread through your career, and the goal of that story is to showcase not only some of the most incredible things that you've done, it's also not just to answer the questions that are being asked of you, what it's really meant to do is to leave the listener or the person who is interviewing you with the impression that the next step in the story can only be that position that you're interviewing for. And we do this as architects in our project presentations. We do this in review. You want it to seem as though the only logical conclusion is the design that you have chosen.

And we do that by picking specific parts of the site. Specific parts of the context, specific parts of the brief, the program. And we focus on those and show them and highlight them both through the design and through our own words. And if you can do that about your own career, it will land [00:13:00] you a second.

I. It will land you an offer far more times than just a sort of generic walkthrough, whatever your resume is at the time.

Treat Your Career Like A Design Problem
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Silvia: Thank you for so eloquently describing that or painting that picture because I can see it as you say it, that when architects work with clients, the client, isn't the expert, they hired the architect to be the expert and, I feel like in most successful cases with working with clients is when you were able to convey to them. They can trust in your expertise that you did the research, that you are knowledgeable in this area and that they can just follow along with what you have done the hard work in creating and perfecting for them. So you're saying, just create that same story with all of the parts of your career journey.

Jake: Absolutely. And I think one of the things that if you've heard Erin and I speak before that you've certainly heard at least once, is to treat your career like a design problem. In many ways, we are [00:14:00] setting out a brief for ourselves and that brief changes every time you sit down and think about, Hmm, what is it that I want to do next? but the constraints, the parameters, the end goal, those are all things that we can outline, and then it becomes as easy as sort of sorting through them to determine what the best methodology is for getting to that. And I think it's, it's unfortunate that we tell architects that there's only one pathway.

It's a pretty common sentiment that the goal is to be. Principle partner, run your own firm, but to be an architect. And I think there are a million avenues for architecturally educated individuals to take their talent. So don't be afraid to sit down and revise your brief and to think about what it might actually look like if you were to do something that blended your passions into architecture and that blended your hobbies, that took [00:15:00] advantage of the place that you live, took advantage of the time that you're living in, or the ability to work remotely, or some curiosity that you haven't gotten to explore. I think it's a shame that we find clients who are telling us that they only have one option cause that's never the case.

Demand for Out of Architecture Advice
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Silvia: Let's find out a little more about out of architecture. So this is also something that in the way that you've created the career that you wanted, that you found your dream job, how did you come about in creating out of architecture? Something that is very specific to your experience and also to this niche group that we come from.

Jake: Yeah, it is a very niche community and one that I love dearly, that I think includes both ex architects and current architects. But when I started at Adidas, it was the first time I really had a brand name work experience on my resume. And when I say that I had a brand name, I mean that Adidas is very recognizable [00:16:00] and it's also recognizable for the fact that it has nothing to do with architecture.

and I think that is a spectacular thing when all of a sudden I realize, Wow, I'm truly not in architecture. I'm in footwear. I think I wasn't the only person to realize that because I started to get calls, like a lot of calls, a lot of LinkedIn messages, a lot of emails from friends, former colleagues, professors, and even people that I didn't know.

And the questions that came with those calls were often. , why would Adidas hire you? What are you doing? How can I do that? And I realized there's quite a bit of demand for this kind of advice. I don't think I had formulated my opinions quite as strongly as I have now, but I do think that there was a lot to be learned from my experiences, both my failures and my successes.

At the same time, my business partner Erin Pellegrino, had also just acquired several commissions for her design practice. [00:17:00] She had been teaching, just started teaching professional practice actually at Cornell, and then subsequently at several other universities, and was engaging the profession from an entirely different standpoint, also from out of architecture, but still pursuing licensure, still interested in design, still building buildings.

And we had this discussion because one of our very first quote unquote clients was a very good friend of ours from. A friend of both of ours who was interested in making this transition actually to a sportswear or athletics company, and we were dedicating quite a bit of time to this project and realized that there was definitely something there.

So we made a website and we filed to turn it into a company, and it started off incredibly small. It was maybe five people the first year who reached out and decided that they were willing to take a chance on us helping them as their career coaches. when we ourselves, were in our very early stages of [00:18:00] our career, and I am forever grateful to those people because we learned a lot with them, and we certainly spent many more hours than we, than we build for.

We really never intended for this to be like a money making endeavor. It was always about supporting people and achieving something with their career that they might have felt they couldn't do on their own. Fast forward to 2020. So this was founded in 2018 and of course in 2020 we, like everyone else, wanted to do our part to support people who were having a hard time.

So we turned off billing and we went from maybe a dozen or so clients to 50 or 60 clients, and we had people from all different stages of life employed, unemployed students, 15 years in practice and so on. And it quickly became something larger than we had anticip. today, we've had over 700 clients. We've had thousands of conversations, and it is the most incredible side [00:19:00] business that I could have imagined being a part of.

I think the beauty of out of architecture has very much been the community. . And I think in many ways the idea to do something like this, to create a podcast is to support people in having access to some of the stories that we've experienced throughout the last five years. We have met some amazing people.

We have had a client who had been in practice for 30 years or 50 years, I kid you not 50 years. And yet at the same time, we've had so many clients who are coming to us in year one, year two, and wondering what is in store for them if they go a certain direction, what does it look like to work in tech?

What does it really feel like to be at a small firm or to be in a design agency? And as much as I enjoy giving direct, I think that those stories should be open and available, and especially in the context of how someone has made the transition from an architectural degree. I think [00:20:00] this hopefully is the course that you never had in your architectural education, one that no architectural professor really wanted to talk about, which is absolutely that you can do things outside of architecture. Here's what that looks like and here's how to get there.

The Power of Visual Representation
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Silvia: It's very interesting that it's so focused in school because the skills and things that we have to do lend us to so many things. And I feel that people actually start to use them towards their own hobbies. There's a lot of people that take their, analytical mind and apply it to baking. And then the creative side comes out with either decorating or plants or drawing, painting, dance music, there's so many ways to apply these ways of looking at things and problem solving. can you share some of your favorite things that you've taken from your architectural learning or the things from practice that just works well for you?

Jake: I do think the ability to represent something visually is so impactful. When I started work at Adidas, a [00:21:00] couple of months in, actually, I was proposing a project and I really hadn't seen many project proposals and I thought, Okay, I need to sit down. I need to build an Excel spreadsheet. I need to write out this huge doc, like some big word mumbo jumbo that really elaborates all of the business needs and the desires and.

I spent hours and hours staring at a blank page thinking about how I was going to do just that. And what ended up, what ended up really getting the project started was that I opened an InDesign file and I created some pages and just started to drop images in. And that turned out to be a presentation that was incredibly successful because it had very few words and it had a lot of.

I really enjoy the power that predominantly image driven presentations can have on an audience because it also allows them to interpret what's on the [00:22:00] screen. It allows them to have less focus, trying to read and listening to something instead to focus on what you're actually saying. And I think it allows for a really good story.

I think visuals pair well with, you know, what could be or what is, and yet leaves a little bit of room for the imagination. Still. I would say that the design skills are useful in every job, and I would say that any chance you have to impress or to go the extra mile and to create something visual is completely worth it.

Very Much a Maker
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Silvia: What are some kind of visual things that you like create, I feel like architects just want to create so many things that whatever they get their hands on, they add a certain touch

Jake: I certainly do love to create things, and we have an enormous backyard, which is now filled with all different versions of raised beds and cobbled together chicken coops, and pretty much any structure that I could try and throw together with my own hands. And I [00:23:00] do adore woodworking. It was one of the first things that got me into architecture actually.

I built a guitar as one of the projects for my portfolio, and I've always enjoyed working in the model. Even today, my garage is filled with tools and any project that comes around in the house feels so much smaller for the fact that I now know I'm able to learn whatever it is, go grab a set of tools that at least I'm somewhat practiced in using and try my hand at making whatever is inevitably broken, slightly less broken.

Silvia: So you were able to get back to those early thoughts of being a landscape architect.

Jake: I was, and we have more plants and more garden than I care to admit, but I do think that some of those things come around and my architectural training has definitely made me a better landscape designer. It's made me a better curator of space. I think it's a really incredible thing to be able to look back on your life and [00:24:00] to see that some of these things are completely circular.

Maybe that is in fact what I wanted to do. Not only, you know, curate space with plants, but be able to kind of curate spatial things, design in the rest of my life.

What Will The Future Hold
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Silvia: I'm curious, you've had a very interesting career journey so far. What are you thinking is in store for the future?

Jake: That's a very good question. Certainly I think that the future will hold some mix of things. As much as I love my corporate job, and as much as I love my day job, I've never just been satisfied with one subject matter. I really have enjoyed growing and learning from the experience of out of architecture, and I think that will be a big part in my future because not only does it fulfill you, To interact with the architectural community.

It also allows me to have a window into the millions of other pathways that are still out there to learn from people who have gone through all kinds of life experiences. [00:25:00] Who have their own desires and ambitions, some of which I'm keen to adopt, and some of which I'm keen to ignore. So I'm always curious speaking with clients about what their goals are and why.

More specifically, I think in addition to out of architecture, I've really enjoyed lately the exposure to the world of startup. I've had the opportunity to work with and advise quite a few startups on a range of topics that I think are also very appropriate problems to be solved by someone with an architectural training.

That being said, I also would like a little time to relax , so maybe there will be a glass of red wine and some time in a very comfortable lounge chair.

Get Started with Out of Architecture
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Silvia: That sounds really nice. this will be very helpful to plug for the future, but how can people get involved with out of architecture ?

Jake: Well, at its core, out of architecture is a consulting company. And we are so happy to have individuals reach out through the website and out of [00:26:00] architecture.com to book time with us. We offer free introductory calls for half an hour to get to know you, to tell you a little bit more about what we do, and as I like to say, offer some unsolicited advice.

I certainly think that there are other ways to get involved. Partly, we are launching a book this November. It's possible that it will already be out by the time this podcast comes out. So if it is, it's available on Amazon and Audible and we have an ebook version and paperback and audiobook, and it's.

Just a really exciting opportunity to share some of these stories in a format outside of the podcast. For those of you who are interested to learn a little bit more, the trials and tribulations that have led to this business, and also ways in which you consider your future career, that book will be available and is a great resource.

We're always interested in hearing from people. Want to become mentors to the community as well, or who are interested in [00:27:00] potentially becoming advisors in supporting and contributing to and learning from each other as part of out of architecture. So please feel free to reach out. You can find us at [e-mail].

That's our email. Or you can find us on Instagram at out of architecture, or. My personal favorite platform, LinkedIn. Um, and of course you're welcome to come connect with myself and Aaron and the rest of the out of architecture team.

Defining an Architect
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Silvia: That's amazing. And thank you again for everything that you are doing with out of architecture and your platform, helping hundreds of people find their dream careers. and to close, I'm really curious to hear what does architecture mean to you, or in other words, how would you define being an architect?

Jake: To me, being an architect is about being someone who not only enjoys, but who seeks out learning opportunities and problems to solve. I don't know many professions where people are actively looking to make things better all of the [00:28:00] time. They're actively looking to improve their surroundings, both the physical surroundings as well as the context of what they're building.

I think architects are dreamers. And I think we get a bad rap for that because the artist side often produces things that are less reasonable, maybe less attainable. But I would say that as you consider your career, as you consider what it is that you bring to the table, there is something a. Phenomenal about a person who not only wants to embed themselves into a new discipline, but they want to glean information and then apply it towards progress, towards improving the context, both for others and for themselves.

Sometimes that's making things more beautiful, but sometimes that's creating a process or a flow that is more efficient or designing something in such a way that it actually accommodates a greater range of people or removes bias from some process or allows [00:29:00] someone to experience something that they never could have otherwise.

I think architecture has that power, and I think that power is not limited to the built environment.

Redefining Yourself
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Silvia: That makes me wanna ask one last question. Do you have any advice for someone who may be a little hesitant or a little daunted by the fact of recreating themselves, trying a new career or, , going out for job interviews again? What you said sounds so beautiful. I totally resonate with architects as dreamers and problem solvers and making the world better. , so how do we embrace that part rather than, let the fear take over

Jake: Well, Silvia, I think you said it really well yourself. We don't need to reinvent ourselves. We just need to embrace the aspects of architecture that often get buried when we enter the profession. I think it's very sad to say actually that many architects jokingly point to their professional practice and sort of lament the fact that they don't get the opportunity to create beauty in a pure sense [00:30:00] that it's driven by cost or client needs or deadlines or whatever that is.

There are many places in industries that don't have such strict limits, but even if there are limits and deadlines and things like that, there are also places that truly appreciate that level of competency and work and that level of drive. I would say that for anyone who is daunted by the fact that they might be changing their noun, changing their title, they should do the same exercise that we did at the beginning of the podcast.

They should try and determine what three words. Not what one word, what three words define them. And I think that it's interesting maybe to note that those three words might have changed in the last year or in the last two years, the last five years. Many people might consider themselves, first and foremost to be driven by being a hardworking contributor to a company, and then they have a family and they decide that of those three words, one of them almost certainly has to [00:31:00] be.

Or one of them has to be caretaker. I think the priorities shift and change, and that's completely okay. I would also say that for anyone who's daunted, simply realizing that it was never just one thing to begin with is a pretty easy way to get over that hurdle. Realizing that you've always been more than just an architect, and I say that knowing.

Just what an incredible achievement that it is to get licensed. And so many people hang their hat on that word entirely. So certainly it's not an easy thing to do to make such a big jump, but it's also not that big of a jump. It's not that big of a change.

Silvia: It was there all along. Thank you very much, Jake. This was an amazing conversation. I enjoyed it very much and I'm very excited to share it with everybody else.

Jake: Thank you, Silvia. I really appreciate the opportunity to get to chat with you, and I'm [00:32:00] so excited to see what you do with the rest of the series.

Outro
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Erin: Hey everyone. It's Erin from out of Architecture. If you find these stories inspiring and are looking for guidance, clarity, or just need someone to talk to about where you are in your career, please know that we offer 30 minute consultations to talk about what may be next for you. If you're interested, head to out of architecture.com/scheduling to book some time with us.

Jake: Hey everyone. It's Jake from Out of Architecture. We love hearing your stories, but we know there's more out there that we've still yet to experience. If you or someone you know would be a good fit for the podcast and has a story about taking their architecture skills beyond the bounds of traditional practice, we'd love to hear it.

Send us an email at [e-mail].

Silvia: Thanks for listening to our podcast, new episodes every two weeks. See you then