How to Work Out What You Actually Want From Your Design Career

Everybody thinks they know what matters to them. Then you ask them, and they can't tell you.

Daniel Burka has stood at more career crossroads than most: Digg, Glitch (which became Slack), a company sold to Google, five years at Google Ventures, then eight years in global public health. Every time the stakes got high, he reached for the same thing: Job Rank, a weighted-scoring spreadsheet for choosing your next role. In this episode he opens the real template on screen and walks through exactly how it works, for designers, product people, and anyone in tech staring at a hard career decision.

We get into:

• Why the spreadsheet isn't really the tool: 90% of the value is being forced to write down what you value and rank it
  
  
• If everything's important, nothing's important: how the weighting forces the trade-offs a pros and cons list politely avoids
  
  
• The moment the sheet told Daniel something his ego didn't want to hear about a big role at Google
  
  
• How the tool travels with you: same values, different weights, as your life changes
  
  
• Where AI fits into a decision that should stay human
  
  

GET THE TEMPLATE
Free to copy, in Daniel's full write-up: https://www.hardproblems.com/articles...

LINKS
Hard Problems, helping designers and people in tech find work that matters: https://www.hardproblems.com

d.MBA, business education for designers: https://d.mba

00:15 – What this episode is about
02:10 – Daniel's career crossroads
04:15 – Job Rank: it's just a spreadsheet
04:40 – Writing down what matters to you
06:25 – Weighting each value (and why not everything's a 5)
09:50 – Scoring the jobs you're considering
11:20 – Scoring jobs that don't exist yet
13:10 – How to make your own job
16:50 – The Google role his ego wanted
19:10 – Why 90% of the value is just writing it down
21:10 – Hard Problems: work that actually matters
25:05 – Jobs that matte

What is d.MBA?

Business confidence for designers.