How Kasia Approached her Professional Growth by Leveraging the Principles of Business Strategy
Kasia is a UX Designer at Ocado, an online retailer that prides itself on disruptive innovation, where she is revolutionizing speedy grocery delivery to customers in London. When Kasia isn’t working hard on delivering on both customers’ needs and appetites, she enjoys peace and quiet in the mountains with her partner, Wojtek.
By Katarzyna Małkiewicz, d.MBA alum, with contributions by Clare Goldblatt
In the midst of the peak pandemic in the fall of 2020, like many of us, I felt stuck. Not only could I no longer move and socialize freely as pre-pandemic times, but I felt that my professional growth was stagnating. It was frustrating--feeling as though I had no control over my life and future, both personally and professionally. Based on the work I did in the d.MBA, I decided to see myself as a “product” in need of a strategy overhaul.
“It was all about creating a high-level goal for myself. Who do I want to work with? Where do I want to work? How do I want to work?”
My partner, Wojtek, (who’s also a UX Designer and former colleague), and I created a UX Career Strategyzer Canvas in Miroverse, based on the crucial principle I learned in the d.MBA: a strategy is all about trade-offs. If I was going to see myself as a product and redesign my strategy, I was going to have to discover what aspects were non-negotiable for me professionally, and what aspects I could happily prosper without.
The first step was zeroing in on which values I want to focus on and what’s important for me in terms of values in the workplace. This exercise has a matrix of 30 values, like acceptance, success, wealth, and challenged me to select the 5 most important of these 30 values.
Based on these values, I then went to the long-term goal exercise, which zeroes in on where I’d like to see myself in the future.
Source: UX Career Strategyzer
I realized that I didn’t want to be so detached from what’s going on centrally in the business. I had been designing technical products for developers, which did teach me a lot, but ultimately, was far removed from decisions that directly affect the business. This exercise prompted me to think about pivoting within the company.
The next exercise was assessing the decisions we make when we change our roles. This includes characteristics such as where you work, which industry, what type of product, what type of user, what’s the company driven by, product stage, values, and design maturity.
“This exercise helped me come to the realization that when I changed jobs in the past, I wasn’t really changing. I might have had a different label, but at the very heart of it, all of the decisions were the same. I wasn’t aware of this before this exercise, so it was pretty eye-opening.”
For better quality of the image check out the UX Career Strategyzer.
The skills matrix was the next exercise to tackle. This prompted me to zero in on the 3 skills I’d like to develop the most. I ended up choosing business thinking, workshop facilitation, and communication and presenting.
“You can’t be a unicorn! You need to be intentional in what you choose to develop and what you choose to let go.”
The final exercise of day 1 of this workshop was creating a skills budget since none of us are unicorns and a true strategy is all about trade-offs. Day 1 is all about getting you to think about where you are in your career and where you’d like to be, whereas Day 2 really focuses on the trade-offs you’ll need to make in enriching your career. You can check out the exercises for each day here.
Now, my role has a completely different context than my previous one. I work for a startup within the company and am working on redesigning a brand-new value proposition for our customers, which brings me much closer to the heart of the main company goal. I feel more fulfilled and challenged in my new role, which neatly matches the work I did in the Career Strategyzer canvas.