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