Meet Victoria Kim (she/her), Product Designer @ Utopia Labs and former Content Writer, Sponsorship Coordinator, and Sponsorship Director (2021–2022).
Welcome to the fourth and final installment of the nwPlus Alumni Spotlights! Follow along to learn about Victoria’s step-by-step journey into product design, a life-changing hackathon win, and how Sponsorship at nwPlus has shaped her career.
Note: responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Name: Victoria Kim (she/her)
Role: Product Designer @ Utopia Labs
Previous Roles in nwPlus: Sponsorship Coordinator, Content Writer, Sponsorship Director (2021–2022)
How did you leverage your diverse experiences to land non-technical roles in tech — like internships such as a Technical Writer at SAP during your undergrad, to your current role as a product designer?
My answer slightly differs depending on the stage of my career. My first role was at SAP, where I was part of a technical writing team focused on communications and writing documentation for other developers. Because it was my first internship, I focused on the things I was intrinsically good at — which revolved around communication, writing, and being able to deconstruct difficult concepts and explain it for normal people to understand. It turned out that was basically all you needed to do for a technical writing role, so that’s how I leveraged my skill sets to land that first internship.
Thinking about where I am today (product design), I was able to build all of my internship experiences to lead me to where I am. I started out with technical writing and I jumped into marketing and communications, then product marketing, and finally product design. It’s sort of like an iterative process where you build up skills as you go and use these for your job.
You recently transitioned to a product design role at Utopia Labs after initially joining as their product marketing manager — what led you to make the switch and how have you seen yourself grow and evolve through this transition?
I knew I wanted to do design when I saw my senior designer spend an entire day mapping out the date picker logic for a product. I was in person with him in SF at the time and he was taking me through his logic — iterations and iterations of the same date picker, like “If you press on this date, what is it going to look like?”.
You’re given the time to explore something and distill a concept to its simplest form in order to figure out a solution to something, which led to my initial inclination and interest in design.
Because I’m at a startup, I had the amazing opportunity to take on different tasks, even if it wasn’t technically within my discipline. Product marketing is funny because if you’re not shipping a lot, there isn’t a lot to market. In between those stages, I was given the opportunity to lead UX research projects, dive into user feedback, and distill what we think is really important for us to improve right now. Through that process, I realized, “This is so fun, but I’m not actually the one that gets to implement the experience”. I was able to find out everything that we need to improve, but I wanted to take that last step where you can actually figure out a solution to those problems.
You’re also super involved in the web3 space — with a current venture, Iris — which was also a sponsor at cmd-f 2023. Could you tell us how Iris came to be and what it was like getting to sponsor a hackathon you once organized?
Iris is actually part of a really fun story! After [my friends and I] did a hackathon, we were really excited to continue working with each other, so we decided to do another hackathon. We made a bet where if we won this hackathon, we would take the $20,000 prize and go to Europe for an in-person hackathon. I thought that the possibility of that happening was like, 0.001% — but then we ended up winning. Everyone was new to Web3 at the time and we ended up learning the technology really fast. Yes, there was a higher learning curve, but there was a lot more forgiveness towards what we were building.
After a few months had passed, we ended up sponsoring nwPlus and it was very surreal. I remember stepping into cmd-f — it took me a second to take off my organizer lens and just be present as an alumni. I think it really helps you put things into perspective and see how far you’ve come in that moment. I’m so glad to have been able to be part of cmd-f in that way!
What is one piece of advice you’d give to your younger university self, or an aspiring product designer/marketer?
For my younger university self, I would say to lean into your curiosity as much as possible.
There was so much pressure to grind out your internships and to start looking for a job. It was as if everyone wanted you to not be at your university as much as possible. I wish I could tell myself to just learn, figure out what interests you, and lean into that as much as possible. Learning skills and becoming employable will come later. I say this while acknowledging that you need a level of privilege to be at a place where you can just be curious, which was a lot of pressure for me too.
As I’m older now, I’m just realizing how much better you are at your work if you’re working on something that you’re actually curious about and interested in. Those two things are just inevitably intertwined. You can still grind out Leetcode, interviews, and find a job that you might not be happy in and still make a lot of money. But at some point, I think you’ll realize it’s hard to keep going that way, and the best thing to do is to be true to yourself and work on something that you’re actually interested in and curious about.
You wore many hats in your time at nwPlus, from Sponsorship Director to Content Writer, which role do you think has had the most impact on you and your career journey, and why?
Definitely sponsorship. I always tell everyone, regardless of what they want to do with their career, that sponsorship is such a cool experience because you’re essentially trying to sell something but you’re not necessarily in a sales position. You practice being able to talk about something concisely and get someone interested in it, and you go through the entire end-to-end process of doing the cold outreach, to getting their interest, to actually coordinating the logistics of their partnership with you.
That [type of] experience is relevant to any work that you do, from getting stakeholder buy-ins to working with your collaborators. A lot of those skills translated really well into my other internship roles. Honestly, to this day, the only reason I can write a really professional email is because of the hundreds of emails that I’ve sent at nwPlus. I also want to say that every role in nwPlus plays such a fundamental part to the actual hackathon. Whatever you put into the role is what you’ll get out of it.
What’s your favorite memory from your time in nwPlus?
My favorite memory is from nwHacks 2019 — we were preparing 3 A.M. noodles, and we realized that if we all plugged in our kettles in the same outlets, we would cause a power outage. Everyone was running around the building boiling water, trying to make enough noodles for a hundred people. I remember it was hours of us boiling water in a kettle and putting it into the cups. Everyone was losing their minds and it was just such a funny experience (laughs).
Those moments of camaraderie and feeling like, “we’re really in this together” were my favourite.
I also think hackathon organizing days are my favourite because on the day of the hackathons, it doesn’t matter what role you are in, you’re just a hackathon organizer. Everyone is just there to collaborate and to make sure that this thing that you’ve been working on for the past few months actually goes well — and I love that energy.
Describe your experience in nwPlus in 3 words or phrases. Feel free to be creative with your answer!
- Collaborative
- Exciting
- Notion (one of the tools that nwPlus members use)
What’s another question you wish I’d asked you? How would you have answered?
I would have asked myself if I was scared to be in Arts when I was joining nwPlus. I bring that up because I think it’s a very common thing within UBC for non-technical folks to join nwPlus. I was definitely scared and even a little bit self-conscious at some points — but you quickly realize how nice the culture at nwPlus is.
Where can everyone learn more about what you are working on or connect with you online?
If you want to talk a little bit more about career stuff, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn!
LinkedIn: Victoria Kim
Twitter: @victoriakimse
Instagram: @victoriakims
That concludes our nwPlus Alumni Spotlights! Thank you for reading and to everyone who’s made this series possible. Check out our Instagram and TikTok @nwplusubc for a short form video format of this interview—and all the previous installments!
Written by Daphne Tian and Jennifer Shui, edited by Victoria Lim
