The Start-up Child

To celebrate my 7th ShopBack-birthday, I decided to journal down my thoughts for the sake of reminiscence, and in the hope of helping any designer with a similar journey. It’s not perfectly formatted, but it provides a peek into my experiences and personality 👩‍🎨

Age 19: The First Dose

⛰ Challenge: Polishing Basic Craft

I started my career at the young age of 19, fresh out of school with a Design Diploma. While most of my friends entered design agencies, I found my way to my first full-time job as a graphic designer at an E-commerce start-up, ZALORA. That’s how my adventure with start-ups begins!

Age 21: The New Beginning

⛰ Challenge: Absorbing domain knowledge

Along the way, I chanced upon a new opportunity and role in an even smaller start-up, ShopBack. On the first day in our tiny office, I made a friend: Mr. Imposter Syndrome, who couldn’t stop whispering in my head the glaring irony that I was hired as a UI/UX designer but knew almost nothing about it.

It was time to get my hands dirty and embrace the fun of learning a new domain from scratch! I designed my very first responsive website, did my first user research, then spent 3 days redesigning all over again.

Here are some things I did to speed up my learning:

1. Sit beside an expert: The fastest way to learn in a class is to ask questions, the fastest way to get answers is to sit beside the teacher. I planted myself beside my CPO (Hi Bryan!) and bugged him with unending questions.
2. Video tutorials and books are your best friends: Thank God for The Internet (reference IT crowd joke). Resources are right at your fingertips!

Age 23: The Glaring Insufficiency

⛰ Challenge: Fighting silo and isolation

I considered myself fortunate to be exposed to many “first-attempts” during this period: designing an app, designing a browser extension, speaking at events… all these unique experiences constantly placed me outside of my comfort zone and enriched my growth. These were the accent colours in the painting; only the highlights.

During this phase, the product design team was a team of 2, my designer partner-in-crime (Hi Lingjun!) and myself. The team needed to grow. So I agreed to shoulder more responsibilities of hiring, managing, and attempting to build a team. Remember my old friend Mr. Imposter Syndrome? Yeah, he’s still very present (in fact he’s also here while I’m writing this post), doing what he does best, showing me the fact that I have no clue how to build a team…

Usually these types of stories lead up to success. But ha! Plot twist, I failed.

Every designer I had hired had left, and all other attempts at hiring had failed. On top of that, I felt stuck between growing as a designer and as a manager too. Confused, disappointed, back at square one being the only designer left in the team. I thought to myself: Sam, you’ve finally hit a wall.

Here are some things I learned on hindsight:

1. Get out, speak to people, ask for help: Tap into the global community of designers. Everyone is friendlier than you think! Talk to people from different domains and levels of seniority. Otherwise how would you meet amazing mentors? (Hi Mike, Hi Monika!)
2. Don’t try to hog the spotlight: It’s not only about you, it’s also about the good of the company and the team. The sooner I admitted my shortcomings, the quicker we found resolution that amounted to greater impact for the company.
3. Appreciate people that grow for you: No one owes you a career. Blaming others for stumbling will get you nowhere. Leaders that listen, admit their mistakes, and improve are rare to find (Hi Justin!). If you find them, keep them close!
4. Mental Health is very important: A good mind is important for a good life (and of course, career). De-stigmatise going for therapy. Learn ways to cope with stress.

Age 27: The Composure

⛰ Challenge: Perfect Balance of Life

After the storm of countless ultimatums, heavy-hearted conversations about leaving and sleepless nights of self-loathing, there was the clear blue sky of composure. My struggle birthed valuable traits: Patience, Empathy, and the hardest of all to attain, Humility.

For the first time after graduating at 19, I rested with a month-long sabbatical. Finally having time to get to know myself: I’m Samantha. I enjoy long walks with my dog, and reading in the park. I’m an introvert who learned to converse through acting classes. I’m bad at some things and also good at many others. I’ll spare you cliché epiphanies; there’re enough self help books around.

This actualisation that my weaknesses will not make me less than what I already am, freed my mind from spending time worrying about getting things wrong, and gave me composure to embrace growth and failure. I came back from my sabbatical with a new leader, team, and vibe 😎.

Fast forward to the past 6 months, post-sabbatical, I’ve been excitedly growing with the team. I’ve also adopted my new identity as the Dinosaur Designer of the ShopBack Design Team 🦖.

5 bits of advice that I’ve tried (and benefited from):

I’m not a sage so take it with a pinch of salt! 🧙️

1. Relax your face: Take 5-min breaks to loosen up your shoulders and smile. Your body language and posture can really change your mood!
2. Identify your red zones: Sports coaches identify periods where their athletes’ performance will be affected by exhaustion, overtraining or injury. Adopting the same strategy for career, identify your own red zones in a year, and intentionally schedule for rest.
3. Ask yourself “What’s the worst it can get?”: If you’re an anxious person like me, break down your thoughts to identify the worst-case scenario. It helps me reduce the mental fog, and puts things into an objective perspective.
4. The sweet spot between fear & excitement is a good identifier of what you’re interested to grow in: it’s similar to the feeling you get before a roller coaster ride (assuming you like them): you’re a little nervous, yet also very excited. That’s how I identify challenges to take on!
5. 5% more in the room: Whenever you feel like an imposter, remember that everyone has something to share. As long as you have a different experience than someone else in the room, you probably have 5% more unique material. So, go forth and share-th(?)…

Special thanks to the ever-patient Shantanu Basrur / Shanty for editing.

If you’ve stayed till the end, know that I’m very thankful for your time. I hope you could take a thing or two away from my experiences! Being really young in my design career, I’ll probably look back at these 10 years later and feel slightly embarrassed — like reading your old posts on myspace. Anyway, I’m always excited to meet new people, so hit me up for coffee anytime!