Table of Contents
- Most UX designers ask the wrong career questions
- Why feedback isn't free (and why you keep asking for the wrong thing)
- UX portfolio feedback that went wrong
- How to ask for feedback that's useful:
- 1. Know your goal before you ask
- 2. Be prepared to hear what you don't want
- 3. Close the loop
- What "networking isn't begging" means for UX career growth
- The right way to ask for career help in your network
- For designers who struggle with small talk or have ADHD
- The hardest UX career questions most designers avoid
- Stop asking why, start asking how (Carla's POV)
- 3 hardest questions for UX career growth (Chris's POV)
- 1. What will it take?
- 2. Where is my energy high — and where is it low?
- 3. Given what I now know, would I do it again?
- How do UX designers know if they're good enough?
- The questions you ask shape the UX career you get
Do not index
Read time: under 9 minutes
Most UX designers ask the wrong career questions
Early in your career, you asked: why am I not getting promoted? Why am I so unlucky with jobs? Why don't I have a purpose?
Those aren't real questions. They're complaints wearing a question mark at the end.
I've been there. You sit with that feeling — the career isn't moving, the interviews keep ghosting you, your portfolio feels like it's just... existing — and you ask yourself some variation of "why is this happening to me?" The problem is, that question has no useful answer
In a livestream, Chris sat with Carla Fernandez (a designer with 25+ years of experience, 150+ one-on-one mentoring calls under her belt, and a career spanning 11 countries) — to break down how UX designers can ask better career growth questions. The kind that actually get you somewhere.
Let’s break it down in this blog!
👉 The insight in this blog traces back to a thoughtful conversation with Karla — here’s the full discussion:
Why feedback isn't free (and why you keep asking for the wrong thing)
Feedback has a cost. Every time you ask someone to review your portfolio, your case study, your career choices — they are spending their time, attention, and expertise on you.
Most designers don't respect that. Not because they're selfish, but because what they want isn't feedback at all.
They want validation.
Carla doesn't pull punches on this:
"If you are not ready to receive criticism from a robot, you are really not ready to receive criticism from other designers or from a senior designer that has seen so much."
She makes a great point. AI tools today can give brutally honest, useful feedback on a portfolio. If reading that makes you defensive, you're not ready for a senior designer to give you the real version.
UX portfolio feedback that went wrong
In the stream, Chris shared his own experience. A senior UX designer with 10+ years of experience, booked a paid portfolio critique. Chris gave the honest, specific, and grounded feebacks, based in real hiring experience. A week or two passes. Then the DM arrives: "You're entitled. You think you're better than me. I want my money back."
Before reacting, the feedback was shared with several senior designer friends. Their unanimous verdict: fair and helpful. Nothing personal, nothing vindictive.
That designer didn't want a critique. They wanted someone to say "this is great, you're ready". And when they didn't get that, they burned the bridge.
The lesson isn't to be defensive about giving feedback. It's this: if you're asking for feedback on your UX career growth, actually be open to what comes back. You don't have to follow every piece of advice. Your job is to filter signal from noise. But you have to listen first.
How to ask for feedback that's useful:
1. Know your goal before you ask
"Review my portfolio" gives the reviewer nothing to work with. They don't know your target role, your experience level, or what you're trying to communicate. You'll get generic feedback that helps nobody.
Instead, give them a brief before they start:
- What role are you targeting? (e.g. senior product designer at a B2B SaaS company)
- What stage are you at? (actively applying, just updating, preparing for a promotion conversation)
- What specifically do you want them to evaluate? (case study structure, storytelling, visual quality, overall positioning)
The more specific your question, the more useful the answer.
2. Be prepared to hear what you don't want
Before you hit send, ask yourself: if they come back and say your portfolio isn't ready, are you going to implement the feedback, or are you going to argue?
If it's the latter, you're not ready for feedback. You're ready for a hype session. And there's nothing wrong with that, just be honest about it. Ask a friend who'll be kind. Don't book a critique from someone with real hiring experience and then get defensive when they give you the real version.
One practical move: after you receive feedback, wait 24 hours before responding. Let the sting settle. Then come back and separate what's useful from what's noise.
3. Close the loop
This is the one most people skip, and it's why experienced designers stop giving feedback for free.
You asked. They carved out time. They thought carefully about your work. And then... silence. You implemented it (or didn't) and moved on. Two weeks later, send a short message. Tell them what you changed and why. Tell them what you decided not to change and why.
This does three things: it shows you took it seriously, it builds the relationship, and it makes them far more likely to help you again in the future.
What "networking isn't begging" means for UX career growth
Let's be real about what's happening out there.
Designers are sliding into DMs with: "Hi, do you have any work? I'm a UX designer with X years of experience..." followed by their entire resume in paragraph form. That's not networking. That's a cold call with no value proposition.
Carla has a blunt benchmark for whether you're actually networking:
"If you cannot really name three people in the last 90 days that you connected with and followed up and offered something — you are not networking."
Three people. Ninety days. With a follow-up. And something offered — an observation, a resource, a reaction to their post.
That's a low bar, and most designers aren't hitting it.
The right way to ask for career help in your network
There's a version of asking for job help that works. Carla describes it like this:
"I know how to do this, this, and this. When you find someone wishing for it, can you just drop me a message?"
That's it. That's the move. You're memorable. You're specific. You're not demanding anything in the moment. And you've given the other person an easy way to help you when the timing's right.
Compare that to "do you have any work for me?" — which puts the burden entirely on them, with no context, no specificity, and usually lands in the ignored-forever pile.
For designers who struggle with small talk or have ADHD
This came up in the live session and it's worth addressing directly. Not everyone finds networking intuitive. If small talk feels forced or you're neurodivergent, Carla's advice:
- Approach HR instead of other designers. HR people's literal job is to know who's hiring and what roles exist. Being direct with them — "I have X years of experience in Y, I'm looking for Z" — is appropriate and expected.
- Reframe networking as learning, not small talk. Ask other designers questions you actually care about: "How was your job search? What did you learn from it? How did you break in?" Those are real conversations. They don't require charisma, just curiosity.
Build a meaningful UX career and take control of your own career growth with UX Growth Playbook.
The hardest UX career questions most designers avoid
This is the good stuff. These are the questions that actually move careers, and the reason most designers avoid them is because they require real honesty.
Stop asking why, start asking how (Carla's POV)
Carla has run over 150 mentoring sessions with UX designers. The pattern she sees over and over:
"You are really not stuck because you lack opportunities. You are really stuck because you are not doing this internal work to think about your own wishes." — Carla Fernandez
The questions she'd push UX designers to sit with:
- How is my portfolio not communicating what it should?
- What can I stop doing to make room for what actually matters?
- What type of team, company, and work environment actually suits me?
- Why am I interviewing with companies I don't actually want to work at?
That last one is one most designers skip. If you're doing interviews just to practice, that's fine — but be honest about it. Going through full hiring processes for roles you'd never take is a waste of your time and theirs.
3 hardest questions for UX career growth (Chris's POV)
Here are 3 questions worth keeping in your back pocket. Not for a LinkedIn post. For a quiet hour when you're actually ready to think.
1. What will it take?
Whatever the goal — promotion, freelance, switching companies, building a product — just ask: what will it actually take? Not the sanitized version. The real version. Time, money, discomfort, relationships, sacrifice.
If you can't answer this, you don't actually have a goal yet. You have a wish.
2. Where is my energy high — and where is it low?
Another way to ask this: what feels like play, and what feels like a death sentence?
Your body doesn't lie. If you're constantly procrastinating on something, that's data. If something pulls you in even when you have no reason to do it, that's data too. Naval Ravikant frames it well:
"What feels like play to you, but looks like work to others?"
That's the intersection worth building toward.
3. Given what I now know, would I do it again?
Jason Fried (co-founder of Basecamp) uses this when evaluating employees after a year: "Given what I know today, would I hire this person again?"
Apply it to your own UX career: given what you know now, would you take that job again? Learn that tool again? Stay in that industry? If no — it's probably time to move. If yes — stop second-guessing yourself and go deeper.
How do UX designers know if they're good enough?
This question comes up every time, every mentoring call, every design community thread: am I good enough? Are my skills keeping up?
The first problem is the question itself. Good enough compared to whom? For what?
Carla's take reframes it completely:
"It doesn't matter which level you are, you can always be better. There is always someone better, and I love that, because then you have a threshold where you want to get."
The move isn't to chase a fixed "good enough" threshold. It's to find the designers whose work you admire, compare your finished work to their finished work (not their highlights to your process), and use that gap as a direction.
Even better — reach out. "I was inspired by this project you did. I created something similar. Could you give me feedback on it?" Carla points out that most designers at that level will respond, because you led with admiration and specific context.
The questions you ask shape the UX career you get
Everything in this conversation circles back to one idea: the questions you're asking right now are either building a career or keeping you in place.
Most UX designers aren't stuck because of lack of talent, lack of opportunity, or a bad job market. They're stuck because they're asking comfortable questions that don't require uncomfortable answers.
I love what Carla put it at the end of the session with Chris:
"Your best work should always be your last. If you cannot improve on the project you did three months ago, there is something wrong — you are not growing, you are not learning, you are not improving." — Carla Fernandez
That's the standard. Your last project is your benchmark. If you're not improving on it — you've stopped asking the right questions.
Your career isn’t shaped by the tools you use. It’s shaped by the questions you refuse to avoid.
Choose better questions.
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