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Exploring What Decades of Expertise Can Do Outside a Traditional Tech Role
This video is featured in the Learning playlist.
Summary
For senior UX, design, and IA professionals, full-time employment is no longer the only viable option and, in some cases, may not even be the most realistic one. Whether the job has ended or is just starting to feel less secure, most people reach for the same thing: another full-time role at another company. The actual landscape is wider: fractional leadership, independent consulting, advisory and board work, portfolio careers, and others that most senior practitioners have considered in passing but not deliberately. Greg Baker is co-founder of DesignMap, a 20-year UX strategy firm, and author of the Substack The Sustainable Practice. He shares what he's noticed watching directors, VPs, and principal practitioners navigate the shift.
Key Insights
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Discretionary budgets for design partners in enterprises have vanished first, signaling tougher job markets ahead.
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Senior design professionals face longer job searches, sometimes spanning years, making multiple career strategies essential.
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Independent pathways include consulting, fractional leadership, product building, expert network calls, and teaching.
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Most successful independent practitioners combine multiple work pathways to create a flywheel effect.
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Business development is the hardest part of going independent, often taking half or more of your time.
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Reframing sales as helping others rather than selling makes business development more natural.
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An essential early exercise is re-describing yourself without your job title, focusing on problems you solve, not artifacts you deliver.
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Networking is the primary engine for finding independent work; cold outbound approaches rarely succeed in design.
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Testing your personal positioning through quiet market reconnaissance calls yields honest and actionable feedback.
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AI and automation tools can optimize administrative work, but building without early validation remains a common pitfall.
Notable Quotes
"I feel like there’s going to be less of these in-house roles inside big agencies in the future."
"If you go independent, you may have to spend half of your time or more selling your work."
"I’m not trying to sell things to people, I’m looking for people to help."
"Ask for work and you’ll get advice; ask for advice and eventually you’ll get work."
"Describing yourself without the word design in your title forces you to focus on actual problems you solve."
"Independent work runs on trust; cold outbound rarely works in our field."
"The hardest part isn’t changing diapers, it's everything else — the work around the work."
"Every gray hair means you can charge more because it’s knowledge and experience."
"The sale is the sample — how you do discovery calls shows them what working with you is like."
"It’s never been easier to build the wrong thing — you must get input before going too far."
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