Being an Engineer

S1E51 User Experience & Digital Product Design | Caden Damiano

November 13, 2020 Caden Damiano Season 1 Episode 51
Being an Engineer
S1E51 User Experience & Digital Product Design | Caden Damiano
Show Notes Transcript

What does it mean to be a user experience designer? Join our session with Caden Damiano to learn how it’s much more than simply graphic design, but rather the responsibility for architecting the start to finish experience a user goes through during their interaction with physical and digital products. Also learn Caden’s brilliant method for learning deep insight from key thought leaders by having one-on-one conversations with these individuals. Finally, follow Caden’s design journey through his podcast, “The Way of Product Design”.

The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.testfixturedesign.com and www.designtheproduct.com 



About Being An Engineer

The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.

The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us

Presenter:

The Being an Engineer Podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people, resources, and opportunities. Enjoy the show.

Caden Damiano:

Honestly, these like thought leaders, they they want to help. They want to help as many people as possible, if they're just not scalable. And if you're able to scale a conversation, ask them some more questions, and then they're able to share that to people that follow them. They're totally happy on the podcast.

Aaron Moncur:

Hello, and welcome to the Being an Engineer Podcast. Our guest today is Caden Damiano who is a user experience designer working in digital mediums. Caden has this to say about himself, which I really like. He researches like a journalist, thinks like a businessman, and designs like a creative technologist. That's phenomenal. Caden, welcome to the show.

Caden Damiano:

Hey, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Aaron Moncur:

All right, start off by telling us just a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Caden Damiano:

Yeah, so got into digital product design in a very roundabout way, I'll give the brief version. I remember being interested in creative technology. And being creative technologist, when I saw that first Iron Man movie in theaters, just seeing this character, this eccentric character, just tinkering in his garage, and designing and machining and

Aaron Moncur:

And building amazing technology in like a week,

Caden Damiano:

Yeah. After a montage, he's able to make like a suit of armor, which I thought was really cool. Like, a montage is long enough to do that.

Aaron Moncur:

Exactly.

Caden Damiano:

And so I always wanted to make cool stuff, that creative energy is manifest itself and videography. Front end coding, a little bit of like engineering and information systems education. After four switches in my major, I finally found a, an interaction design digital product design major at the college, I went to UVU, who did it and that's the first bachelor's degree in user experience design in Utah at least. And I think in as far as like the country is concerned and the country for bachelor's degrees, and

Aaron Moncur:

Really the first one in the country?

Caden Damiano:

Not the first one the country, but it's definitely the first one in Utah and it's probably one of the first in the country, because a lot of a lot of people don't have a degree in this. They either, like, pivot in from graphic design, or they have a master's degree in human computer interaction. Those were the traditional paths where now there's actually programs that are developing curriculum around this very new and specific profession. Now it's like becoming a lot more common, but I was very lucky to be part of the first cohort of the first bachelor's at least in Utah. But yeah, just visiting other colleges and talking to other students and stuff. They were very surprised when I told them I was actually like, focused in on that. And but yeah, it was definitely gave me a leg up. It allowed me to be first because it is very saturated market right now. But did that worked at a genealogy software company called Family Search for about a year and then now my progressive leasing making digital lease to own products, allowing you to know people's like, challenge, credit challenge consumers the ability to? Yep, just please don't stuff. Companies like Best Buy, Overstock, people that can't get normal credit cards and stuff, like we help them buy stuff that we want, and not and I'm also the host of the way way of product design, which is a podcast where I just talk with designers, engineers, product managers, mostly in the digital space, but every now and then I branch out to the physical space. Just talk about how I get better at making products that people love.

Aaron Moncur:

One thing that struck me as I was looking through your LinkedIn profile was that it seems to me you are a voracious learner, that you just seize every opportunity to learn something. You talked a little bit about about your formal educational background. What what other avenues Have you gone down to supplement that formal education?

Caden Damiano:

Yeah, so one of so a lot of people I always try to tell people this when they're looking at, planning, like their ambitions and stuff like that in their careers, is to realize, like, where you got lucky in life, like, what the circumstances you were born, like, who you have access to and stuff, and some people have access to trust funds and money. And dark. Yeah, like Tony Stark that, it'd be let's be honest here, he didn't, he didn't, he didn't earn it. But there are also people that have like really great networks, like their dad knows a lot of people. For me, I just inherited my dad's audible account, and he buys a ton of books. So I had the luxury of being able to listen to all these books that he would buy. And he's a voracious learner as well. So getting that example. As always, just taught me to that there's just value in learning and like, trying to learn as much as possible and that spare no expense to invest in yourself and for me, I am definitely like earlier in my career, and a lot of like, of my peers are all talking about how they're investing in Tesla stock and 401(k)s and making money in the downturn, and I'm really putting all my extra money into investing myself because if I'm a better producer, and I'm better at my craft, I'm more valuable and I'll make more money and then I can start investing in stocks. So audio books, I just recently paid for the coaching services and like a course called shift nudge, which is a user interface design course. I do a lot of my learning outside of like traditional curriculums, MasterClass, anything that's interesting. So yeah.

Aaron Moncur:

What's master class I know MasterClass is, but some people might not actually subscribe to it for a while. It's been a little while since I've been on it. But I thought it was a really cool platform and a great idea to tell us a little bit about what MasterClass is and what you've learned there?

Caden Damiano:

Well, MasterClass, let me know if you want to sponsor me now because I'm gonna gush over you for a little bit. So that's a course. It's a it's like a, let's say it's like it's like Udemy. But like, with famous people being the teachers, that's probably the best way to put it. Like CEOs of Starbucks, Malcolm Gladwell. Literally, it's the best people that are at the top of their field and very highly produced. Well written curriculum like courses, like there's Frank Gehry on architecture, there's that Malcolm Gladwell on like, writing and research and Gordon Ramsay on cooking.

Aaron Moncur:

It's really varied, isn't it? It's, I mean, Steve Martin was on there, teaching comedy, like, it's just so many different things you can learn.

Caden Damiano:

Yeah, and it's just, that's what I like about it. When I'm doing personal development. I like to keep my product design education to the podcast, and maybe some books. But I really think having like a broad liberal arts background, where you're learning about writing and math and cooking and gives you a more holistic view on the world, which actually makes you a better engineer designer. Because what I've learned about architecture, like physical building design has helped me become a better digital product designer, and vice versa. And then, Steve Martin's comedy course taught me how to interact with my co workers better and be better at telling stories and yeah

Aaron Moncur:

Very cool. So tell me a little bit more about your podcast, The Way of Product Design, how did you get into podcasting?

Caden Damiano:

So I started in my last year college with a friend Cam Sackett, who is a very talented designer, he works for a couple, a very well known agencies Reform Collective and Rally Interactive. And they work on some of the probably some of the coolest, like digital experiences for big companies like Toyota and stuff like that. And the the impetus for it was we were networking, we realized really quick that the degree wasn't going to give us a job, unfortunately, because of how competitive it is to get into design and hiring junior designers is very risky. So it's very, like hard to break in. It's like, we thought a bit like acting like you have to break in yeah, make your own things. So a lot of it is relationships, being visible in the community. And we just wanted to meet as many directors and like leaders of design as possible to learn from them, a steep learning curve and we found out that if we just ask them, Hey, can I have an hour? It's like me going to you and saying like, Hey, can I pick your brain for an hour? You're like, Ah, I'm a busy guy, I run a business and stuff like that. And that's, that's not going to fly. But if you say something like, oh, we'd be on my podcasts, we found that people would say yes, more. Because, you're, you're giving them value to them. Because honestly, these like thought leaders, they, they want to help, they want to help as many people as possible, if they're just not scalable. And if you're able to scale a conversation, ask them some more questions, and then they're able to share that, to people that follow them. They're totally happy on the podcast. So it was initially a really like selfish like, strategy to grow our network and meet interesting people and have these conversations with people that are really hard to access. And then from there, it just turned into just an extension of like, my personal brand, my friend eventually moved on from the project, because podcasting, like you probably know, is very, is a part time job. And now I just I just keep doing it. Because I just gives me access to so many interesting people and people I admire, I get to meet some people have been falling ever since I just started learning about this. And yeah, I'm just not going to stop because it's so it's just so much fun to be a part of the community like this, and really share and people like talk to me at like meetups before COVID, when we'd actually like meet up and talk in person. And they tell me like how, like an episode really resonated with them and help them help change their perspective. And that's great. For me, that's a huge success success metric is that I'm creating content that like helps people.

Aaron Moncur:

I found the exact same thing to be true that it's really hard to get time with some of these people. But if you frame it in a way, that's I'm going to help scale you I hadn't thought about that specific way of articulating it before. But that's a really good way to put it, I can help scale you because you're right, they do want to help, but if it's just one on one help, that's not so attractive. But if it's one to, 100 or one to 500, or one to 10,000, that's a lot more more attracted to some of these key thought leaders. So, can you tell us maybe you've interviewed all these key thought leaders, these these designers? Or have there been any, like golden nuggets that you've learned that you can share with us?

Caden Damiano:

Oh, man, that's, I mean, that's a fair question. It's also a very tough question. Because there's so many, I think, the biggest golden nugget and the culmination of everything I've learned, and now it's really changed my perspective on life. In my career, I started the podcast being in like a hustle mindset. And thinking that I need to work hard on this, I need to eventually get to weekly episodes. And just meeting these people I admire the most successful interesting people I've met on the podcast, I put on this pedestal, but then when I met them, they they had this very calm demeanor. And that they didn't take themselves too seriously. And that they really were just about performing and having skin in the game. Because there's a lot of people that want to be the smartest person in that. Remember, they don't want to take responsibility for when things go wrong. They want to give advice, but they don't want to execute and the best people I've met, execute, and they don't take themselves too seriously, which means that they're low ego and they're able to collaborate well with people. Another thing I learned while going through the interviews is there's there's hard skills that there are best practices and there's ways to do your job and to, in your guys's space, it's all quickies on your CAD software and like workflow, stuff like that. That's all great. No, but really, at the end of the day, like great business is conducted and products are made when you are able to work well with the team that you're on. So yeah, it comes down to kindergarten skills. I interviewed a UX author thought leader, Jonah totally and he uh, he always goes towards like when he talks about like projects, like consulting projects. He never talks about like, how many how like, how many design thinking workshops he ran and are like, Oh, the case study of this project is like, oh, and I made him do some, some posting exercises and stuff like that He always talks about how there was a stakeholder that was a stick in the mud and was really concerned. And he just got in the room with them and said, Hey, what's going on? Like, what? What's making you so concerned? And you'd resolve the concern and the root cause and then that unclogged the project. And then you could do all the best practice stuff for the hard skills. And for me, it mean, he's like labeling the reality that, we always tell people to, oh, well just be professional at work. Don't bring your personal stuff at work. And we get mad at people who are cantankerous or like having a bad day. So they're uncooperative, and projects, and people who just complain about it. And think like, Oh, well, I can't, I can't do like what Google's doing, because like, the people on my company don't work that way. And that's just not true. Honestly, we're working with humans, they're, part of being in this line of work, knowledge work and creative technology is going to have to revolve around like 50% your job, if not more, is the soft skills to help resolve concerns to negotiate scope in terms if you have those skills, you're like, it may be if you're a B player, and all the hard skills required to do your job, but you're an A player in establishing scope, establishing expectations really. Like you're going to win a lot more because you could be just not good enough to be good at your job. You also have to be good at helping other people do their job as well and helping bring out the best in them and that requires negotiations off skills. That's another good masterclass I took it was the the Chris boss negotiation masterclass, that answer that was a really good one, he wrote the book never split the difference. Yeah, I found that those skills are what make my life a lot easier. And then you can go to me, and I'm pretty sure you could go to any company, if you have those soft skills, if you go to any company doesn't have to be like a well established company. And you can have a good time and fun at work. Because even though some people might be having a bad day, or, or they might be uncooperative and have some really bad, soft skills, you're able to work around those kinks, and help dig out their concerns and resolve them and make them feel like they're listened to. And then they're happy, you're happy, do good work.

Aaron Moncur:

I tend to agree, I would rather work with someone who is pretty good with the technical skills, but has an excellent attitude, just really pleasant to be around and to work with. Then the person who's really, really gifted tactically, but is just a jerk to work with. Of course, ideally, I'd rather find a person that has both sides, right. But given the choice, I'd take the person who's just pleasant to work with.

Caden Damiano:

Yeah, that's the challenge, right?

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah. Tell me about your design process. Like what when you're when you're starting a new design? What mental checklists are you going through in your mind?

Caden Damiano:

Yeah, so it really depends. I compartmentalize it by scope and risk level, right. So you have to establish scope every time. If it's low risk, like changes to messaging or copy, our small layout changes. I mean, in software, we have the luxury of iterating. Because it's it's bits

Aaron Moncur:

All ones and zeros.

Caden Damiano:

Yep, we could just update an experiment as much as we want. So we that's why we have like the Aagile process and physical proxxon you have to flesh things out before you spend a bunch of money on manufacturing. Right. So we, I do consider it a luxury because you don't get that luxury in as much in physical products. But making sure that you establish scope, if it's low risk, high risk, high risk, meaning that you could really break revenue streams if you mess up. And then also is it like, then, like my parameters and criteria change if it's an existing product, finding leverage points. By leverage points, I mean, identifying points in the user experience where you can get the most the biggest ROI so it's like, if I make a change here, like is that going to be leveraged towards like better results? If it's a new product, and I learned a lot about, um... I learned this from physical product design. James Dyson, who's like one of my product design heroes, he's all about approaching engineering from the design perspective. And so if it's a new product project, I like to throw myself into the engineering discovery as well, not because I can code and engineer myself, I understand it. And I could speak to it conversationally. But if I have a cool idea I, I don't like to depend on unless I have a good engineer who's also a creative technologist. And they're willing to like, push the limits and like, learn how to do stuff they've never done before. But yeah, I like to, I like to learn the engineering. So if I have a good idea, and I've done discovery work, and I see like business viability, and I see that this this feature, or this product experience would provide a ton of value to our customers. I figured out how to architect the back end with the engineers. And Dyson said, that like, once you have the idea, you could learn anything in six months, like you have plenty of time to learn the technology once you have the idea. And just having that mindset of taking the best things about design thinking and then applying it that lends to the engineering process, then you actually end up designing better products.

Aaron Moncur:

I like what you said about leverage reminds me of a book I wrote read recently The 80-20 Principle, I don't remember the author's name right moment. We've all

Caden Damiano:

Richard Koch?

Aaron Moncur:

I think that's right. Yeah.

Caden Damiano:

Yeah.

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah. Have you read that book?

Caden Damiano:

Yeah, I love Richard's work. Star Principle, Super Connected.

Aaron Moncur:

Okay. Well, we've all heard of The 80-20 Principle and but reading this book, it forced me to reassess what am I working on every day? And what are the things that are actually having an impact which, if you're thinking about that, you also have to ask yourself, what is my goal? What am I actually trying to accomplish? So it really has brought a lot of clarity I think to what I do, that's been a really helpful exercise. I highly recommend that book. Let me take a real quick break here and share with the listeners that the testfixturedesign.com is where you can learn more about how we help medical device engineering teams who need turnkey custom test fixtures or automated equipment to assemble, inspect, characterize or perform verification or validation testing on their devices. Today we're speaking with Caden Damiano. Caden, I feel like I jumped into the podcast with without taking a little bit deeper look into, what it means to be a digital product designer, most of the people listening to this podcast are mechanical engineers, or chemical engineers, or electrical engineers, some software engineers, but maybe a lot of us don't have a really good understanding for for what that means to be a digital product designer. Can you share with us maybe one or two projects and some of the details about what you did, the tactical details what you did on that project to earn that title Digital Product Designer?

Caden Damiano:

Yeah, so digital product designer. It's definitely a new new career as like of the last 10 years. In a very simplified version, it's you're working on digital touchpoints. So those can be

Aaron Moncur:

Touch points. What's a touchpoint for you, in your definition?

Caden Damiano:

Yeah, so touchpoint is something that customer, it's an interface that customer interacts with. Right?

Aaron Moncur:

Physical interaction?

Caden Damiano:

Yeah. So it could be like the screen of your laptop, the screen of your phone? It could be an Amazon Alexa, and it's the voice interface that you're talking to.

Aaron Moncur:

Okay. Any interaction with technology? Not necessarily a physical?

Caden Damiano:

Yeah, exactly. And those lines are blurring a lot right now. I mean, you could see that in self service kiosks, at your grocery stores. No, there's a mix of physical and digital a gas station pumps, right? They have like the physical hardware to swipe your watch over for Apple Pay. And that influences what's on the screen. So what Yeah, so like a digital product designer, is we design, it's more like software design, and you're designing software to power, power, certain, empower people in certain like workflows and tasks and stuff like that. So it's like, how you have one physical product like the iPhone, but there's always like new things coming out where you can control thing using this one device. As you can download the app to automate your home, like smart home, and that's something I'm actually really interested in developing in my career is getting into smart home devices. Another thing that experienced designers like digital product design, there's a big facet of it like UX designers user experience. There's an aspect of it called service design. So you're designing. So like for ancestry, you're planning out that whole experience of the DNA test, like what emails, do they see the packaging on the box? How do they prepare the spit sample and, like, repackage it and send it back to you. And so I also do a lot of projects like that service design projects like, but I do work a lot on digital interfaces, and progressive leasing, like the the application to qualify for lease, like the data entry that leads to us giving them $1 amount that they could use to go shop. But another project that we have on the horizon is what happens if they need to return that product? And what does that return experience look like? And there's physical aspects of that journey, like packaging? And yeah

Aaron Moncur:

It's a lot more than just graphic design, right? You're the architect of this entire experience that that the user has, whether it's dealing with the graphics, or, like you said, interacting with packaging, or that sort of thing.

Caden Damiano:

Yeah, it's a very broad, and it's still being fleshed out on like, what you can do, because there are, there are elements of visual design best practices that have come from the graphic design world, but then there's like, designing the architecture of software and designing the database structure, like how, but not looking at it on like how, from the perspective of, 'Okay, how we're gonna make this database and how I'm gonna code this database?' It's going to be like, 'Okay, how we design this database is going to influence the customer's experience downstream.' If we make it dense, or we ask them for too much information, then so for example, if the database is requiring you to give your credit card in an initial application to see if you prequalify, someone's going to be like, well, this is sketchy, I'm not going to finish this application. And then you see conversion rates go down, because and the mental model, so there's like a psychology aspect to it as well, like, customers, mental models expect the collection of certain data and certain parts of their flow their workflows, so usually, you'd expect a credit card to be collected when they're checking out and they've already decided to convert.

Aaron Moncur:

So like, so you're getting into things like behavioral science as well, right, understanding that the mind of the consumer and how they interact with things.

Caden Damiano:

Yeah. So we're not engineers, in the sense that like, we're, we are, yeah, it's more of an I would say it's more of an architect when I explain it to my family members who have no idea what it is, because it's really, it's a new job, right? I just tell them, like only construction industry, there is an architect who plans the layout of the house, there's purpose to the room. So like, for example, when you're planning out a house, like what do you see when you open the front door? Like, a bench to take your shoes off a closet, put your coat in? And then you go into the living room? And there's a TV entertainment center, there's a sectional and you're like, yeah, this makes sense. And then in the corner, there's a toilet. Right? And that doesn't back like that does not make sense for that to be there. And it's really an up like, obtrusive to the the experience of enjoying your home, right? Because you don't want to have like a toilet where

Aaron Moncur:

So you're the guy that makes sure there's no toilet in the living room from...

Caden Damiano:

Our kitchens or yeah. Stairs, yeah.

Aaron Moncur:

Great way to explain it.

Caden Damiano:

Yeah. So I do that for digital products is I I think about the human aspect. And then I work with the engineers to make sure that the technologies are feasible

Aaron Moncur:

Is project that you can share, that maybe it was a big success or something you really learned a lot and share a few of the details about that project.

Caden Damiano:

Yeah, so I think a common problem with like older companies is that they hire a lot of software engineers, but they don't bring on design. Because the value design is it's slowly being accepted that like companies that invest in staff that think about these things are usually very valuable. Think Apple, think Amazon. Amazon has a very great user experience, it might not be like the get does, like visual Graphic Design Awards for the design of their site or anything like that. But like from like UX is getting from point A to point B, a customer wants couch in their house, you could go on Amazon app and get a couch sent to your house with minimal, with minimal, like headaches or anything like that. Or if you want to return something with Amazon, they make it so painless. Like so. And that's why they're so valuable is because they've invested in people to think about these things. And so, I progressive leasing is 20 year old company, we the legacy, there's this monolith of legacy code that is preventing us from unifying the consistent workflow. So that led to duplicate workflows. Like the application experience was duplicated, like four, four or five nose 20 times actually was 20 times there's 20 different versions of the same workflow, because the architecture because the the, how we architected our databases and stuff didn't recognize people as customers, they were numbers, their IDs in a database. And that meant that if you wanted to shop around and we just started rolling out e commerce products, where the behaviors of an e commerce shop are totally different than someone in a physical store where they've like they've driven to the store, they've decided to convert they're on e commerce, there's a lot more shopping around, and mood see people applying like five different times within an hour going through like the same thing entering their social and turning in like all this, this personal information that's pretty high set high sensitivity over and over again. And so I worked on with the engineering team to re architect how our system like what would an application look like with a centralized customer database. So like a customer centric view of the application, they enter in the information once they get saved to the customer profile. And then if they want to shop around, they can log in, quickly reapply without having to fill out an application again. And that will give them the flexibility to shop around because that's what they want, as shown through their behaviors. They want to shop around, they want to consider multiple options, and they're treating us like purchasing power when we're just an application that's very linear and inflexible. Yeah, so that allows them to perform the tasks and the jobs to be done that they want to do and jobs to be done is just a framework to like look at innovation, right? People there's people don't like, for example, have you heard of jobs to be done like that framework?

Aaron Moncur:

No.

Caden Damiano:

So great book, Competing Against Luck. It's written by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen. And he's led to this, it's very popular and the digital products on space, but jobs to be done is, you don't want to drill but you want to like you don't want a quarter inch drill that you want a quarter inch hole. So the story isn't about your product. It's what your product allows people how it allows people to get to point B. And so a really interesting example of jobs to be done is Safe Boto, which is a African version of Uber. So there's in Uganda, in Kenya, there's these taxis called boda bodas, which are just motorcycle taxis. They're not the safest eggs. They're not it's not the safest experience. It's really interesting. But what people realized. So like, a lot of these years, these European people, they started this company like, Oh, it's really unsafe. We will give these riders helmets will get make sure that they are background check before they get on the service. And people want to love the product because it's safe. And they quickly found out that Ugandans are yous are very accustomed to the danger of commuting this way. The reason they would actually hire so they'd have jobs to be done, like you hire a product to complete like a job that you have. The reason they're hiring safe, Botha was it was a status symbol, I could afford the slightly more expensive taxi, it was the flex and so they change their marketing and their value proposition to that instead of focusing on safety, which they're not the customer but they assumed that's what everyone wanted. So for for that project. The job to be done was being able to find out how much you could spend and be able to shop around wherever you want. And that's got to be done. How our product was originally designed with legacy. Systems was not allowing that. So we redesigned it to allow that to happen.

Aaron Moncur:

Interesting. I really liked that you brought up that phrase, what is the job that you're hiring this product to do? Right? In fact, I read I can't. I think it may be was, How Do You Measure Your Life also by Clayton Christensen?

Caden Damiano:

Yeah.

Aaron Moncur:

And I think it was in that book that he talked about consulting for McDonald's, and they had, they're trying to figure out how to sell more. sell more milkshakes. Right, right. It's terrible, how do we how do we push more milkshakes on the American public? But that's how he framed it. He was like, 'What is the job that people are hiring a milkshake to do?' And I think that's a really useful way to think about life in general. I recently asked my all the team members at Pipeline, what is the job that you're hiring your job to do? What is it that you want to get out of working at Pipeline or working anywhere, for that matter? It's just a really useful framework through which to think about your life, I think.

Caden Damiano:

Oh, totally. And it also helps you be more self aware actually did one of I think my second podcast episode, it's called Jobs To Be Done Theory In Your Life by Jeff, and I interviewed Jeff Whitlock. So that's in the the the annals of my podcast, if you want to look that up. It's one of the first ones and he talked about why he went to a prestigious college. And he's like, I want to go to prestigious, prestigious college because I want to get a job at a big consulting firm. And he realized, like, 'Wow, that's really shallow.' And he ended up he worked at McKinsey and stuff, but he left out for a couple years, because he, that's not what he wanted, he realized quickly. That's not like what you want it to how you want to build his career. And, like, asking myself, because I had a bad experience, where I worked for a year to prepare for a university interview with Facebook. Like, my professors were like, okay, we're going to recommend one designer to interview at Facebook. And the whole time, I got recommended but had a year to prepare, like, be ready for that interview. And they can dress I had a good day came, I did the interview. And you know what, like, it's it's a very tough hiring process. I didn't get it. And I mean, it was cool to interview and say interviewed because I think that's like an accomplishment in itself. But I realized, like, why was it hiring Facebook? Because I wanted that Facebook logo, my LinkedIn, it was not because I didn't like, I don't use their products that often. Like I deleted Instagram and Facebook. I recently downloaded Instagram again, when the pandemic because I missed my friends. And that was a way to connect with them. Yeah, so I was hiring them to kick my friends. But when we were physically meeting with people, I didn't have it. And I was just like, 'Well, how do you think I would have?' I would have been happy there. If I, I mean, would have been good for my career. But like, is the problem do I believe in their products? Not really. So yeah.

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Well, we should probably wrap up here in a few minutes. But before we do, how can people get a hold of you? And maybe if there's anything else you want to plug for your your podcast as well, this is this is the time to do it.

Caden Damiano:

Yeah, thank you. Um, so of course, listen to The Way of Product Design is a cover to the podcast, it's everywhere podcasts are streamed to cover is my face with The Way of Product Design and it's a green cover. So it shouldn't be hard to miss. So if you want to like broaden your horizons, think about like internet of things products. I know this a lot of like physical engineers that listen to this podcast like if you want to be interested in like cool technologies, like making smart speakers and stuff like that. I think it'd be a great investment of your time. And also connect with me on LinkedIn, Caden Damiano C-a-d-e-n D-a-m-i-a-n-o. Had to spell it out because it's people think Domino like D-o-m. I'm sure you can link all this in the show notes. But yeah, just connect with me. Listen to the podcast. And if you want like to talk like I love, I love chatting with people. Obviously. It's my hobby. So...

Aaron Moncur:

Awesome. All right. Well, Caden, thank you so much for spending some time. I really appreciate it.

Caden Damiano:

Yeah, no, thanks for having me on.

Aaron Moncur:

I'm Aaron Moncure, founder of Pipeline Design & Engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please leave us a positive review. It really helps other people find that To learn how your engineering team can leverage our team's expertise in developing turnkey custom test fixtures, automated equipment and product design, visit us at testfixturedesign.com Thanks for listening.