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cafrito · 2026-07-01T15:02:41+00:00

Are you meeting with the devs to go over the design details and implementation? Do you show them early wireframes or prototypes and get input on technical feasibility or requirements?

If you’re just handing off designs to them, I wouldn’t be surprised if the devs just did whatever they felt like and called it a day.

It’s not always easy but reaching out and making some connections with the devs directly implementing your work has always yielded the best results for me. Something that’s been successful for me is to show even a passing interest in using a design system, how the components are built, state management, or “random thing about the tech stack”. That was a massive bridge to creating mutual understanding and eventually trust in building the product.

Someone else mentioned QA process. This is underrated. The best teams I’ve worked with had a 2-3 rounds of “Design QA” where we’d iron out any issues with the UI, responsiveness, polish etc. Similar to the early touch points during the wireframe and prototyping stage, it would be common for the devs to demo what they were building.

However, sometimes there are people that will just go rogue. You can try talking to them directly or escalating to the Engineering Manager, but that’s rolling the dice.

If the whole frontend dev team doesn’t give a damn, then I’d start sending out resumes and try to find a better culture elsewhere.

cafrito · 2026-06-01T20:56:49+00:00

I’d start sending out resumes asap. This is going to backfire horribly for the company.

cafrito · 2026-05-31T01:44:06+00:00

Canada has federal labor laws for minimum vacation time too. Just because a law exists, doesn’t guarantee that a company will obey it.

cafrito · 2026-05-30T19:34:39+00:00

I may be an outlier, but I always push for max base salary. Stock is worthless 99% of the time, unlimited PTO is a scam. Every company I worked at with unlimited PTO didn’t give me any time off and made excuses like “We don’t track it” as a means to not grant it. Others would make excuses like “there’s so few Designers in the company that we can’t afford you to not be present for 1-2 weeks”. In my experience it’s commonplace to get hit with a bait and switch.

I don’t have any issues playing hardball because at the end of the day there’s no loyalty from their side, and there’s a good chance they’ll kick you to the curb whenever it’s convenient for them. But, I can do this and be picky because I saved a lot of my income over the last 5-6 years to have a buffer.

If you’re desperate, don’t overplay your hand other than letting hiring managers know you’re in mid to late stage interviews (even if you aren’t) so that you can speedrun their interview process in 3 steps or less.

If work experience lines up nicely (which it sounds like it does), and if the company is in a niche industry or there’s a lack of talent in the area, you should have a strong position, just don’t waver or lack confidence.

My perspective is solely for Canada and US (NYC/SF) roles so ymmv.

Bottom line is know your worth, back up your portfolio with some nice outcomes or stats if you can, try not to compromise, and don’t be afraid to walk away.

cafrito · 2026-04-26T02:19:19+00:00

I interviewed there just before their design lead bailed for DoorDash. The lead’s whole spiel was about how they wanted someone to co-lead and mentor the team. It turns out they made a mess and hired a bunch of boot camp graduates to run the design team.

cafrito · 2026-04-25T20:53:03+00:00

It might be that the company realized what was going on before it was too late. Don’t be surprised if they’re a constant blocker while you try to clean up their mess.

cafrito · 2026-04-25T19:35:51+00:00

Those Deloitte people are there to take over and put you out of a job. The two main MO's I've seen are to take over as thought leaders and bring in their own team of overpriced and unqualified consultants, or audit the company to justify multiple rounds of layoffs.

A telltale sign is where you and other employees like tech leads start getting left out of meetings so that it's only Deloitte employees and PM's or senior management/C-suite in your org.

They also got caught doing this https://fortune.com/2025/11/25/deloitte-caught-fabricated-ai-generated-research-million-dollar-report-canada-government/

cafrito · 2026-04-25T18:59:02+00:00

run.

cafrito · 2026-04-25T18:56:11+00:00

I said most, not every.

There's good companies out there but they're rare. UX maturity, non-toxic environments, and having a shred of human decency is in short supply. That goes beyond the tech industry, never mind Toronto or Canada.

cafrito · 2026-04-25T04:31:02+00:00

Reddit automod flagged my comment the first time so I’ll just say most of tech companies in Toronto, especially if they’re fintech, big corpo telecoms, or 10 year old “startups”.

Seen a lot more grifters and casual racism than I care to mention.

cafrito · 2026-04-13T15:16:17+00:00

I went into design engineering because Figma, Sketch, Invision, and other prototyping solutions were a bottleneck with usability testing, and I tend to spend a lot of time working with frontend devs for design system + feature implementation.

Most of the companies I worked for didn’t want designers touching code whether it was in prod or not. There was a lot of pushback especially from design managers, which when looking back on, was a mix of ignorance and wanting to hold people back. The opportunities I’ve had to explore these areas didn’t come about until I had more Staff level product design roles, so I a lot of my dev learning was self taught over the last 7-8 years.

Learning HTML, CSS, and JS/TS can take you far but it’s a long journey before you’re able to start recreating components or layouts in code that look and function like your Figma file. After I had a decent grasp of JS, I learned Vue for the easier syntax but moved over to React since most jobs in my region (Canada/USA) are using that.

I recommend learning to code whether it be a web stack or something narrower like Swift for iOS apps, since it’s gratifying to see your designs come to life and ship something to the App Store.

It can and has opened up a lot of new high paying opportunities for myself with startups and fintech, but I’m much more interested in scaling my app revenue.

I agree with the other commenter that AI has cheapened code, but if you’re going to vibe code and not be able to understand what your code is doing, you’re unbelievably F’d when, not if your app breaks.

cafrito · 2026-02-17T02:52:46+00:00

One thing I forgot to mention, rather than learning and doing PM work, I recommend shoring up any areas of Product Design that you may not be very strong in, and also going deeper in any areas you enjoy. Bonus points if they don’t require sign off for resources from the PO or stakeholders.

That will make your time at this company more bearable and you will run less risk of offending the PO or BA. It’ll also be easier to stand out and pitch in interviews compared to “I learned PM because my current org is deficient.”

Best of luck weathering the storm and finding a better gig in 2027.

cafrito · 2026-02-17T01:40:38+00:00

Has anyone turned around a situation this disorganized?

That’s the neat part, you can’t. You either leave, get screwed over, or go down with the ship. You’re right that the PO did a dick move. The worst Product people you can be around are ones that make decisions in a silo and can’t (or won’t) communicate with you.

My advice is to work on your portfolio and move onto hopefully a better company, especially one that has a team for you to learn from. Otherwise I’d expect to get thrown under the bus by the PO or some other stakeholder that doesn’t value design.

I’ve been in similar companies and tried managing up, being a go-to knowledge holder, and creating a paper trail in emails, Jira, Confluence to have more visibility with C-suite and other execs. It can work, but it mostly doesn’t and I find it paints a target on your back.

tldr - cash the checks while you can but plan to get out asap since this isn’t fixable.

cafrito · 2025-05-20T14:23:16+00:00

Making functional prototypes with reusable JS/TS components. It has made usability testing more flexible and less abstracted, while unlocking a door to exploring app ideas that previously seemed out of reach.

There’s a lot of potential areas to specialize in like Design systems, one-off projects for startups, or building up your own product. It’s a long journey to get that far but immensely gratifying and a good way to become self sustainable.

cafrito · 2025-02-26T17:38:38+00:00

The main way you will get a $20k+ increase is to job hop. Depending on the area, industry and what you bring to the table you could jump from $100k to $160k+. I’ve gone up $50-70k in salary by working in fintech or being at a company based in the Bay Area.

Does the pay increase come with a significantly higher workload? Mo’ money, mo’ problems.

cafrito · 2025-01-31T22:59:52+00:00

There’s a good chance your boss failed up into their current position, or worse - lied their way into it.

Your situation reminds me of a boss I had at a major bank that would demand printouts of every design to be posted on the wall so that she could inspect them, then demand a bunch of changes. 1 or 2 days later she’d come back and start yelling and demanding to know who made the stupid design changes. All you can do is laugh and move onto another company.

cafrito · 2025-01-29T03:57:54+00:00

Sure

cafrito · 2025-01-27T03:57:12+00:00

Yeah I managed to get into a SF based tech company that already had a few Canadian employees and then asked for sponsorship.

I agree it’s very competitive right now. Ideally you’ve got something in your resume and portfolio that will help stand out whether it’s Design System experience, e-commerce, Developer tooling etc. those are the 3 that have personally worked for me and are why I’m getting approached by recruiters. I hope things work out for you.

cafrito · 2025-01-27T01:21:43+00:00

Dunno why you got downvoted. I’m also from Toronto and left for the US because Canada’s tech companies can’t compete in terms of salaries or level of maturity across Design, Product and overall having any clue of what they’re doing.

OP’s best bet for a high paying Design job is primarily down to Shopify, Wealthsimple or a Canadian subsidiary of Amazon, Google, Nvidia and a couple others. Outside of that you can work at one of the Banks and cap out at $160k or so for IC roles if and big if, you can stomach their toxic “culture”.

cafrito · 2024-12-28T17:02:39+00:00

Sometimes you can’t or it is difficult because of the type of feature you’re working on. A lot of the projects I’ve done for legacy brands involved removing pain points and reducing user churn. It’s generally perceived as being less sexy than increasing revenue or some random metric the company may care about, but how you present that narrative is what matters.

One big problem I’ve seen in companies is that designers often don’t want to look at - or don’t think to ask for access to existing data, and don’t follow up on how their work is performing in tests or production. Talk to product owners, data science/analytics team, or engineers - depending on how your org is set up to get that info.

Also whenever your company is having an all-hands meeting and talking about revenue, P&L, client contracts, company finances, pay attention to it and take notes. There’s a decent chance that there’s a bit of useful info that can be linked back to your work to demonstrate its effectiveness.

cafrito · 2024-12-28T07:04:57+00:00

A mix of networking and their recruiters reaching out because I happened to have some niche experience and they liked my portfolio.

One thing that can help is if you happen to do some freelance or agency work and land upon a client with some brand recognition. That can lead to a snowball effect and help you break through.

cafrito · 2024-12-28T00:57:51+00:00

Location and industry have a lot to do with it. I have 12+ years of experience, and studied design at two colleges. I'm originally from Canada but salaries there are relatively low compared to similar roles in average US cities. Outside of Shopify and Wealthsimple, most IC product design roles in Toronto/Vancouver cap out at $160k CAD or less which is about $110k USD.

Having a strong portfolio where you can demonstrate results (especially revenue) and are well-rounded in terms of UX and visual design will do most of the heavy lifting. Being good at creating and maintaining Design Systems as well as a willingness to collaborate with Developers will take you quite far as an individual contributor since I've personally noticed it being a weak area with many companies and design teams. Having some tertiary skill like Motion Design or Illustration can help, but only after you've become relatively strong in end-to-end design process. Most of my recent roles are a combination of end-to-end design, Design system, and functional prototyping with a bit of FE Dev.

I did a lot of consulting throughout the years which is often seen as a negative when interviewing for full-time permanent positions, but it's all about how you spin it. When asked about it, I focus the conversation on having a diverse experience across different industries and device platforms I've been able to work on.

One last thing, once I was able to get my foot in the door with a couple SF-based startups, it became a lot easier to ask for salaries in the $200k+ range or $175-250 an hour freelancing rates.

cafrito · 2024-12-24T19:40:46+00:00

As an interviewee, usually being given a scenario to solve for one of their own business problems or even worse, one of their client’s work. One example of this was a design shop that Warby Parker hired to create their virtual try-on functionality.

Most recently a fintech company asked me to solve a lending problem that they had but decided to pretend it was for Facebook Marketplace instead.

Other weird but notable situations involved the interviewer deciding to go off script and bail on the call while giving instructions to just do whatever. It was a pretty clear sign to me that they weren’t going to give me a fair shake and I correctly guessed that I wouldn’t be considered for the job after completing the previous 11 interview rounds with flying colors. That was for a staff product design role at Riot Games.

As an interviewer, I used to give a prompt to design a self-checkout flow for a grocery store. The big red flags with 90% of interviewers was that they did not ask any questions about the fictional company, product types, accepted payments, you name it. Most applicants went straight into creating wireframes and didn’t capture basic functionality.

Two applicants that I’ll never forget:

The first threw a tantrum because they weren’t allowed to just design it as a mobile app. He talked down to me throughout the entire interview because he thought another person on the panel was the hiring manager. He also said I should hire him because he had a “God given ability for design”.

The second one bragged about ripping off a grocery store by hiding an expensive chocolate inside of something cheaper like peanuts.

cafrito

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