Listen Now

Folks, I am super pumped to bring to you our conversation with Jeffrey Boadi, one of the coolest people in the plant based world. Jeffrey and I decided to hop on a video call to get to know each other, exchange some plant based knowledge and talk about healthy diet and lifestyle in general. Jeffrey has built a good followership on Twitter at @JeffreyBoadi_ and he’s getting more popular by the day, which is great! He also has a website blog at TheWealthOfHealth.co.uk where I read a few interesting articles. Without further ado, please tune in and I hope you enjoy our plant based talk!

Folks, if you love technology and the cloud trends, you’re gonna love this conversation we had with Sarbjeet Johal! Sarbjeet has worked for companies like Visa, VMWare, PeopleSoft, Rackspace, Oracle and others and he accumulated an enormous amount of first hand experience and knowledge about the cloud industry. We intentionally skipped most of the topics that you can easily find on the Internet and focused on truly interesting things. Here’s what we discussed with him: His journey (so far) in tech State of the Industry Future of software technology Technology consumption design patterns Traits of good leadership in tech companies Tip for youth 4 tech I’m so excited to finally publish this episode! You can find Sarbjeet on Twitter at @SarbjeetJohal so you can start following him there and get a daily dose of insights about cloud. Thank you for stopping by and tuning into this truly incredible episode! PS I apologize for a slightly poor audio quality on my side. Something must have gone not so smooth with sound recording on my machine. But Sarbjeet's audio is perfect so it should be all good! :)

What a blast it was to record this episode with Alisa! I hope you guys absolutely love it! Alisa has an undergraduate degree in math and philosophy and a master’s degree in teaching. Last year Alisa transitioned from teaching to UX design and she’s currently with Microsoft EDU in Seattle working on a really cool OneNote Education product for teachers and students. We talked about her journey and what she learned along the way. We also discussed why exactly having a mentor (or mentors) from your industry is very important to success. Alisa also recommended a few resources and books that helped her get started and move forward. The links to all of them are in the episode notes below. I can’t wait for you guys to listen to this! This is a really awesome episode! Tune in! Notes: Hexagon UX — UX Mentorship organization  Hacking STEM — Blog of the Hacking STEM team at Microsoft Books: Information Architecture Understanding Context About Face: Essentials of Interaction Design Fooled By Randomness Skin In The Game

In this episode, I had a pleasure of speaking with Tom Chaffin from Lancaster, PA about his life story and how he found his passion in user experience. Tom and his team won a grant a few years ago and worked on a mobile app and that's when he knew UX is what he wanted to do next. We also discussed some constructive advice for people who are just starting their UX career as well as for those who are pivoting into UX from other walks of life.  I really enjoyed it and I hope you love it as well! PS If you enjoy listening to this podcast, please consider leaving a 5 star review on the platform of your choice. It would mean a lot to me and it will also help get these valuable conversations to reach more people out there.

Hey folks! Thank you for tuning in! Today I had an awesome guest Libby Yeh who shared her story of transitioning from a career in Account Marketing to first a programming school and then UX. She also provided valuable advice for people who are just graduating college or are also contemplating a career change. It’s a fascinating conversation from which I learned a lot myself and hopefully you will also find it very informative. Tune in and thank you for listening to our podcast today! Notes: Twitter UX community people mentioned in the episode: Jared Spool, Nick Finck, Joe Natoli PS If you enjoy listening to this podcast, please consider leaving a 5 star review on the platform of your choice. It would mean a lot to me and it will also help get these valuable conversations to reach more people out there.

Thank you so much for tuning in! Do we have something awesome for you! We got together with Doug Collins and Pavel Samsonov late last night to chat about Dark UX Patterns since these things have been getting out of hand lately and they are not always necessarily black and white. We have a lot of research based insights from Doug and rather interesting philosophical thoughts from Pavel. We really hope you enjoy it! Here are some of the materials that have been mentioned in our conversation: Examples of dark UX confirm shaming - https://confirmshaming.tumblr.com/ Senate bill - https://twitter.com/MarkWarner/status/1115660831969153025 Hotel booking study - https://behavioralscientist.org/consumers-are-becoming-wise-to-your-nudge/ Shining a Light on Dark Patterns - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3431205 Fake numbers behind dark UX techniques - https://twitter.com/OphirHarpaz/status/1184486445039411201 Tweet about preserving user trust - https://twitter.com/hober/status/1134509819937906688 PS  If you enjoy listening to this podcast, please consider leaving a 5  star review on the platform of your choice. It would mean a lot to me  and it will also help get these valuable conversations to reach more  people out there.

Hey guys, thank you so much for tuning in today! I want to share something interesting with you. About 8-9 months ago, I interviewed with a couple of companies for a product owner position here in Minneapolis but wasn't hired by them. What happened later is really funny and kinda fascinating! :) If you had similar experiences, I'd love to hear your stories. Please share them with me on Twitter @VitalikGDemin. Thank you again for tuning in! Hope you enjoyed it!

Hey guys, this is a quick solo episode where I want to share something interesting I heard at a product conference here in Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago. It's very fascinating imho and I hope you will find it useful as well. Thank you for tuning in!

In this episode I'm sharing a real life example of how some people are able to escape the tunnel vision and focus on the end goal without any mental limitations. I took a Lean training a few years ago while at one of my employers and I was blown away at what one of our teams did. Tune in and let me know what you think. I hope it's valuable!

Hey guys, this episode is an experiment. It's a quick solo recording that I did just now right on my paddleboard in the middle of a lake here in Minnesota. I am explaining the difference between Product Manager and Product Owner. Let me know how you like it. I'd love to hear your comments!

In this episode legendary UX designers @DougCollinsUX and @PavelASamsonov join me in the very first three-way podcast conversation. We originally planned to talk about how UX designers deal with Product Owners but quickly pivoted into the subject of what career options UX designers have these days, Product Owner being one of them. This discussion was really great and we also kept it short and sweet at 30ish minutes. We would love to hear any questions or comments that you guys may have! Thank you for tuning in!

My guest today is Jeff Grigg who has over 20 years of experience of working as a developer for multinational corporations. He and I recently engaged into a short tweet exchange where he mentioned a few things that caught my attention. I figured we needed to talk it over on the podcast. In this episode we are briefly discussing Code Ownership and then moving into a very new area to me – Extreme Programming. Based on what I heard and the answers I received to my questions, it does sound like something companies should at least pay attention to and even try a test run of this methodology to see how it goes for them.  Test Driven Development and Pair Programming (where two people work at one computer thinking thru coding together) do seem to offer very straightforward benefits. I specifically liked what TDD has to offer because it does help build out that critical testing focused culture as well as testing infrastructure to make the testing process more streamlined and efficient. We all know testing is often underrated by a lot of companies so the TDD based culture and process can surely help with that. Speaking of Pair Programming, it seems to me that this approach can be sometimes used for things like UX Design because there’s a lot more thinking in this area than the actual design work. If you put two smart UXers together on certain UX tasks, there’s a high chance that they will deliver higher quality work in a shorter period of time. Anyway, I had a blast talking to Jeff! We would love your two cents if you have any feedback. You can find Jeff on Twitter @JeffGrigg1. All information about me is at vitalik.co. And hey, who ever thought I'd make it to episode 10! :) Thank you for tuning in guys!

In this episode I have a very special guest, Pavel Samsonov, a UX designer from Bloomberg LP. Our conversation is focused on challenges that product design and development organizations face these days. Pavel expresses his view on how Agile may be improved to better accommodate design processes. We discuss very interesting things like “respecting the skills” of long time users, decision making ownership and more. Pavel also shared his point of view on how Microsoft's efforts in product design in the last few years have set them up for success in the future. I personally learned a lot from Pavel’s experience and the way he frames his thoughts. I’ll surely be listening to this episode myself at least a couple of times to make sure these learnings fully sink in. You can find more information about Pavel at www.PavelSamsonov.com. You can also follow him on Twitter @PavelASamsonov. People and articles mentioned in the episode by Pavel can be found in this Twitter thread. Thank you so much for tuning in and I really hope you enjoyed our conversation! We would love to hear your feedback! PS I apologize for a not so smooth fade out ending of the episode. I pushed the “Stop recording” button 1 second too early and this fade out was the best I could do to make it sound less weird. I’m still polishing my podcasting skills but I’ll get better soon, I promise :)

In this episode, Oksana Ivanova and I discuss gaming - why today's games are easier than they were in the past, where the gaming industry is going, what can potentially happen to the Fortnite model as they expand into a social platform arena. This conversation provoked a few interesting thoughts that I hope you guys will find valuable. Oksana can be found on Twitter at @OksanaIvanovaPM. Thank you for tuning in!

This episode is very special with a very special guest. Joe Natoli shares insights from his many years of UX consulting experience. We also discuss a rather important topic of product ownership inside product development organizations. Turns out "Product Owner" is a very important role and we talk about it in detail. This episode should be very insightful for folks like me who for a long time have been searching for the right career track within product design but were afraid to end up going in a wrong direction due to the fear of the world we live in where everything is labeled. Hope you guys enjoy this episode. I had a blast and I learned a ton from this conversation. Would love to hear your feedback! You can find everything about Joe at GiveGoodUX.com. He's also on Twitter @JoeNatoli. Thank you so much for tuning in!

I love Colorado! I snowboarded there many years ago (too many actually) and we also visited it last summer. Since Doug was born and spent almost all of his life in this beautiful state (he lives and works in Denver), I thought it would be a great idea to have him help me learn more about the state. We talked about job market in Denver, best mountains for skiing and snowboarding, cute resort towns, breweries and potentially the biggest liquor store in the world – Tipsy’s. Everything about Doug can be found at DenverUXer.com and on Twitter @DougCollinsUX. You can find everything about me at vitalik.co. Thank you so much for tuning in!

In this episode I let Doug Collins drive. He spoke about his learnings from some of his past failures. We also came up with some tips on how to negotiate with your business partners or managers when they prevent you from properly doing your job as a UX professional. Hope you guys enjoy it! Everything about Doug can be found at DenverUXer.com and on Twitter @DougCollinsUX. You can find everything about me at vitalik.co. Thank you so much for tuning in!

Today Doug Collins and I discussed a rather important topic - return on investment of user experience design. This is very often either not properly understood by executive decision makers or plain neglected. We talk about real life examples with high level numbers, left brain and right brain folks, liberal arts, and more. We would absolutely love your feedback on that one! Hope you enjoy it! Thank you for tuning in! Doug can be found at twitter.com/DougCollinsUX or at DenverUxer.com

Today Oksana and I dove into the current state of the crypto industry and blockchain. I shared my first hand experience related to investing, working for a crypto project, understanding the blockchain in general and things of that nature (i.e. what is Bitcoin, how Ethereum works, etc). Hope you find it interesting. As I mentioned at the end of the episode, feel free to send me questions about specific aspects of our conversation and I'll be more than happy to dive a little deeper for you. Oksana is on Twitter at twitter.com/OksanaIvanovaPM. Thank you very much for tuning in! I really appreciate your time.

Hey guys, I always wanted to have audio versions of my ebooks but I didn't want to deal with all these logistics. Now that I have my podcast, I figured that I can simply narrate them myself here. The first ebook is "Create A Start" that basically tells almost my entire career story in under one hour while tracing some of my accomplishments back to very specific starting points in the past. In case you'd like to read it, it's available for free at all major ebook stores ($0.99 on Amazon Kindle because they never allowed me to publish it for free). If you're interested in my other books, you can find them at books.vitalikdemin.com. Thank you for tuning in!