Exploring UX Research w/ Julien Leforestier

Marketing careers come in many shapes, and among its very top niche is SEO. That's really no wonder because Google gets 8.5 billion surge queries every single day. That's 100,000 queries per second! Placing your site or your business at the top of one of those queries is valuable for any business out there. So it's no surprise that SEO specialists are in dire demand. Today we're chatting to Karyn Corrigan about how she got into this line of work as an SEO specialist at Shopify.

Today we have Julien Leforestier of Spotify as a guest with us. If you're thinking about any of your favorite products out there in the world, there's probably a person like Julien behind them. A product is nothing without its users, and so it's easy to understand just how important the role of a user researcher is.  The role of UX researcher or user researcher is still a bit underrated in comparison to its counterpart, a UX designer, yet the growth of user research and its roles is predicted to increase a lot more. In the next few years, good professionals are in demand. Today we're learning a little bit more about this profession from Julien.

One thing I love about careers in tech and maybe specifically software engineering is that it's one of the rare career paths where self-teaching is a genuine way to build a valuable career on the back of grit and determination.   It is now estimated that about 70% of software engineers in the industry have a full or partially self-taught background, and with average salaries in the US being among the highest for engineers and developers in the tech industry, it's an accessible career with the right help. Our guest has taken the leap years ago and has since then matured to become a team leader to go back into the career path as an individual contributor and is currently working for Remote.com.

Once again, marketing remains one of the most popular fields of study in the US. The growth of marketing positions in the industry is pretty stable. And while the growth of the position isn't exactly extraordinary, graduates from marketing degrees are among the ones with the lowest unemployment in their fields. While advertising and commercial agencies struggled throughout the pandemic, the demand of good marketing and growth people in the tech industry exploded. How close are the subjects of agency and commercial work to startup growth? And how can you make the jump or even the start in one of those positions? That's something we're going to hear about from Gus Veiga, an experienced mentor on MentorCruise, a top-rated coach on the platform. Gus is a growth manager at Uber in Brazil and focuses a lot of his work on strategic marketing and B2B marketing, as well as leading a team.

Talk to Stephen 👉 https://mentorcruise.com/mentor/StephenGroat/ --- There's no doubt about it: Tech workers are in demand. Be it software engineers, product designers, or managers, many see these growing career paths as a way to get ahead in their professional lives – and rightfully so. However, one type of tech worker doesn't quite get the same spotlight and that's cybersecurity and security engineers. And yet, it's one of the careers that's predicted to grow the most in demand. But what is cybersecurity and what do you do in this part of the tech industry? This is something that Stephen Groat is going to talk us through today. Stephen has been a security engineer for many years and today leads a security team at Datadog.

Talk to Lloyd 👉 https://mentorcruise.com/mentor/LloydJacob/ If you're like the majority of adults and people online right now, you want to build your own business someday. In fact, over 60% of people in their twenties and thirties have this life goal. In reality, a much smaller amount of people actually end up doing it and then even less of those people actually succeed. So what goes into the whole process of starting a startup or building out your own ideas? What are you getting into as a founder and where can you go for help?Those are questions that we discussed today with one of our most experienced mentors on the platform, Lloyd Jacob. Lloyd is a serial founder, experienced product manager, and one of his past companies even went through Y Combinator, the very prestigious accelerator for startups. He's also one of our earliest mentors on MentorCruise with the ID number 23. So without further ado, let's talk to this veteran of the startup industry.

Talk to our guest Rebecca here 👉 https://mentorcruise.com/mentor/RebeccaLiu/ Design is one of the most popular majors in the world. Yet it is estimated that only 20 to 25% of the graduates ever make their way into the industry. It's a competitive field with many competitors around and comparably not many well paid positions. Today, we're talking about product design though, and it's really the other way around. It's a very multidisciplinary design field that also connects with research and, and business opportunities. It's very much in demand and a high paying position as well. We're talking with Rebecca Liu, a product designer at Shopify about this topic. She herself has switched her career from social media management into product design.

Let's start this one off with a quiz right away. If I ask you right now, what does a product manager do all day? Would you be able to give me a concrete answer? if you can, that's great and you'll be sure to learn more about it today, but if you can't – you're not alone.  The search term around what a product manager does all day actually gets up to 10,000 hits every month in Google. So we're taking the time today to talk to a veteran and leader of the industry. Colleen Graneto is a product manager at Airbnb and talk us through what product management means, why it's one of the most popular and well-paid jobs in the world and how to get started.

In this episode, we're talking about the topic of personal branding, certainly a topic that's not uncontroversial. Maybe you remember something from our very first episode when our guest said the infamous quote: > Personal Branding is a bit of a cringe term And I think it comes down to one side of the spectrum being very against it, staying authentic at any cost, letting your work speak for itself. And on the other side, you maybe have people overdoing it a little bit and create a very authentic and brandable version of themselves. Our guest today is luckily somewhere in between. Anand Safi is a very experienced engineering manager based in Canada. But if you go to his LinkedIn right now, you'll see him being invited on podcasts, into use industry panels, being on the board of a startup as well, and acting as a coach and a mentor on a variety of networks. So today let's take the chance and learn from him directly on how we can use personal branding to open your doors for ourselves and also get access to more opportunities.

In this episode we are going to talk about the transition to go from a hands-on individual contributor to a manager position. As an engineer, or maybe even in tech, in general, the career path of people is very predefined: You start at a junior-like position, you go on to become a mid-engineer or a mid-designer. You stay there for a while until you prove yourself that you can take on the responsibility of a senior position, and then you go that way. But after that, it is much more unclear. You might go the way of becoming a tech lead or you can take the path and become an engineering manager. That jump is not always easy. Sometimes it fails. Sometimes management is just not up to the expectations of the person, but that's exactly what we want to learn today. We are talking to Naz Delam, who is an engineering manager at Netflix and has made that jump from the individual contributor. We are going to talk about what change exactly entails and what the big difference between the two positions actually is.