How to Work Out What You Actually Want From Your Design Career

Everybody thinks they know what matters to them. Then you ask them, and they can't tell you.Daniel Burka has stood at more career crossroads than most: Digg, Glitch (which became Slack), a company sold to Google, five years at Google Ventures, then eight years in global public health. Every time the stakes got high, he reached for the same thing: Job Rank, a weighted-scoring spreadsheet for choosing your next role. In this episode he opens the real template on screen and walks through exactly how it works, for designers, product people, and anyone in tech staring at a hard career decision.We get into:Why the spreadsheet isn't really the tool: 90% of the value is being forced to write down what you value and rank itIf everything's important, nothing's important: how the weighting forces the trade-offs a pros and cons list politely avoidsThe moment the sheet told Daniel something his ego didn't want to hear about a big role at GoogleHow the tool travels with you: same values, different weights, as your life changesWhere AI fits into a decision that should stay humanGET THE TEMPLATE Free to copy, in Daniel's full write-up: https://www.hardproblems.com/articles...LINKS Hard Problems, helping designers and people in tech find work that matters: https://www.hardproblems.comd.MBA, business education for designers: https://d.mba00:15 – What this episode is about 02:10 – Daniel's career crossroads 04:15 – Job Rank: it's just a spreadsheet 04:40 – Writing down what matters to you 06:25 – Weighting each value (and why not everything's a 5) 09:50 – Scoring the jobs you're considering 11:20 – Scoring jobs that don't exist yet 13:10 – How to make your own job 16:50 – The Google role his ego wanted 19:10 – Why 90% of the value is just writing it down 21:10 – Hard Problems: work that actually matters 25:05 – Jobs that matte