How I accelerated my career pivot
3 years later, what worked in my career pivot into product design
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Friends,
Ever feel like career advice is just a collection of clichés and cookie-cutter steps? Today, I'm excited to share something refreshingly different from Viya, a former accountant who engineered her path into product design and now leads design at a B2B SaaS startup.
Viya developed something called the "Sugi Framework" (inspired by a Japanese tree-growing technique 🌲) that turns the traditional career-switching playbook on its head. Instead of following the usual "quit job, take bootcamp, pray for success" route, she created a systematic method that helped her compress two years of design experience into just 6 months.
Frameworks you’ll learn today:
How she avoided wasting thousands on ineffective bootcamps
Her unconventional "atomic skills" approach to leveraging past experience
The exact strategy she used to find and land bridge roles
Why following "design influencers" almost derailed her progress
If you're wrestling with a career pivot—or just curious about how to accelerate your professional growth—this is the real-world framework you've been looking for. 💥📈
Viya is a product designer who brings a unique blend of business acumen and design thinking to B2B SaaS products. Her unconventional path from accounting to design has shaped her pragmatic approach to career development and product building. Based in Montreal, she co-founded a thriving DesignConnect community and hosts Design Career Circle, virtual sessions helping others navigate their career transitions with confidence. Her framework, Sugi, emerged from her own journey and continues to evolve through her work with aspiring designers. When she's not designing products or building community, she's writing about the intersection of business, design, and personal growth. Read more on her newsletter here.
Trust me, you won’t want to miss this one. 👀
Intentional Evolution: How I Accelerated My Career Pivot to Product Design
After four years as a startup accountant, I switched to product design in 2021. I now lead design and help build products at an enterprise SaaS startup.
Many people told me my method is unusual, so I’m here to share how I made my career transition work. If you are considering a career pivot, I hope this is helpful.
Those Big Questions
Besides the competitive job market, I had to overcome three main questions:
How do I know design is the right choice for me?
Where should I start? What should I learn first?
How can I quickly find a job?
Behind every challenge were doubts and insecurities.
“Should I give up my salary now, or save more before quitting?”
“Which course should I take? They’re all expensive.”
“I know nothing and need to start from scratch.”
“I don’t have a creative background... should I go to design school?”
“How do I stand out among other talented and experienced designers?”
I wrestled with these questions. A lot. Committing was the hardest part, and I wish I had better guidance. It took me a costly year to decide on software products and design. At my peak frustration, my insecurity won. I enrolled in a UX Bootcamp offered by CareerFoundry.
I quickly realized the bootcamp wouldn’t help me find a job as soon as expected. It’s too theoretical and lacks real-life feedback. One month into the course, I changed my strategy, which helped me land my first and critical project in my career transition.
My goal was to maximize the return on my time and money by growing to the max with the least time and lowest cost.
My game plan was to acquire the knowledge of a two-year-experience designer within six months. And it worked.
Sugi Framework
I summarized my process into a framework called “Sugi.” “Sugi” is inspired by Daisugi, a Japanese tree planting technique that uses an existing tree to nurture a new one. Sugi is about awakening hidden skills, amplifying them, and leveraging them for a new career in product and design.
The Sugi framework includes four steps:
Bird’s-eye Search
Atomic Skill Map
Peer Interview
Push the Needle
For a design novice and career switcher, this framework helped me quickly gain vocabulary, test my assumptions, find the bridge role and lead me to an effective transition.
Let’s dive into it.
1. Bird’s-eye search
Bird’s-eye search is a pause-check. It’s a surface-level research that challenges assumptions. At first, I didn’t understand its value. Being asked to pause felt like being told “no” before I even started. But I was wrong, and I wasted thousands of dollars by skipping this step.
Instead of jumping into a 10-month-long bootcamp, conducting a bird’s-eye search can significantly increase your odds of success.
The easiest first step: Ask ChatGPT to validate your assumptions.
Try this prompt:
Can you compare the day-to-day work of product designers in:
Early-stage startups (under 50 employees)
Large corporations (Fortune 500)
For each, please cover:
Daily schedule and responsibilities
Team structure and collaboration
Common challenges
Tools and processes used
ChatGPT’s answer can be thought provoking. It offers vocabulary to continue exploring. Continue to ask “what” and “how”. Be conscious of its generality. The same task and skill could mean differently depending on the context.
You can also read through job descriptions for entry-level designers to understand the scope of work. The goal is to grasp what you’re signing up for—the reality, the language, the tools. Run it through AI as well!
Try this prompt:
I have a job description for Associate Product Designer at X company in United States. Could you:
Break down the required technical skills and explain what each skill means in practice
Extract the soft skills and provide specific examples of how they’re used in this role
Create a list of typical daily/weekly tasks based on the responsibilities mentioned
Identify any industry-specific knowledge or tools required
Flag any unique or notable requirements that stand out
The takeaway:
The bird’s-eye search is about understanding the demand, what’s needed for your next role. It lists out the standard scope of work and useful terminology. It’s a vital first step when exploring fresh territory.
2. Atomic Skills Map
As you grasp what is required, you may question how to stand out among a sea of checkboxes. Here comes the Atomic Skills Map, where my approach differs from conventional advice. Instead of trying to learn everything all at once in a bootcamp, you add, train, take out specific skills from your toolbox.
List every skill you’ve gained from current and past jobs, focusing on those that bring you joy. If you can’t verbalize each skill, describe what you did in the job, and run it with ChatGPT.
Try this prompt:
I recently worked as an accountant and need help identify my transferable skills. Here’s my background:
[Describe your role, including:
Key responsibilities and daily tasks
Projects you led or contributed to
Challenges you solved
Tools and software you used
Teams you worked with
Any process improvements you made
Help me:
Identify transferable skills from these experiences
Provide specific examples of how I used these skills
Suggest how these skills could apply to other roles/industries
Highlight any leadership or project management experience
Point out any unique skills that might set me apart
Combine with the skills required for an entry-level designer, based on Bird’s-eye Search, and Venn-diagram them.
Overlapped skills → amplify them with storytelling
Skill gaps → create action plans to fast-track it
You may be surprised at the number of skills you already possess!
