Your favorite ideas of 2024
Read me to smash your 2025 product and design goals
Hi, I’m Felix. Welcome to this month’s ✨ free edition ✨ of ADPList’s Newsletter. I reveal proven & untold insights on designing things people love and insider career advice from top leaders.
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Friends,
This was a big year for ADPList—the biggest since our founding in 2021:
🌎 We organized a record 300+ meetups globally this year, including in cities like San Francisco, New York, Mexico City, Mumbai, Paris, Dubai, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney.
🤖 AI Summit 2024: The first time we did this, over 2,000+ people purchased tickets to join us on Dec 4, 2024. Thank you!
🎉 ADPList’s Ambassadors Program launched with 17 chapters—with over 85 ambassadors, and we’re still recruiting in your city! 👉 Apply here.
Now, let's recap this year's most powerful design ideas, organized by goal:
I want to design exceptional products
🏆 Steal these brilliant design tactics: Learn from the full breakdown of the world's best-proven design: Figma, Notion, Airbnb, Spotify, and Miro.
🪜 Best onboarding UX learnings: The guidebook from Figma, Duolingo, and more. From common mistakes in designing onboarding to secrets behind engaging onboarding.
🌟 How the best companies operate: Airbnb, Tinder, Uber and Duolingo
🧪 Julie Zhuo’s Data-informed Design Framework: How Julie Zhuo at Meta uses data-informed design, the dilemma & anthology how-to guide. (Also, check out this podcast with Julie Zhuo)
💰 Duolingo’s formula to high freemium conversion: 5 product-monetization lessons from the world’s most downloaded education app.
🔺 The Best Design Advice: 30 pieces of high-signal product-building advice from 35 elite leaders from companies like Meta, Google, Airbnb and more.
📊 How to measure your product's success: Why measuring your product will lead to success as a designer & product manager.
🦄 100 unicorns: 7 different design truths: Reasons why consumers love a particular product and arrive at why it works for them, based on my research of 100+ unicorn startups and public companies.
I reach my biggest career goals faster
🔖 The ultimate framework for rapid career growth: “How do you grow your career if you’re not getting the growth from your work, but you’re not quite ready to leave?” This framework answers that.
🚀 Things that matter for growing a career: A guide on the biggest lessons learned from being an IC vs. Manager from my 8 years of career experience.
😳 Should you quit your job: I quit my $100,000 paying job. 5 strategies I wish I knew on how to navigate the career growth journey and know when to move on to the next thing.
🗣️ How to pitch your value across roles: A guide to mastering the art of career transitions. This is useful for so many of you!
💎 This is the 1 skill designers will need: Most “good” designers still miss this today. This will be huge in 2025; designers should focus on building product thinking skills starting yesterday.
💥 A guide to becoming a Senior Product Designer: This is how career ladders work and how to create a career plan to climb the ladder. Probably the best guest post that benefits lots of designers with this framework.
💸 I stopped using these 7 salary negotiation advice: Debunking 7 myths you should avoid while asking for salary.
🧠 What 6 years at FAANG taught me about designer growth: Yutong’s guest post on broadening focus, building ambitious things, and expanding your view.
📈 How I quickly rose to VP by Ethan Evans: A formula for career success and reaching career goals faster by Amazon’s former VP.
I want to become a better leader and manager
👊 Overcoming self-doubt and win: 90% of leaders suffer from imposter syndrome. This is Cami’s guide on building a daring version of yourself for career success.
🏔️ Design Career Ladder Cheatsheet: Examples & frameworks from 10+ companies, including Figma, Amazon, LinkedIn and many more.
👾 How to give clear feedback without feeling guilty: You can disagree and still be kind. This is 7 ways how you can give powerful feedback at work.
🍎 How to persuade your team with design narrative: A guide to designing narrative and tension to engage with your presentations.
🔮 How to manage up and down: How to get ahead of 90% of your peers: Managing Up.
I want to get a job
🤯 How I got 50 job offers with zero experience: Landing a job in tech is hard. But this guide contains proven strategies and frameworks that will make breaking into tech easier as a designer and product manager.
🗞️ Career hype doc: We found the most important career doc for your manager, peers, and you to get promoted (including free templates).
🦄 How to succeed at design interviews: From Meghan: “I survived 10 years of interviews.” Insider tips, proven strategies, and expert insights from leaders at Meta, Airbnb, and Mixpanel, on what really makes you stand out.
🔥 State of the design job market 2024: A deep dive into the job market and 10 data-informed proven insights to help you thrive in a challenging market.
I want to grow my potential exponentially
🦴 Pixar’s framework to storytelling: Stumbled across Pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling — here are the top six we can all learn from.
⚡️ How to use ChatGPT in your work: A robust list of new ChatGPT prompts that will greatly enhance your day-to-day work designing products
☄️ Taste vs Skill Framework: Improve your taste and skills to be the world's best. Lessons from Apple, Netflix, and Meta.
🧠 How to master your attention in times of distraction: Nir Eyal’s podcast with us on rules for focused success in a distracted world.
🐝 Why some people succeed, and others fail: Guy Kawasaki’s life and career lessons working with Steve Jobs, Apple, and Canva.
I want to become smarter
(Opinion pieces and great insights to build your knowledge)
Want to pitch your best story?
Have an amazing story to tell? Killer insights to share? Apply below.
For the first time, I’m putting out a call for guest posts on ADPList’s Newsletter to amplify your insights massively.
Many of our most popular posts were guest posts, and I’ve never put out a public call for submissions. Excited to see what comes in. The newsletter goes out to 210,000+ people across the world. No prior writing experience required, but the bar for guest posts is high!
That’s all for this week! 🙏
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See you in 2025 🎉
Felix
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