I came into design sideways. My first two jobs were both customer-facing. I started as a BDR at Datricks and then moved to MCE Systems as executive assistant to the Chief Commercial Officer, which put me in customer calls and internal meetings about customer feedback all day. After a while I realized I wanted to be the one designing the fixes for the problems I kept hearing about, not just passing them along.
So I moved to QA on MCE’s mobile app team, testing iOS apps. Alongside the QA work I started building prototypes of improved versions of the flows I was testing and demoing them internally to our product team. That is where my design work started.
I’m earlier in my design career than most people doing this kind of work, and I think that is actually one of my biggest strengths. I didn’t come up inside one specific tool or workflow, so I stay open to new ones. That is a big part of why I picked up AI tools so quickly and use them so confidently now. I prototype in Cursor and Claude Code before I open Figma, and I learn new tools by doing, not by reading about them.
The thread through all of it is empathy through user research. Most interesting design problems are listening problems first, and the rest of the craft is in service of what those conversations surface.
I work best with other people. PMs who push back, engineers who tell me when something is a pain to build, designers who give me a real critique. Self-driven, but not a lone wolf. Most of my favorite work has come out of someone else’s question.
want to say hi? → atarasalt@gmail.com