Creative Crossroads: A systems approach to unconventional personal growth

In product design, we fear a broken user flow. In our careers, we fear the unknown. While giving ourselves permission to begin often feels like the hardest part, hitting a strategic or creative crossroads can feel just as challenging.

As the Design Program Manager for Netflix’s Design Systems team, I spent years turning inconsistency into infrastructure. But when my own career system hit a malfunction, I discovered that the principles of systems thinking had a lot to teach me beyond the Figma file.

"Creative Crossroads" is a deeply human look at what happens when a systems thinker meets the messy middle of career transition. Moving beyond the illusion of absolute certainty, this talk shares how a three-part framework can act as your personal compass in career growth and craft development. We will explore how designers' intuition mirrors personal instinct, how product heuristics serve as decision-making criteria, and how user testing acts as the ultimate reality check to shatter our assumptions.

This talk is designed for UX professionals, systems designers, and multi-passionate creators looking to bring fresh frameworks back to their teams—and the personal projects they’ve been cultivating.

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