How to evaluate the UX maturity of a company

So that you don’t end up stuck in a shitty job

Something wasn’t right. I had just received the work contract to review and the name of the role stated throughout was only “designer.” But it was the job that would finally allow me to move to London, something that I had wanted for a long time, so I ignored my gut feeling and signed the contract.

(Source: me)

I was presented with this opportunity in the summer of 2015. Until that point, I had spent two years living in Germany and working for an early-stage startup in Luxembourg. It was the job that I moved abroad for. Now, I finally had the chance to move to London and kickstart my UX design career there. Or so I thought. The gut feeling that I ignored was right. I found it odd at first, but then I consoled myself with something like: they probably see designers as generalists, that’s why they didn’t use UX designer or Product designer to describe the role. Being self-taught and having mostly freelance and early-stage startup experience at the time, I had already considered myself a generalist. So I deluded myself that calling the role just “designer” was actually a good thing and took the job.

I left that job only 10 months after I joined. It’s still my shortest tenure with a company in my career. It turned out that designers had to do all sorts of…