My professional path looks fairly predictable from the outside: web design turned into visual design, then UI, then product design. Each step was shaped by the companies I worked at and by the market itself. On paper it looks like a straight line, but in reality it felt more like a road that sometimes bent without warning, leading me past sharp corners I couldn’t see in advance.
But along the way I kept running into things that shifted me – a company with a completely different culture, or a new hobby that reshaped how I think. I try to catch those moments and hold on to them, especially when they echo with my work.
At a small 25-person company I learned to take initiative. I ran social media, moved desks around the office so it felt more cozy and less dull, without anyone asking for it. Later, in a large game company, I learned something else: respect the user, actually use the product you build, and always glance sideways at competitors.
This year I added something new again. I got my golf player “license” number and started to go to the course. The more I play, the deeper it pulls me in.
I’m not a golfer, not in the way people usually mean. I play for myself, early in the morning, when the course is empty and the air is cold. The grass is still wet, and the silence is so complete you can hear the flag flicker against the pole. It feels like the world hasn’t started yet, as if I somehow arrived a little earlier than everyone else. My game is average: sometimes I make a par, often a bogey, sometimes a ball lost in the water. But golf has started teaching me lessons that feel very close to design.
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Setup
Setup in golf is everything: the way you stand, how you hold the club, where the ball sits, the shape of your swing. These small details allow you to repeat the shot again and again.
No matter how confident or experienced you are, if something in your setup is off, the ball won’t go where you want. The whole point of setup is predictability. Without it, the game becomes chaos.
In design, setup is just as important. Do you know the goal, the scope, the user, how the product will be used? That’s your setup. Without it, your work drifts the wrong way.
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Repetition
I learned this early in my professional path, but in golf the principle becomes painfully clear.
At my last training the coach stopped me mid-sentence. I was explaining what I wanted to fix. He pointed out a mistake in my stance, made me hit 40 balls under his eye, and then said: “Now take a 9-iron and hit 500 more. Come back after that.”
In design it’s the same. Writing specs for components, shaping design systems, preparing asset sets — and then redoing them all again because something changed. Repetition isn’t glamorous, but that’s where skill sharpens. Only by repeating do you really learn.
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Oversaturate
In golf you want to make every shot repeatable, even in strange situations: tall grass, uphill, downhill, in the rain. Setup is there to support predictability, but for a beginner it feels completely unnatural. If you just grab a club and swing the way you think, it will be wrong.
The first thing a coach tells you: “Yes, this feels unnatural. You’ve never done it this way. Oversaturate.” Push it further than you think you should, and only then it settles into something real.
I think about that a lot when I start something new at work. At first, I overcommit. It feels odd, unnatural, even unnecessary. But over time it finds its balance.
Half a year ago I started taking notes in meetings to stay present and focused. At first I went all in: notes at every meeting, too many details. Over time the habit stuck, the details leveled out, and now I keep just enough to capture the discussion and key points.
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Move on
No matter how badly you hit the ball, how badly you messed up a hole — the next one is still waiting. Just move on. Focus on the next shot. It’s dangerously easy to get stuck on a bad tee shot, sink into that mood, and ruin the next few holes. But the ball has already flown. It might stop in the water, in the trees, or fall short 100 meters ahead. The only thing that matters is the next swing.
Same in design. You make a proposal, you believe in it, colleagues like it. Then you present to stakeholders and get: “Not convinced. Can we see other directions?” My first reaction is always frustration. But then you take a breath, break down the feedback, make a new page called “Follow-up from presentation,” and move on point by point.
Just move on. It’s only one step in the process.
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Enjoy the moment
Sometimes on the course I get caught up in results. How could I miss that putt? How did I mess up again? Then I remind myself: I’m not here for the score. I don’t play to impress anyone. I don’t even have friends who’d care whether I made the putt in two or three. I’m here to breathe the cold air, to watch the first light spread over the grass, to enjoy being in that moment.
Same with design. Sometimes I get tired of the project, of that one misaligned label next to an icon that never gets fixed because it’s low priority, or of the extra button we had to add just because one stakeholder pushed hard for it. In those moments I try to zoom out and think about the bigger picture – how we started this product and what we have now, how thousands of people use it every day.
Sometimes I even redo a screen just for myself, polish it the way I want, cut the button I dislike. No restrictions. Just to enjoy the moment without stakeholders and backlogs.
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In the end, golf turned out to be another design teacher for me. Both journeys – one on the course, one behind the screen – are never perfect. You just keep showing up, making the next swing, the next screen, and slowly they start to click.