Podcast · Arts & Books

Design Table Podcast

by Nick Groeneveld, Tyler White · English · Arts & Books

Get a seat at the table and build the design career you want. This podcast is for designers looking to break in, level up, and take control of their careers—whether you're freelancing, climbing the corporate ladder, or just trying to get noticed. Every two weeks, we dive into career fundamentals, de

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 33 min
Latest: 14 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

14 Oct 2026 · 37 minNew

How a Product Design Director Uses AI to Explore 10 Ideas At Once

Design school taught us you should explore before you settle on a solution. In reality, most designers sketch two or three options, pick one, and hope nobody asks about edge cases or anything outside of the 'happy flow'. Now that prototyping is so much more accessible, going wide has never been easier. With that in mind, why are so many designers still designing for that happy flow only? In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick talk about conceptual range and depth: going wide to find better design solutions before going deep one that one solution to bring it up to…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E66 · 7 Oct 2026 · 37 min
The One Way to Get Better at (And Still Enjoy) Product Design When AI Does Half the Work
Every designer wants sharper craft and better taste. But with the new tools generating close to all of your work, it's tempting to skip the design fundamentals entirely. I mean... who knows anything about gestalt or color theory anymore?! Also, social media is full of hot takes claiming UX is dead and the double diamond is over. None of this or the above helps you to enjoy your job as a Product Designer. Luckily, there's a better way. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick continue their series on becoming a modern, in-demand product designer with part two: improving…
E65 · 30 Sep 2026 · 29 min
The Best Way To Get Product Design Experience When You Have None
Junior product designers know what it is like. To get a job you need experience; and to get experience, you need a job. How do you break free of this annoying circle? The internet is full of generic suggestions that do not really get you anywhere. Luckily, there's a better way. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick tackle the experience-job circle mentioned above. They skip the tired advice of redesigning a famous website and focus on what gets you real clients, real work, and real proof. Tyler makes the case for doing free work the right way, from pitching local…
E64 · 23 Sep 2026 · 33 min
Your Product Design Setup - How To Go From Idea To Live Prototype In Just a Few Clicks
Imagine you found a bug on your client's website. Back in the day, you'd have to get that issue on the agenda and agreed on before even starting to work on it. Today, Nick's website fix went live twelve seconds after he clicked 'sync', and the whole setup costs about twenty-five dollars a month. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick kick off a ten-episode series on how to become a modern, in-demand product designer. They start with the foundation: setting up an environment that helps you get an idea off the ground and into a working prototype fast. It is a modern…
E63 · 16 Sep 2026 · 25 min
The Business Side Of Freelancing - How Nick Prices, Gets Paid, and Builds A Buffer
Nick's first freelance invoice was for six hundred euros, quoted with a straight face, even though he half expected the client to talk him down. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick dedicate the full conversation to the business side of freelancing, the part that never makes it into a portfolio case study. Nick walks through how he landed his first clients without ever doing cold outreach, why he said yes to everything for two years before niching down, and the pricing structures he actually uses: fifty-fifty splits, milestone billing, and prepaid hour packages. They…
E62 · 9 Sep 2026 · 25 min
Design Quick Fire Round - Job Titles, Email Design, and Why AI Made Us Less Proud Of Our Work
Nick's biggest newsletter open rate was fifty percent when his list was small. Now that it's grown, he's happy with thirty, and neither of them can fully explain why. In this quick-fire episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick answer a stack of rapid questions on product design and careers, each in under five minutes. They cover why email and newsletter design remains such an underrated skill, why designers keep leaving the field entirely to open restaurants and ninja warrior gyms, and how AI has shifted the job from pushing pixels to writing planning documents and doing discovery…
E61 · 2 Sep 2026 · 24 min
Product Design Money Talk - How To Go From $50 To $95 An Hour Doing The Same Work
Nick's first freelance client paid him fifty dollars an hour. He said 'yes' before he knew what the market rate was, and it turned out to be exactly the right way to find out. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick spend the whole episode on money, salaries, hourly rates, and how you should ask for more. Tyler walks through the salary research tool that showed him his entire possible career path and the forty thousand dollar salary he thought he would happily live on forever. Nick breaks down the raise that took him from 2500 EUR/month to 4000 EUR/month, and the…
E60 · 26 Aug 2026 · 29 min
I Got Fired Over Christmas And Nobody Told Me - Product Design Horror Stories
In 2015, Nick drove to an interview in his moms car. Three minutes in, the hiring manager told him he would never make it as a designer. 10 Years later, he loses his product design job over Christmas. And that's just the start... In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick share the worst moments of their careers so far. Nick gets torn apart in his first ever interview, prints a batch of flyers that come back the wrong color (because nobody told him about RGB and CMYK), and takes on a small favor for a client that turns into a project so big it costs him two clients. In the…
E59 · 19 Aug 2026 · 34 min
The 4 Skills Every Product Designer Needs Right Now (Figma isn't One of Them)
You can master every product design AI tool that exists and still get overruled in the meeting that matters most. That's because tools matter way less than what you read online. There are way more important things to learn if you want to make it as a modern-day product designer. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick lay out the four skills they think actually separate strong product designers from everyone else. It's inspired partly by Josh Puckett's Interface Craft course, and partly by more than a decade of getting these wrong themselves. Conceptual range. Conceptual…
E58 · 12 Aug 2026 · 33 min
Is AI replacing designers? Not Really. There's A Bigger Danger
Someone on your team just built a landing page with Claude and skipped you entirely. It used to be a product designer's nightmare, but now... it is called 'Tuesday'. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick get into the question lots of product designers are asking right now. Is AI actually coming for your job? Or is that all social media nonsense? They map out why the risk of losing your job has nothing to do with AI itself. Instead, it comes down to company size and UX maturity, and where you land on that grid decides whether you're a strategic partner or the first…
E57 · 5 Aug 2026 · 32 min
10 Things Companies Hiring Product Designers Want From You Right Now
Zero to one product design work. That's the main skill companies are hiring designers for right now. You'd expect Figma knowledge or being 'native' with the latest AI tools to be the main thing, but that's not the case. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick react point-by-point to a breakdown of what companies currently want from product designers according to Tom Scott, recruiter and owner at Verified. The list includes communication skills for designers, ownership, design systems, AI-native skills, and why both the take-home task and the old-school work trial are…
E56 · 29 Jul 2026 · 33 min
Live Portfolio Review - Your Hero Section Is Costing You The Interview
Two seconds. That's how long you have before a hiring manager bounces off your portfolio. Most product design hero sections that time. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick roast real, anonymized hero sections pulled straight from product design portfolios. Examples include the generic portfolio, one that looks like a resume-dump, and the rare ones that work. They break down why "I deliver thoughtful designs, seamless solutions, and creative experiences built for impact" tells a recruiter nothing, why your name doesn't need to be the headline, and how to turn a degree,…
E55 · 22 Jul 2026 · 36 min
The take-home design challenge is broken. Here's how to survive it anyway.
Four hours of unpaid work. Seven rounds of interviews. And then a generic rejection email that reads like it was written by a robot. If you're hunting product design jobs right now, none of the above is news to you. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick have their opinions on the modern design hiring process; take-home challenges, endless interview rounds, and the red and green flags you should keep in mind to figure out if a company is worth your time. They get into why take-home tests rarely test what companies think they're testing, why a whiteboarding challenge is…
E54 · 15 Jul 2026 · 27 min
Do you have to use AI to get a design job? (our listener asks)
One of our listeners wrote us while being stuck between two things: loving the product design craft and needing a job badly. He likes doing the actual product design work by hand, because that's how he learns and how he gets better. That's how he finds solutions. Yet, every job posting wants you to be "AI native" with a ton of "AI experience." So what do you do? Fake it? Give in? Hold the line and risk staying unemployed? Or something in between? In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick answer a real question from a listener: a recent grad, currently out of work, torn…
E53 · 8 Jul 2026 · 37 min
Is Everything You Design Already Copied?
Every product. designer has had this thought at some point: "Someone's already built this. Am I even doing anything original?" It creeps in during a login screen, an onboarding flow, a pricing page, and it makes you second guess whether you're actually adding value or just repeating and copying something else. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick tackle a listener question: is it a problem if your designs look like things that already exist? They dig into why copying isn't the same as stealing, why juniors should absolutely study and replicate great work before they…
E52 · 1 Jul 2026 · 31 min
You Are Not Behind: A Mental Health Check for Product Designers in 2026
Every new product design AI tool feels like a deadline. You have to use it or you're left behind. That's what you read on social media at least. In this episode, Tyler and Nick have perhaps their most important talk of the Design Table Podcast so far: the anxiety of constant updates, managers demanding you become a '10x product designer', and how the product design community's mental health under a lot of pressure. They discuss what's causing burnout for product designers on the job hunt, comparison culture, the disappearing joy of problem-solving, and why "you're not behind" might be the…
E51 · 24 Jun 2026 · 37 min
"Go Fix It Yourself" (The Best Thing A Senior Developer Told Me)
Product design is becoming more collaborative, more technical, and a lot harder to control. In this episode, Tyler and Nick talk about what happens when your design work stops being “yours” and starts becoming a shared thing across designers, developers, PMs, stakeholders, AI tools, and codebases. We get into the emotional side of design work too. Why product designers get protective, why feedback can feel personal, and why letting go might be one of the most important skills designers need to build. What we cover in this episode: 🔸 Why designers get emotionally attached to their work 🔸 How…
E50 · 17 Jun 2026 · 56 min
Everyone's Switching Design Tools - I'm Not. Here's Why
Product design workflows are changing fast and nobody has a clean answer for what to do about it. In our first ever live episode, Tyler (in-house at a fintech SaaS company) and Nick (freelance product designer working with clients across the world) get honest about what modern design actually looks like right now. Neither of us have touched a wireframe in months. We talked about why. And then we get a comment from a live viewer that made us thinking again about our choices. What we cover in this episode: 🔸 Why wireframing is disappearing and what is replacing it 🔸 The real difference between…
E49 · 10 Jun 2026 · 36 min
I Spent a Month Trying to Quit Figma. It Failed.
Everywhere we look, product designers are sick and tired of AI this, AI that. It feels like every day, there is a new tool, a new workflow, a new “Figma is dead” post, a new vibe coding demo, and another person telling designers they are either 'cooked', obsolete, or about to become '10x'. Reality is completely different. So try and relax! In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick talk about whether AI is making product design more fun, less fun, or just more overwhelming. They get into the current AI chaos around product design, vibe coding, designers touching code, Figma,…
E48 · 3 Jun 2026 · 32 min
Product Design Perfectionism: Why 97 Out of a 100 Is Not Good Enough
Two episodes of telling their career stories, and Nick and Tyler kept noticing the same thing: the lessons that actually mattered came from the rejections, the steps backward, and the ego traps nobody warns you about. In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Nick and Tyler sit down for a third session to digest their two previous story episodes and pull out what they actually learned. No new hero's journey. Just two designers comparing notes on the messy, non-linear reality of building a career that lasts. They get into luck and whether you can create your own, why eight months of…
E47 · 27 May 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
I Got Let Go Twice. Here’s How I Still Built a 16-Year Design Career
Most product designers want to have the clean career story. First, you go to school. You build a portfolio and get hired. Then you get promoted and become a senior product designer. Post something painfully inspirational on LinkedIn about “the journey” and you're there. Cute, but Tyler’s path was not that. It started with trying to get into animation. He soon realised the job market did not care about his art school confidence, so he had to go back to learn graphic design, web design, and coding landing pages. After, he started mailing resumes like it was the stone age and slowly figuring…
E46 · 20 May 2026 · 45 min
How Nick Became a Freelance Product Designer Making Six Figures
Lots of product designers dream about going freelance. No boss. No performance reviews. And you decide where and when you work. And then reality shows up. No guaranteed paycheck. No HR department. No sales team. No legal department. No one magically handing you clients because you updated your LinkedIn headline to “freelance product designer.” So… how do you actually become a fully booked freelance product designer making six figures without setting your career on fire? In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler interviews Nick about his full journey into product design. From…
E45 · 13 May 2026 · 31 min
Why The Best Product Designers SAY LESS In Interviews
Most product designers spend weeks (or even months) polishing their portfolio website. And then they get into the actual interview, open their mouth, and suddenly their clean case study turns into a 14-minute hostage situation. Awkward questions and most likely no follow-up after the interview. Back to square one. So… how do you actually present your design work without rambling, panicking, or over-explaining every single pixel? In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, we talk about the portfolio presentation stage of the product design interview process. The part where you’re no longer…
E44 · 6 May 2026 · 30 min
If Figma Disappeared Tomorrow, Would You Still Have a Job?
Like many product designers, you’ve probably ran into one of the following challenges. One PM shows up with a prototype, an engineer suggests a user flow, or someone who has never opened Figma suddenly has strong opinions about spacing, UX, and “how the screen should work.” So… is everyone a designer now? In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, we talk about why designers feel threatened when other people start doing pieces of design work, why that fear is understandable, and why the real value of a designer is not about the tools they use. We also get into AI, vibe coding, Figma Make,…
E43 · 29 Apr 2026 · 39 min
The AI Skill Most Product Designers Are Sleeping On
Like many product designers, you’re using AI. You get decent results by prompting and copy-pasting. Yet, you're still doing all the work. WHat if you didn't have to? In this episode of the Design Table Podcast, we talk about how designers can move beyond prompting and start using AI to actually execute tasks. Nick walks us through how he’s setting up simple workflows using Claude Skills to (more or less) automate small but meaningful pieces of work, from fixing things on his site to handling repetitive tasks. We also talk about what’s changing, how fast things are evolving, and why the real…
E42 · 22 Apr 2026 · 34 min
Your Portfolio Platform Doesn't Matter (Stop Overthinking It)
You’re stuck building your portfolio. Should you use Webflow? Framer? WordPress? Maybe you rebuild everything from scratch and start over? There are so many opinions on design social media that it is impossible to know what to do. In this episode of the Design Table Podcast, we discuss why designers obsess over portfolio tools and why that’s (mostly) a waste of time. We talk about what actually matters when someone reviews your work, why presentation beats platform, and how small details like having a custom domain has more impact than the tools you use. We also cover platform tradeoffs (in…
E41 · 15 Apr 2026 · 28 min
This Product Designer Built a SaaS Product in a Weekend (And There's No Way Back)
You keep hearing that UX and product designers should build. Yet, most designers don’t. Why is that? Are designers right? Is it just a case of social media nonsense? To find out, we looked at what happens when someone actually does it. Not a side project they’ll finish later (but never do) or another concept that never makes it out of Figma. It is a real product and it is live. All in one weekend. And for Tyler, the designer who built it, it changes everything. In this episode of the Design Table Podcast, we discuss just that; what actually happens when a designer stops talking about…
E40 · 8 Apr 2026 · 30 min
How Designers Actually Get Hired (After Being Laid Off)
You lose your job. No warning. Or maybe you felt it coming. Either way… now you’re sitting there thinking: “What the hell do I do next? How do I find a new product design role?!” In this episode of the Design Table Podcast, we discuss what actually happens after getting laid off as a product designer and how to succeed at the job search that follows. We talk about the emotional side of layoffs, what goes through your head in those first few days, and how quickly reality sets in when you realize you need to find your next role. We also get into real strategies that worked for us (we found out…
E39 · 1 Apr 2026 · 33 min
How to Survive as the Only Product Designer at a Company
You join a new company. First of all; congratulations! You arrive on day one and what do you see? There are engineers, product managers, marketers, and a sales team. But there is no design team. Turns out you are the only product designer. Yikes! In this episode of the Design Table Podcast, we discuss what it’s actually like to be the first or only designer at a company, how product designers can survive those early months without burning out, and how you can start to build real design influence. We talk about the reality of introducing design into organizations that have never had it…
E38 · 25 Mar 2026 · 31 min
Everyone Can Ship Now… But Should They? Product Designers, AI, and the Shipping Problem
Designers can ship code now. That's what social media and your manager is telling you. AI tools, vibe coding, and new prototyping workflows mean designers are getting closer to production than ever before. But just because we can ship faster doesn’t mean we should . In this episode of the Design Table Podcast, we discuss the growing pressure for designers to ship quickly, why the “just ship it” mindset can backfire, and how teams should think about quality in a world where building things fast seems more important than building things well. We talk about the collapse of the gap between…

About Design Table Podcast

Design Table Podcast is a English arts & books podcast from Nick Groeneveld, Tyler White. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Nick Groeneveld, Tyler White
Language: English
Category: Arts & Books
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 33 min
Latest episode: 14 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1803162380

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