Michiel Pruijssers

👋 Ahoy there!

I am a Principal Designer with 14+ years of UX work experience (whether as a Designer, a User Researcher and as a Design Consultant). I'm super passionate for great Design and love-love-love helping people whether it's "breaking into tech", acing interviews, and planning careers paths.

My mentees range the spectrum of starting/junior- to seasoned design/research professionals, to interns and PhD candidates.

My career in tech has taught me a thing or two about:
1) How to break into 'big tech': how to prepare for interviews as a designer and/or user researcher?
2) What makes a great Design- or User Research portfolio and how to navigate the various interviews and white-boarding exercises?
3) How to determine if the team you're applying for will be a good fit?
4) How to navigate career changes (I used to be a soldier, turned entrepreneur, turned consultant, turned designer, turned user researcher, re-turned designer to finally turned into a Design- & User Research Practice leader)?
5) How to influence stakeholders?

As I have had the opportunity to specialize myself in the AI space for the last 7 years (Principal Designer positions at Microsoft for Computer Vision and Conversational AI). We can definitely go deeper in other topics of interest such as:
- Designing for "black box" experiences
- Ethical and moral implications of AI initiatives
- Planning, Strategizing and executing on User Research activities

Before we get started, we'll schedule a quick session just to get to know each other as. Making sure we 'vibe' is very important as well as having clear goals and expectations from (y)our mentorship.

Looking so forward to meeting you! 😊