What does it actually take to build a long and meaningful UX career? In this episode of Ascend UX, Ayan Bihi sits down with Ravi Singh, Vice President of Design and User Experience at PROS, to explore the mindset shifts, habits, and honest truths behind leading a UX career with intention. From his roots in fine arts and print design to becoming a design executive over 25 years later, Ravi shares the lessons that shaped him, including why relationships matter more than craft at a certain point, why shipping beats polishing, and why the best thing a designer can do early in their career is start thinking like a leader. Whether you are just starting out in UX or navigating your next big step, this conversation is full of practical wisdom and a few refreshingly uncomfortable truths.
MEET YOUR HOSTS
This conversation was brought to you by two people who believe deeply in the power of design and the people who practice it. If anything in this episode resonated with you, we would love to connect.
EPISODE NOTES
What Is UX, Really?
Ravi opens with a deceptively simple answer. UX is a product or experience intentionally designed for an end user. The key word is intentionally. Coming from a fine arts background where he designed purely for himself, the shift to designing for others changed everything. Good design, he says, is invisible. You remember the experience, not the effort behind it.
How Ravi Got Here
Ravi did not follow a straight line. He moved from fine arts to print design, then into HTML and web design in the late 90s, drawn in by something that had always frustrated him about art: the ability to actually measure quality. Web design gave him engagement data, and that led him naturally into self-taught user research, reading Jakob Nielsen and learning on the job. After a decade as a practitioner, he moved into management to create a safe space for other designers to thrive.
The Power of Transferable Skills
Ravi's fine arts background gave him abstract thinking, the ability to connect dots across very different disciplines, and a genuinely multidisciplinary curiosity. Mathematics, Eastern philosophy, anatomy, all of it fed into his creative practice. His advice: do not let an organisation put you in a box. Wander. Explore. Collect shells on a beach if you have to. Curiosity is what keeps a designer sharp.
Tricks Over Methodology
Ravi references a study from a Jared Spool conference that compared UX agencies relying on methodology against those using a more flexible mix of techniques and tricks. The second group consistently produced better outcomes. The insight: no matter what you put into a sausage grinder, you get sausage. Real creativity needs room for serendipity. His own favourite trick when stuck is simply to walk away, breathe, and let a quiet mind process the problem.
Career Advice Worth Writing Down
Ravi's advice for aspiring and mid-career UX designers, shaped by a mentor who told him as a teenager to grow like a flower:
Take your time. Accelerating too fast means missing the lessons. Early in your career, focus on technique and knowledge. Later, shift to relationships, communication, and purpose. Stop talking about design methodology and start talking about business. The goal is not to be the best designer in the room. It is to be indispensable, and indispensability comes from connecting people, not perfecting pixels.
Ship. Don't Polish.
One of Ravi's most direct points: a designer's focus should be on shipping, not perfection. A great product still on the drafting table creates no value in the world. Do not make shipping somebody else's problem. Own it as part of the mission.
Empathy Starts at Home
Ravi challenges the way designers talk about empathy. We advocate for end users we often never meet, while sometimes failing to empathise with the product managers, engineers, and executives we work with every day. Real empathy starts with the people around you. Build those relationships. Understand the pressures others are under. That is where designers earn real influence.
Storytelling as a Career Skill
Storytelling is not optional for designers. It is how the work creates value beyond the screen. Ravi's approach: find one story you can tell many times, then adapt it to each audience. Lead with the business punchline for executives. Go deep on process with fellow designers. Match the language, the length, and the level of interaction to whoever is in the room. Practice it. Record yourself. Iterate like you would any design.
Aligning Design to Business
Ravi's framework for communicating design value has stayed consistent across his entire career. Every piece of work should connect to one of three things: increasing revenue, decreasing costs, or improving customer satisfaction. Lead with those metrics, then tell the human story underneath. As one of his executive sponsors once put it simply: serving users is good business.
For Anyone Not Given a Seat at the Table
If you are in an organisation where design does not yet have the space it deserves, Ravi's advice is to invite others into your process first. Co-present with product managers and engineers. Bring data. Let the customer voice do the heavy lifting. And when trying to influence someone, give them 24 hours. Especially engineers: they will push back on the challenge at first, and then they will come back with a solution.
CLOSING AND LISTENER HOMEWORK
Ravi closes with three words for anyone early in their career: be weird, be patient, and allow yourself to grow. Try different things. Do a stint in product management or engineering if it helps you grow. Be honest with yourself and the value will follow.
As Ravi put it: some dots you can only see in the rear view mirror. But at this point in his life, he sees the dots in the future too.
Want to continue the conversation? Reach out to Ravi on LinkedIn and find the link in the show notes below.