We’re kicking of the 200 Series with a conversation with Kate SyumaKate and I had the pleasure to connect via the Growthmates podcast and hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

About Kate

Kate is a Growth Advisor and Founder of Growthmates, with diverse experience in building products that combine great user experience with a real business impact. Previously Kate was shaping the product through hyper-growth at Miro for 6+ years, passing through company growth from Startup to Business at Scale.

Throughout her experience, she gained diverse expertise across Product Design, UX, User Research, and Growth Strategies by covering Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Monetization, and Community Platforms.

Currently, Kate is a Growth Advisor and a Founder of Growthmates — a platform and an advising practice that guides companies in growing meaningful products by leveraging PLG and enhancing UX quality, together.

Tell us about your career odyssey. What led you to design?

I don’t want to start too far back, but it seems inevitable. Since childhood, I have been passionate about creating some form of art. I studied at a fine art school, creating tangible visual artifacts that allowed me to express myself creatively. I remember getting acquainted with Photoshop and Illustrator and waking up early on Saturday to try out new things before doing the homework (yeah, I was a nerd!).

The first critical moment that led me to explore design more consciously was at university where I studied IT & Business Informatics. I rationally got into the tech world, but subconsciously I missed the "creative aspect" of that world. I started thinking – alright, how can I bring this creative element back, while not shifting a direction completely? So I landed on Graphic Design.

I remember these warm summer evenings when I was reading "Steal Like an Artist" by Austin Kleon, "Design Form and Chaos" by Paul Rand, and it felt like I found something I was looking for. As I was still studying at university, it became my playground to "learn by doing", so I started leading a small student club on Graphic design. In a strange way, my first money came from that "design as a hobby" — I designed the postcards that were sold in a local shop in my hometown. Then I started turning it into more work-related freelancing and managed to complete dozens of projects with a Marketing agency.

I felt that I needed to harmonize this passion with the tech world, so I landed on the UI/UX design discipline. A lot of my friends were developers at that time and I uncovered that user interface was the best playground for me to express myself creatively in the tech world. And soon, the Miro story began.

You started as a Product Designer at Miro and moved up all the way to Head of Growth Product Design. What advice would you give designers about career progression at the same company?

First, I'd like to share a little story of how it all started. About 8 years ago, I was working in an agency and felt I was not good enough (yet) to get into the Product Design world. This is when unexpected things usually happen and get you out of your comfort zone, where there's no change or learning. This happened to me — a recruiter from Miro (formerly RealtimeBoard) came to me with a position after finding my Dribble profile with literally 3 shots published. It took some amount of courage and nerves to complete the test task and come to the interview with nearly 10 people (all are very smart in the room, except myself), and eventually receive a job offer on my b-day (again, interesting coincidence and nice present).

I joined as the third Product Designer in the company, the team was around 50 people, and I was incredibly terrified, curious, and excited at the same time. Looking back, it's hard to acknowledge that over 6 years in one company I experienced so much on this path:

• 3rd Product Designer (Miro was ≈50 people) in 2017

• Lead Product Designer (Growth, Enterprise, and User Research)

• Design Lead in Growth

• Product Design Manager in Growth

• Head of Growth Product Design (building a team of 10+ people, Miro was ≈2000 people) in 2023.

I shared some self-reflections about this path in my article From IC to Leader in Growth. When I think about my advice to anyone who are looking for growth opportunities in one company, the first phrase that comes to mind is "Growth mindset". This is something that lays underneath all other things, and I think most people have it, but it can be in "deactivated" mode. The best way to activate it is to stay constantly curious and self-conscious.
There's a book  “Mindset: How We Can Learn to fulfill our potential” by Carol Dweck. This is where I learned about the term “Growth mindset”. Carol Dweck defined it as “The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.” I think that attitude helped me stick to the defined path for the following years.
On top of the growth mindset, there are some principles and practices that helped me, and I hope can help others:

1. Dive deep into business, regardless of your role or title. During my first year, I had a paralyzing impostor syndrome. However, over time, the curiosity and desire to learn overweight that feeling. I learned that you don’t need any permission to start asking business-related questions, dive into raw data, and operate with a mental model of a “mini-CEO.” It also stimulated the feeling of ownership and a desire to take more responsibility proactively.

2. Knock the door to join all possible leadership meetings. It’s not always natural for leadership to involve individual contributors in strategic meetings, but I believe it’s essential if you want to build a reliable team and mutual trust. For the first several months, I remember having a physical notebook where I wrote down everything related to strategy, metrics, and unknown terms like WAU, NSM, and ARR and creating a personal knowledge base — this helped me in the beginning. Afterwards, I continued to develop this "business vocabulary" as a tool to build partnerships with PMs and Leadership, and speak the same language with them.

3. Start with “Yes” to get more opportunities, then prioritize and delegate. Over my first two years in the company, I was an individual contributor in 3 to 4 teams simultaneously (several Growth teams, Enterprise, and Miro Research Labs). It was incredibly intense, but it afforded me a tremendous opportunity to not only learn the field, but also master managing a substantial scope by myself. Later on, it became a great foundation for creating prioritization and planning frameworks, as well as operationalizing that scope within a bigger team.

4. Build your own growth while keeping your manager a supportive partner. In my opinion, career transitions and promotions are not the responsibility of a manager. Being proactive and intentional about that in the first years is essential. When there was no performance review process at Miro, I created a simple ritual — showing my vision about the role, scope, skills, and responsibilities every 6 months and co-create opportunities to explore the next steps with my manager.

5. Create your own role by combining business goals with your passions. That one became a recipe for having enormous curiosity and passion to stick with one company for a long.

   1. Combine various elements of different roles you enjoy;

   2. Build your own role;

   3. Get the support of your manager by showing how your skills and strengths can be connected with business needs.
      This approach helped me to land the Design Leadership in Growth that inherited all beautiful aspects of business-driven nature from Product Management, ongoing User Research, Product design, and People Leadership as a conscious choice to explore how my desire to understand human psychology can find the place here.

At the same time, the last principle also became the reason why I left and decided to design my own "pathless path", and I'm happy to share more about that later in this interview.

Another thing I tried to maintain across all the years is having regular self-reflections to check in with myself at least every quarter. As I'm now on an independent path, I'm trying to self-reflect weekly, and "subconsciously" it happens all the time (even as I'm writing this). Here's a simple template of a "Personal Painted Picture" that I used in my yearly planning and still trying to rely on self-retrospectives.

The desire to grow myself inspired my transition to Design Leadership to support others in building their career. Now I'm also trying to help others in personal and professional growth through 1:1 Coaching and Mentorship, and recently was surprised how this approach worked well for others, especially connecting the "business + design" worlds. For example, one of my coaching clients who has been looking for a new career step recently landed his dream job at Loom and started achieving first wins and fantastic performance results in 2 months. This type of work makes me very fulfilled and activates the mindset I used to have as a design leader – "my success = the success of my team".

What is one part of the design process you find so much joy in—your design love language?

Discovery and Research — 100%. I uncovered this passion when I was an individual contributor, and there was no AI or unmoderated research to automate the insights gathering. At some point, I found myself talking to customers almost every day, sometimes late in the evening due to time zones, and it took literally 50% of my work. Surprisingly, I did that not because I had to, but because I deeply wanted to learn from them and their experience as end-users.

Even these days I'm doing a lot of "discovery work", which comes in different forms and shapes:

• Conducting surveys and industry studies like this one about User Onboarding

• 1:1 interviews with industry leaders turned into Growthmates, which is now becoming a platform and my advisory practice that guides companies in growing meaningful products by leveraging PLG and enhancing UX quality, together (connecting my two passions).

Is there a particular project or work you’re really proud of in your career?

My favorite project was Miroverse which I worked on in 2020. Not only it was my last "hands-on" project before I transitioned into leadership, but also it reflected my passions, like continuous learning and creating visual frameworks. Ultimately, Miroverse was created as a community-led platform for Miro creators to share best practices, and for others to learn from them. I was lucky to be in an enthusiastic working group who worked on that and it felt like a "startup" project in a growing company. The first version was shipped and proved super fast (in a couple of months), which also reflected my belief in quick launches and iterations. I was lucky to have some creative freedom in this project and introduce "black mode" which made this place a bit more authentic.

Looking back, there are a couple of things that made it my favorite project:

1. Delivering value through the power of community. On top of any business impact, there should be a clear value that the product delivers. This project is an example of how this value can be multiplied by the power of your users and community, who are eager to advocate for the product and openly share their thought leadership and best practices. From the recent similar examples, I find Reforge Artifacts as another valuable example of this approach.

2. Business impact and connection to the Growth ecosystem. The Community-led growth strategy is getting more popular these days, and at that time the team had to prove if it was worth it. If designed well, the community platforms have their connection to all parts of the Growth ecosystem: UGC templates become an Acquisition channel, the content itself can be used for Activation and deepening Engagement, and sometimes it can be even Monetised (as you guys did at Webflow).

Overall, it shows again the importance of delivering value to users to have an impact on business. What is good for users is good for business.

Can you tell more about Growthmates and what mission are you driving these days?

I think that even working on Miroverse already sparked some inspiration in that direction. In parallel with my leadership transition, I started leading an internal ritual "Growth Community of Practice". It was a place where we exchanged learnings within the Growth stream. We selected different topics, prepared small narratives, conducted research, and invited external experts. This meeting quickly became a favorite for many people.

Soon after one of the "Growth Community of Practice" sessions, I met with my teammate Oscar and we decided to share the Zoom recording internally as a follow-up. At that moment, I had a thought: why are we sharing it only internally when these insights could be interesting to people outside the company as well? This is how it turned into the podcast.

The first episode was released in Spring 2023, and it became a personal learning platform, providing access to conversations with fantastic leaders from top tech companies about both personal and professional growth stories. This is how I also met you, David ;)

In total, over the year, there were 20+ in-depth interviews with leaders from Dropbox, Loom, Canva, Adobe, Amplitude, and more. I started transforming these insights into case studies, blog summaries, and other assets that I carefully collected.

In gratitude for this milestone and as a gift to everyone, I created “The Holistic Growth Playbook” — a reflection of industry trends, conversations with guests, and special insights from respected industry experts. It was also a trigger to create a new home for Growthmates and describe all other collaboration options that I'm eager to support companies and people with.

Join Growtmates.club — the platform to learn from industry leaders on the intersection of PLG and UX, and explore different collaboration options with Kate.

As Growthmates is still evolving and shaping, it becomes something beyond just myself or just a podcast. I want to think of that as a platform for learning from industry leaders and my advising practice that guides companies in growing meaningful products by leveraging PLG and enhancing UX quality, together.

I'm always open to new ideas and discussing meaningful collaborations. For everyone who'd like to explore what I'm doing and get in touch, here's growthmates.club to learn more and connect with me.

This publication celebrates learning and continued experimentation. What aspect in your career or life are you most excited about learning?

I love this principle. Even from the Product Growth practice, only around 50% of experiments are successful — the same applies to the professional journey. Not all opportunities have an immediate impact, and that’s fine. The common mistake is completely pivoting direction right after the first unsuccessful attempt. Always run at least a second iteration.

As I'm currently on the independent track, it requires a lot of attempts to do things for the first time. How to build a newsletter, market my advising practice, build relationships with clients, and balance work and life as a solopreneur? My approach — learn, reflect, and iterate smart. Combining it with the “consistency and commitment” rule helps me just keep doing things I find valuable, and I hope that soon they will present more return on investment.

The main aspect that I'm most curious about constantly is psychology. I think this is the foundation for all the things we're doing — from building user experience to leadership and personal growth. I've been working with an analytical psychotherapist for the last 4 years, read probably all the things from Carl Jung, and combined that with my passion for exploring emotional intelligence ("The Atlas of the Heart" by Brene Brown). Now I'm also thinking about how to mix it with the professional aspect of creating product experiences through behavioral design — thanks for asking this question, it's a useful reminder!

What do you do to creatively recharge?

Once I collected a list of emotional "gainers" and "drainers" and started implementing some of the new routines in daily life. Here are some of them that are connected to creative sources.

1. Writing and Weekly self-reflection exercise. I try to dedicate at least 1-2 hours each week on Fridays to strategic thinking that helps me constantly reflect and re-prioritize many things I’m doing. Being constantly in a “doing” mode is not an option for me anymore, as this “thinking” mode gives impactful decisions to inform what activities to invest in.

2. Treating art as a source of inspiration. This source is something I lost long ago, but now it’s time to give it back to me. I go to museums or galleries at least once a week to get inspiration from visual art — and it became a priority. Sometimes I share my observations in a newsletter as well, for example, a recent exhibition from Matthew Wang provoked a theme of "loneliness of the self in the vastness of the world" that I think is familiar and tough for any creative human being.
   

1. Matthew Wang — End of the Day

2. Spending time with nature. I'm trying to surround myself with the elements that give me energy. As I'm living in Amsterdam and it's quite dark and rainy during the winter, I grew about 15 houseplants and keep expanding my home garden. During summer, I'm just trying to be outside as much as I can.

1. Practicing yoga and meditation. Mind and body are deeply interconnected, and to get new creative ideas and energy, I need a lot of time with myself. I'm trying to have at least one 10-min meditation in the morning and 5 minutes journaling to set up for the day. Usually, this is the moment that sets me up for the day ahead.

Where can people find you on the internet?

It's a challenge to be active across so many platforms — for now, I'm more active on LinkedIn, but maybe something will change in the future. Here are all the places to stay in touch with me:

• LinkedIn — sharing my thoughts and frameworks on the intersection of PLG and UX.

• Substack — weekly articles and podcast episodes about growth, UX, and my solopreneurship journey

• Growthmates website — a home for all my activities where you can also find "The Holistic Growth Playbook" that I've recently shared.

• Instagram — my life, traveling, and other things behind the scenes.