Acknowledgements

You’re reading an excerpt of Land Your Dream Design Job, a book by Dan Shilov. Filled with hard-won, personal insights, it is a comprehensive guide to landing a product design role in a startup, agency, or tech company, and covers the entire design interview process from beginning to end, for experienced and aspriring designers. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

A frequent question I get from folks is, how long did it take to write this book? Although the content took only two years to put together, the reality is that I’ve been thinking about the topic of design, careers, and development for over a decade. And although my name is on the cover, rest assured many people supported me on this journey; there wouldn’t be a book without them.

First and foremost, I’m grateful for the support of my family. I spent a fair amount of time writing parts of the book while on vacation, which sometimes meant locking myself away in my room for hours on end. Thank you for being patient with me during this time.

A big shout out goes to the fantastic team at Holloway. Courtney Nash helped start the conversation encouraging me to write. Her support and guidance helped me create a strong narrative from beginning to end. Taking the book to the finish line was no small feat either, and I have to thank Joshua Levy and Rachel Jepsen for helping me get there.

Big thank you to Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga at UX Collective for supporting my writing over the past few years. Shout out to Fabricio for feedback and encouraging words which buoyed me to continue writing during a challenging time in my career. And of course, I’m indebted to everyone who has read my articles, shared the work, downloaded the templates, and provided feedback.

I also want to thank all the reviewers who have taken the time out of their busy schedules to read this book and provide insightful feedback: Nancy Duan, Sylvia Yu, Adam Connor, Melissa Hui, Julie Stanescu, Chris Shu, Zain Ali, Marissa Louie, Aniruddha Kadam, Sanchit Gupta, Susan Rice, Timmy Chiu, Tanner Christensen, and Tanaya Joshi. Special thanks to Hang Le and Angela Liu, who went the extra mile and were generous with their time and knowledge to make this book stronger.

I wouldn’t be here without my mentors and managers who helped my early career development: Michael Rawlins, Bob Thomas, Chris Cox, Pamela Hostetler, Gregg Tyson, David Vonesh, Marc Fusco, Melissa Teitler, and Glenn Britting. I’m grateful to my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, which set me on a whole new path that I wouldn’t be on were it not for the rigorous MHCI program. To the team at Instacart, which helped me grow exponentially over the past few years with the help and support from: Ryan Scott Tandy, Brett Rampata, and Himani Amoli.

Thank you to everyone who has helped me on this journey so far. If we haven’t had a chance to connect just yet and you have some words of advice or feedback, I encourage you to reach out!

—November 2020