194: UX Hiring Insights: Marc Aquino, Senior Product Design Manager at Deel

UX design burnout doesn't come from working too many hours. That's one of Marc Aquino's hot takes in this episode, and once it sits with you, it's hard to keep blaming the hours.

Marc is senior product design manager at Deel, a global HR and payroll platform helping companies hire and pay employees and contractors in over 150 countries. He's spent 15 years in the industry, seven of them building and scaling design teams across startups, scale-ups, and global companies.

His take started with a LinkedIn post responding to a Nielsen Norman Group article on psychological ownership, research originally from Lynn Van Dyne and John Pierce. Burnout builds from a cycle. You get excited about a UX project. You pour research and effort into it. Then stakeholders get involved, and it gets scoped down or reshaped until it barely resembles what you built. Repeat that for months, years, and it wears you down more than the hours ever could.

Marc talks through how he tries to protect his own team from that cycle, including a framework for pitching big ideas without getting shut down, and a line from his LinkedIn post that stuck with Sarah: the UX designers who last the longest hold the shipped thing loosely and their own judgment tightly.

Then the conversation shifts into hiring. What Marc actually wants to see when a UX project never launched. Why team metrics tell him more than individual ones ever could. What happens when a candidate claims credit for a huge revenue number all on their own. Deel gets an enormous volume of applications, and Marc is candid about how little time he actually gets to review each one.

Topics Discussed

✅ Why UX design burnout might have less to do with hours worked and more to do with losing authority over something you feel deep ownership over

✅ The repeating cycle that quietly wears UX designers down over months and years, and why fast-paced companies make it worse

✅ A framework for pitching big, ambitious ideas at work without getting shut down before you even present them

✅ Why you should include projects that never launched in your UX portfolio, and what to talk about instead of the outcome

✅ Why leading with a huge dollar figure or revenue percentage in an UX interview can backfire, and what to say instead

✅ Why team metrics tell a UX hiring manager more about a candidate than an individual one ever could

✅ What actually happens to your application in the days after you hit submit at a company receiving millions of applications a year

✅ Two team rituals that help a UX design team avoid burnout and stay aligned every month

Links & Resources

🔗 Connect with Marc on LinkedIn

🔗 Marc's LinkedIn post responding to the Nielsen Norman Group article on psychological ownership

🔗 Learn more about Deel

🔗 Kotter's Eight Steps to Change Management

🔗 Sarah's earlier episode with Steph McDonald, UX recruiter at HubSpot

🔗 10% Happier by Dan Harris

🎯 How I can help with your UX job search

📋 Get my UX case study template

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