Today we’d like to introduce you to Sara Niezgoda.
Hi Sara, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Growing up, I wanted to be a businesswoman and an artist. I made and sold friendship bracelets from a display on my bicycle when I was a child on my front porch. Then I made and sold handbags with custom interiors from magazines in middle school. My first jewelry business in Undergrad became a hobby since I didn’t know how to make up-cycled and recycled jewelry scale or charge my worth.
My first taste of working in digital marketing was at a fashion blog in New York during an unpaid internship. I managed the company’s Twitter feed and realized then the power and responsibility of a brand interacting with their customers daily. It’s the ongoing continuous relationship with customers at every touchpoint that can make or break that brand’s relationship. It is a delicate and tedious process to uphold that brand sentiment, especially given the content culture of unsatiated digital appetites that we all now have.
I earned my MBA directly after completing my BBA. I then start working with entrepreneurs, small businesses, and startups as a consultant and employee. I realized how under-resourced they were. The title that I had didn’t matter as much as what I could see that needed to be done. Rather than complaining about not having those resources, I would fill the gap by learning whatever was required.
I would usually start in social media, then become the graphic designer, video editor, animator, copywriter, email marketer, advertiser, customer support person, and web designer.
In the spirit of filling the gap, while I was at a tech startup, I was told to cover for the head of customer support for a few days, only to realize that I was to absorb that role (and department) entirely. I became the sole point of contact person for the thousands of customer support inquiries from social media and customer support, tech issues, emails, in-app issues, and phone calls in addition to managing all marketing efforts.
I began to develop a curiosity around the UX process and design thinking from an amazing coworker there. It led me to work with the customers more strategically about how to make the app better. I would take the customers’ pain points and sketch out low fidelity designs and advocate for those to be prioritized as bug fixes as I had the data both from customer support and social to make the case. I also used that data to create social media that spoke directly to the customer’s pain points.
The app downsized, so I traveled to six countries in five weeks, thinking about what was next for me. Once I got back to LA, I started teaching yoga again COVID-19 hit when I became entirely jobless.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
In March 2020, I was job hunting out of pure desperation because I had incorrectly assumed how long it would take me to find work. I was honestly applying to anything that seemed like I had the skills for it. I clocked 300 jobs on my excel between the nine different custom resumes that I crafted.
I went to a recruiter in Los Angeles, and she snarled at me, “What am I supposed to do with you? Your resume is a mess!” referring to how I had outlined all of the different responsibilities that I had at each company. Although the companies and clients I’ve worked with came with a ‘must wear many hats’ requirement, I assumed that would be an asset. This conversation with the recruiter shattered my confidence and made me feel even more desperate for work because I was more confused than ever.
Among the nine different resumes that I have, I was trying the most to pivot into an ad agency as I had always wanted to be in that kind of environment. Every rejection said something like, “you’re too horizontal and not enough vertical” or “you have no agency experience,” to which I wonder, how are you supposed to get agency experience if no one gives you a shot?
Of those 300 jobs, two said yes to me. One was in a role that I was overqualified for. It was a customer support role, but I was grateful to have a job. The other was for an Academic Coach/Professor’s Assistant for various Universities, and I took both jobs. I left that customer support role after a few months because there were no growth opportunities. So, I was back at the drawing board.
Although I was feeling stale, I know that great feats can take time, and I am no stranger to perseverance. As a long-time runner, I had a knee injury that put me out of running for six years. Only in November 2020 did I gain the PT needed from a friend, Melodie Daniels, to start running again. I trained for and ran my first marathon in the summer of 2020 by myself in LA’s streets. I knew that if I could overcome that feat, then I could dig my heels in and figure out what was going on here job-wise.
I began looking for mentors and people who had walked in my shoes to believe that I would be ok. The more I looked, the more I was shaken and scared that I felt lost on my path. Everyone’s paths seemed to be so linear and felt a bit all over the place. I reached out to MANY people. Some ignored me, some I didn’t resonate with their journey, and others gave me the exact amount of hope I needed not to feel that I wasn’t such a misfit.
I am beyond grateful to have had a conversation with someone that shook it all into place for me. I vented to this ad industry strategist that I am a smorgasbord of things, and I’m not sure what is the right role for me if one exists at all, and if I’d be good at it. After one conversation of picking my brain with numerous questions, this man said, “You sound like a UX Strategist.” At that moment, everything I’ve ever done became meaningful and vital to this role.
Immediately after that call, I poured myself into UX work. I spent 17 hour days learning all that I could for free online. I was in 1-4 virtual events a day, even if they were on as background noise while I worked because I wanted to learn by osmosis and hear the terminology to the point where I could make sense of it. To be clear, I was doing UX type of work for years in terms of mindset and mentality. However, I now needed to gain technical methodologies and the foundation of the process.
My first UX project was for a website build for my friend’s Yoga business (AndreaHuntYoga.com). I wanted to combine my marketing consulting background into the UX process, and I did just that. I started by creating a brand identity, performed a needs analysis, set goals, foundational UX Research, and made low fidelity sketches. I turned that into high-fidelity designs in Figma (meanwhile, learning each step as I was conducting the process and learning the tools simultaneously), and then I hit a roadblock. In one of my UX Meetup groups, I asked how the UX Designers take their high-fidelity website design and bring it to life as an actual website? They laughed at me and said, “that is when you hand it over to a developer.” Well, I realized then I would have to learn how to build this website in the process.
I started with Squarespace, deleted all the template pages, and custom-built and designed the website. To do this, I also had to learn how to custom code CSS and HTML while I was creating to try to get my Figma design to come to life. It was NOT EASY! I spent a few all-nighters each week learning, developing, designing and being overwhelmed by not knowing how to do what felt like everything at all (talk about imposter syndrome!)
I started taking a Squarespace course to make sites look custom, be more confident with CSS during this time, and expedite the learning curve. After six rounds of usability testing and editing, I completed the site, and I was proud to have gone through my rigorous first UX project.
I’m proud to say that my first UX project was also my first custom website build. It included +20 pages, SEO strategy, and custom CSS throughout. It was accessibility tested, and I also created the launch campaign of social content/ graphics/ copy/ email marketing/ and Facebook ads for the digital strategy. From the first conversation about starting this project, the website launch was only 48 days!
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I currently live in Los Angeles. Professionally, I’m a Squarespace Website Designer, a UX strategist, a Digital Marketing Consultant, an Adjunct Professor of Advertising, and an Academic Coach of Marketing and Advertising. And you know what, about half of that list became my reality in just the past few months.
When I am working with an entrepreneur or in a larger company, I zoom in on the end-to-end details of what I do. I see the overall operational goals and reverse engineer strategies to make those goals come true through effective and meaningful designs. That could be content design, graphic design, UX design, website design, instructional design, curriculum design, campaign design, etc.
Besides pursuing my UX, web design, marketing, advertising, and teaching passions, I am currently learning more about instructional design, front-end design, data science, and cognitive science. Why? Because it all connects, and I now have the confidence to learn as much as my heart desires and not be afraid that I won’t fit into a specific job’s box.
I now work with brands and people that value my experiences, and they know that by working together, they too will benefit from my desire to support them in any possible way that I can. Even if I need to learn something new, I am always willing and excited to learn!
I view every opportunity as a learning experience, and all of these skills are in my toolbox for the passion project that I’m working on, which is multicultural art shared space. I hope to leverage what I know to connect other artists and non-profits to resources to get their ideas and their work off the ground and gain the support that they need to thrive.
What I know is that we flourish when we support one another. When we hold space for our curiosities, we permit others to lean into theirs too. If we suppress our uniqueness by trying to fit into someone else’s box or mold what they want us to be, we live within a shell of ourselves and do a disservice to the world by hiding our unique gifts and untapped talents. You truly never know how things will connect or why that skill or experience was necessary until the day you need it.
I dedicate this article to the person who inspired this new journey for me by connecting the dots and shining the light forward on this path. Thank you, Bobby.
Do you have any advice for those looking to network or find a mentor?
The people who have helped me the most (I believe) did so because I had skin in the game. I was pouring myself into the learning, taking on projects, classes, and showing work to get their perspective on.
Even if you start down one road and end up not liking it, the fastest way to figure that out is through applied learning, not just theory. So try to find a project and dive in headfirst!
I joined just about every single UX Meetup that I could. I maxed out my LinkedIn messages. I went to many other online workshops from General Assembly and others to learn the craft and participate. I asked questions that were probably dumb because I was such a newbie, but I didn’t want to waste a precious learning opportunity.
I had to surrender my ego of trying to hold it all together on my own, and I had to ask for help. I told everyone I knew what I was working on and was open to every networking chat, book, article, class, etc. Even if it didn’t bring me closer to what I wanted, it was just as helpful to learn things along the way that I don’t want.
Pricing:
- $500 – +$3,000 Custom Designed Squarespace Website
- $75 / hour – Freelance UX Design, Digital Marketing and Advertising work
- $100 / hour Private Yoga class
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: https://www.saraniezgoda.com/
- Instagram: @saraniezgoda
