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Shruti Goli - How to Succeed by Failing as Much as Possible

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Highlights

Are you terrified of failure but want a job in tech or to build your own product? In this episode, Shruti dives into her advice on building your product, how she did it while she had a full-time job, and the best time to get started. Read the article below for her tips on landing a big tech internship and building a successful product. Listen to more of Shruti's fantastic advice in the full episode!

🔥 Don't be afraid of failure.

Whether you are trying to land an internship or launch a digital product, don’t let the fear of failure hold you back. Use each failure to learn new lessons that will propel you forward in your career. You never know what insights you will learn that will come into play down the road!

📢 Land the internship of your dreams!

Polish up your portfolio and resume early to get ahead of anyone else looking for the same internship as you are. Make connections by networking at tech career fairs and contacting recruiters to ask for feedback. Don't let rejection hold you back; stay persistent and learn how to improve your interview skills with each failure.

✅ Take action on your product idea.

Stop reading about it and move forward. Create a landing page to gauge interest in your idea. Work on user research to understand specific needs to make sure your product is solving the right problem.

How to Succeed by Failing as Much as Possible

In episode 49 of The Product Design Podcast, Seth Coelen interviews Shruti Goli, Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Trymata, where you can build digital experiences users love with their usability testing and product analytics solutions(formerly TryMyUI.)

During our chat, Shruti shares her journey into tech and her inspiring take on how failure can propel you forwardalong your career path. She gives advice on what she learned while landing an internship at Microsoft (on her second attempt) and failing five times before making her breakthrough product. This episode is packed with the tips and tricks you need if you are just starting in product design or are ready to create and launch your own product now!

Shruti Goli and Seth Coelen on The Product Design Podcast

In this article, we will focus on advice from Shruti on landing an internship for a big tech company and three steps to create your own product!

How to land a big tech company internship

Shruti embraced failure along her career journey, even early on. She was rejected the first time she applied for the Microsoft internship, had 40 interviews with different companies, and finally landed her internship with Microsoft on the second attempt! She shared four ways she approached landing the internship she dreamed of at Microsoft.

📢 Get your resume ready early.

Applications for big tech company internships roll out from August to September. Make sure your resume is ready at least a month before that.

🔑 Network, network, network!

Attend tech career fairs and coffee chats with recruiters to get their attention. See if they can give you feedback on how to make your portfolio and resume stand out.

“Fail fast and be okay with failure.”

👏 Stay persistent.

Even if you get rejected from one application process, don't give up; keep trying and stay motivated by seeing what you can do differently each time. Accept failure as a data point and use it to your advantage to improve on the next go around. Stick to the hustle mentality and remember that failure is okay!

🔥 Improve your skillset.

Practice yourself by speaking on camera to help improve communication skills. Do mock interviews to prepare yourself mentally for when you do get invited in for an interview.

Start simple: three steps to building your own product

Building your own product can be daunting, but it doesn't have to be. The first time Shruti tried to create and launch a digital product, she dedicated so much time to build the idea, and in the end, it did not work out. She failed five times before finding the product to help her launch her business and career! Here are the key pieces of advice Shruti learned as she failed her way to success in launching her own product!

📚 Don't waste time by just reading.

Delve into the problem you are trying to solve and create a landing page for your product idea on Webflow or GoDaddy. Use the website to collect email addresses and gauge interest in your product even before you build it.

☎️ Get on the phone with users.

User research is key to ensuring that you are on the right track. Interview users to understand their pain points regarding the problem you're trying to solve with your product. Ask them for feedback on your idea and if there would be feature requests that could improve your overall product.

💡 Get creative in a “bootstrappy” sort of way.

There are many ways to test your product without fully developing it. Go an extra step further by creating a mockup of your design in Figma and creating the prototype for testing to see how users interact with it. Determine the improvements you need to make and test the updated prototype again. Once you are sure it is worth investing more into your product idea, get moving, and remember that if you fail, it is ok - you will keep learning through the failure!

“Evaluate the opportunity as a whole and then take that leap of faith.”

Thank you so much, Shruti!

Thank you, Shruti, for sharing so much fantastic knowledge with us on this The Product Design Podcast episode! Your advice on landing a big tech internship and how to approach creating a brand-new product will be helpful to so many people in our industry. It is always awesome to offer advice for people getting started in product design and those further along their career path.

Listen to the complete episode on The Product Design Podcast, which includes a deep dive into how Shruti prepared for her breakthrough product while working full-time and more advice on making sure your product idea is worth pursuing. Don’t forget to follow Shruti on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and watch what Trymata is up to on YouTube!

Where to find Shruti