Her Story
About Samantha Rose
Samantha LindFeinstein is a Senior Product Designer with expertise in UX Product Design. She studied theater design while in college at Rutgers and began her career doing freelance work as a costume designer and working as a producer for an independent theater company while also working in retail. This retail experience led her to focus on customer experience, and with recommendations from friends in UX and tech, she transitioned into the field, working at different startup companies before spending five years at T-Mobile. At T-Mobile she worked mostly on e-commerce experiences for B2B customers and also on the consumer side, including maturing the e-commerce site and introducing the TLife app to business customers. Her main area of expertise today is the e-commerce experience. She is heavily involved with Tech Ladies and plans to be involved with a local synagogue ladies group in Pennsylvania. She attributes her success to discipline and patience, values doing work that she is proud of and that helps people, and advises young women entering the industry to listen and be open to conversations rather than diving straight into tools amid challenges like AI.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Samantha Rose
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would say discipline and patience. I've always been a disciplined person by nature. It has made things a little bit easier for me because I can get a little frustrated or want to move on to the next thing, but if I tell myself if I'm just patient and I see things through, it usually helps me out in the end.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
It was from a former roommate of my father's who is an artist. He said you need to be honest with yourself with the type of lifestyle that you want. It's important to follow your passion but also to be realistic and set goals for yourself. It helped me take a step back, recognize what I enjoy doing, and be honest with myself about how much money I need to make to have a fulfilling lifestyle.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
It's a very challenging time to enter the industry especially with AI. Instead of finding a way to not overwhelm yourself, be able to just listen and be open to hearing conversations, not necessarily diving straight into tools right away but hearing engineers and people within the field have conversations about the tools that are being created. UX is so vast and product design is really big. It takes time to understand what your expertise is going to be and that only comes once you've realized what you've become passionate about.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge is AI. It was a factor that didn't really exist before. There's a lot of competition right now between designers who are moving around and everyone's trying to find their feet and market themselves as the best designer. Everyone right now in the industry is going through a semi-identity crisis trying to figure out if they're worthy or still good enough.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
It just goes back to doing work that you're proud of. If I can complete a day where I can rest easy at night and look forward to the next day and be proud of the work that I do then I know I'm doing the right thing. As long as I'm working on work that I feel helps people in a way then I'm satisfied. You can make impact in a smaller company where you're just helping people.
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