We recently hosted Soumil Panwar, Senior UX Designer at Optum in Dallas, for an engaging alumni talk. Soumil, a Parsons SDM graduate (Class of 2023), shared his career journey, portfolio strategies, and reflections on navigating the UX and product design industry. Below are the key highlights and insights.

Career Journey into UX
Soumil’s design path began in India, where he ran his own design agency before moving into UX through client projects in software. At Optum, he started with execution-focused UX tasks but gradually expanded into leading UX research, managing teams, and bridging product strategy with technical feasibility. His journey underscores the importance of volunteering for responsibility, learning on the go, and carving out a role that integrates design with business value.

Five takeaways you can use this:

• Pick a lane for each application. Tailor your materials to a specific role, not a generic “UX everything” pitch.
  
• Lead with two or three excellent projects. Recruiters skim the first three items, so make them count
  
• Use one page per project up front. Give a tight summary with links to deeper case studies for hiring managers.
  
• Track your funnel like marketing. Monitor outreach, screenings, portfolio reviews, panels, and offers, then improve the weakest step.
  
• Tell value stories, not tool lists. Show how your work reduced risk, improved adoption, or unlocked revenue, and keep it technology agnostic.

Soumil’s path in brief

• Early career: Visual design undergrad in India, then co-founded and ran a design agency. 
• Shift to UX: Client software work exposed him to product problems and research workflows. 
• Parsons focus: Chose courses to build research, systems thinking, and strategy skills that transfer across industries.
  
• Current role: Leads UX research at Optum, bridges stakeholders and technical teams, manages designers, and keeps the conversation centered on business outcomes and user value.
  

How to position your experience

Value first. Soumil frames projects by the problem, the decision at stake, and the result for users and the business. He avoids heavy jargon and focuses on clarity, narrative, and evidence.
Transfer across domains. Instead of branding yourself as “healthcare only” or “aviation only,” highlight universal capabilities like product discovery, system change, and adoption strategy. That flexibility made his moves across finance, healthcare, EdTech, transportation, and AI possible.
Strategic design without the buzzwords. Use the language hiring teams already speak. Replace abstract frameworks with simple stories about how you reduced uncertainty, aligned stakeholders, and shipped better decisions.

Portfolio structure that respects how hiring works

Front door: two or three flagship projects.
For each flagship: a one-page summary with

• problem and context
  
• your role and collaborators
  
• what you did
  
• what changed for users and the business one or two visuals that speak for themselves link to a detailed case study.

Case study depth: keep it scan friendly. Move from discovery to insights to decisions to outcomes. If you include methods, say why they were chosen and what the method unlocked. Avoid dumping artifacts.
Older work: do not force your newest framework onto past projects. Re-edit the story for clarity and value. Keep the original decisions honest.
Landing page: simple grid, strong thumbnails, clear titles. Minimize personal filler. Let the work lead.

Role targeting and job search strategy

Choose a role, then align everything. Title, summary lines, project order, and even the way you talk about outcomes should match the role’s expectations.
Networking with structure. Plan short term actions, like weekly outreach and event attendance, and long term actions, like staying visible in a niche and nurturing a small set of relationships over months.
Treat it like a pipeline. Track conversion at each step. If screens convert well but panel interviews stall, rehearse your storytelling and evidence. If outbound messages do not get replies, sharpen the ask and relevance.
Practice the pitch. Rehearse concise intros for each project and a 60 to 90 second role story that links your background to the team’s needs.

What he would look for if he were hiring

• A crisp problem statement and a believable path to insight.
  
• Evidence of collaboration with product, engineering, and business stakeholders.
  
• Concrete outcomes, even if small, for example faster onboarding, fewer support tickets, higher task success, or reduced risk.
  
• Craft that matches the role, not a toolbox recital.

“Treat your search like a pipeline. Improve the weakest step each week.”
“Lead with two or three excellent projects. Most reviewers will not go past the top row.”
“Tell value stories. Tools change, outcomes translate.”

Do this next

• Rebuild your portfolio landing page so the top three projects carry the story.
  
• Create one-page summaries for those projects with links to depth.
  
• Write a role-specific intro you can say in under 90 seconds.
  
• Map your job search funnel and set weekly targets for each stage.
  
• Send two thoughtful follow-ups to people you met this month, with a clear reason to reconnect.