An in-depth look at how Carlos Salom turned a “non-linear” career into his greatest strength and landed at one of the world’s top consulting firms.
Last week, our Strategic Design and Management community had the privilege of hearing from Carlos Salom, a recent SDM graduate who now works as a strategic designer at Bain & Company. What unfolded was an honest, practical, and inspiring conversation about navigating career uncertainty, building authentic stories, and leveraging the unique skills we develop in our program.
Carlos opened with a striking visual timeline of his journey, describing it as “very non-linear path”. What initially seemed like scattered interests in industrial design, fashion, sports branding, and blockchain technology eventually became his greatest professional asset. His message was clear: your diverse experiences aren’t career confusion; they’re your competitive advantage.

Finding Your Fundamental Truth: The Foundation of Strategic Storytelling
The centerpiece of Carlos’s career strategy was what he calls finding your “fundamental truth.” This isn’t about crafting the perfect elevator pitch or tweaking your resume; it’s about identifying the core thread that connects all your experiences across time.
“Throughout my experiences, there was one thing that was really connected through all of them,” Carlos explained. “I was not the best designer, I was not the best in business, and I was not the best in tech. But I was the best in connecting all three.”
This realization became his North Star. He recognized that his natural ability to navigate the intersection of desirability, viability, and feasibility wasn’t just an academic concept from class but his genuine professional strength. For SDM students, this insight is particularly relevant: our program inherently trains us to think at these intersections, making this a natural space for many of us to excel.
The key takeaway here is that your fundamental truth should be authentic and flow naturally when you speak about it. As Carlos noted, “The only way a story is gonna flow and roll up your tongue in a way that it’s gonna connect really hard with people is, if it’s true.”

The Power of Backcasting: Designing Your Career Like a Project
Carlos applied design thinking methodology to his own career development through a systematic backcasting approach. Rather than simply applying to jobs as they appeared, he worked backward from potential future selves.

His process involved five key steps:

-> Identify fundamental truths about yourself and your core strengths
-> Create narrow possible futures (he identified three potential paths)
-> Design your authentic story around these truths and futures
-> Map existing experiences that support this narrative
-> Identify gaps and create strategic plans to fill them

What made this approach particularly powerful was how Carlos treated his career as an iterative design process. When he realized fashion wasn’t his path after interning at Oscar de la Renta, he didn’t see it as failure but as valuable data for his next iteration.

“Creating your story is not a process of reworking your resume,” he emphasized. “It’s a process of experimentation by elimination. You try things that, at that moment in your life, feel like the best next step. And when they don’t, you just change and iterate.”

The Double Diamond Approach to Portfolio Development
One of the most actionable insights Carlos shared was his systematic approach to building a portfolio using the double diamond framework. He mapped every project he had ever completed to specific phases of the design process, then identified where his experience was weakest.
“In Bain, usually clients do not need the entire end-to-end process,” he explained. “They perhaps will only need your team to be on the discovery phase… So they’re gonna look for somebody that is excellent in the entire design process, because you’re not going to know what part of the process you’re gonna be in.”
This insight led him to strategically choose projects that would round out his skill set. If one project had focused heavily on discovery and synthesis, his next would emphasize development or ideation. This intentional approach to skill building demonstrates how SDM students can leverage our project-heavy curriculum strategically rather than just completing assignments.

Life at Bain: Where Strategic Design Meets Business Reality
Carlos provided us an overview into his role within Bain’s Vector team, specifically the AI, Insights, and Solutions (AIS) group. This team includes designers, machine learning experts, software engineers, primary research experts, and insight experts who collaborate on client projects.
The work falls into three main categories:
-> Product design for companies needing digital products
-> Experience design for client-facing or enterprise-level experiences
-> New venture design including services and product innovations

What struck many attendees was Carlos’s honesty about the business-first nature of consulting work. “The projects that we do are completely about profit,” he acknowledged. “My harvesting was social impact… In Bain, you’re gonna find a very realistic approach of design, which is maximizing value.”

This candid assessment helps SDM students understand that consulting represents a different application of design thinking than what we might experience in more idealistic academic or social impact contexts.

The Reality of Consulting: Breadth Over Depth
Carlos was refreshingly honest about what type of person thrives in consulting. “If you enjoy the variability, if you enjoy to really get deep into new things all the time, it’s for you,” he said. But he was equally clear about the flip side: “If you’re more somebody that enjoys a single industry… you’re not gonna do too much of it.”
His advice for SDM students was to prioritize “breadth over depth” in their learning experience. Since the design process should be industry-agnostic and applicable across different contexts, demonstrating flexibility through diverse projects becomes a key strength.
The fast-paced nature of consulting also means developing comfort with ambiguity and quick learning. “You need to be able to learn about a new industry, about a new type of product, or a new type of client quickly,” Carlos explained.

Networking That Actually Works: Building Authentic Relationships
Perhaps the most valuable practical advice Carlos shared was abou

t networking, which he approaches as relationship building rather than transactional career advancement.

His strategy centers on providing value first: “I gave away work for free, I sent articles I knew that person enjoyed, I invited them to events, I refer them to jobs that I also knew they wanted, I gave them value, instead of thinking, what can they do for me?”
He suggested using capstone projects as natural networking opportunities. “You can ask them, hey, I’m doing this project on this topic. You’re an expert. Can I have 10 minutes of your conver

sation?” This approach feels authentic because it genuinely is focused on learning rather than job seeking.

The timeline matters too. Carlos emphasized building these relationships over a full year rather than during traditional recruitment cycles, because “human relationships do not follow recruitment or internship cycles.”

Technical Skills That Matter: Beyond the Design Tools

While Carlos emphasized that technical skills can be learned on the job, he identified several that are particularly valuable for consulting work:
-> No-code/low-code tools like Lovable, v0, and Replit for rapid prototyping
-> User interview skills including both guide creation and conducting interviews
-> PowerPoint proficiency for client communications
-> Translation skills for communicating design concepts to non-designers

The PowerPoint emphasis might surprise some, but Carlos explained that muc

h of their work gets presented by consultants to C-level executives who have no design background. “You’re able to communicate your skills in a way they understand it, that’s gonna be hu

ge.”

Key Takeaways for Current SDM Students
Several themes emerged that are particularly relevant for strategic design students:
Embrace the non-linear path. What feels like career confusion might actually be your competitive advantage. The ability to connect across disciplines is increasingly valuable in today’s complex business environment.

Use design process on your career. Apply the same iterative, use

r-centered thinking to your own professional development. Test assumptions, gather feedback, and iterate.

Focus on process mastery. While industry knowledge is valuable, demonst

rating excellence across the entire design process gives you flexibility in an uncertain job market.

Build relationships authentically. Start now, provide value first, and thi

nk in terms of years rather than recruitment cycles.

Take your coursework seriously. Carlos admitted he wished he had been more diligent with readings early in the program, as he had to revisit fundamentals later when he realized strategy was his calling.

The conversation ended with a testament to the value of authentic relationship building. Marion Sadavoy, a classmate who worked with Carlos during the program, joined to share how his preparation, genuine interest, and confidence made him an exceptional collaborator. Her spontaneous endorsement illustrated the very networking principles Carlos had been describing in action.
Final Thoughts
Carlos’s journey from industrial design student in Colombia to strategic designer at Bain & Company wasn’t the result of a perfectly planned career strategy. Instead, it emerged from consistent application of design thinking principles to his own professional development, authentic relationship building, and the cou

rage to iterate when paths didn’t feel right.

For current SDM students, his story offers both inspiration and practical guidance. The skills we’re developing, the process-oriented thinking we’re cultivating, and the network we’re building within our prog

ram all contribute to career possibilities we might not even be able to imagine yet.

The key is to embrace the uncertainty, focus on authentic story development, and trust that consistent effort toward learning and relationship building will compound in ways that create unexpected opportunities. As Carlos demonstrated, sometimes the most non-linear paths lead to the most interesting destinations.