How a UX Designer with Zero ML Experience Landed an AI Job at Adobe 🧪
When Nitya Kumar saw the tech industry pivoting to AI, she panicked. With an art school degree and no background in machine learning, learning AI felt impossible.
Her solution? She stopped treating her career like a ladder and turned it into a Science Lab.
Here is how her "Mad Scientist" strategy landed her an AI UX role at Adobe:
🔬 She set a micro-formula: Instead of trying to learn everything at once, she committed to 1 hour of Cursor a day for 7 days = 1 functional AI prototype.
🧪 She built weird, fun things: She didn't stick to boring corporate case studies. She built a dance-gesture tracking game and a matcha recipe generator.
🤖 She developed a "vibe coding" workflow: She let the tools play to their strengths. She used Gemini to refine prompts, fed those into Claude to vibe-code, and used Figma MCP to design.
🗣️ Quirky projects win interviews: Her matcha app made interviewers laugh, sparked real conversations, and proved she knew the AI landscape. Result? Hired at Adobe in Nov 2025.
🤝 She turned her method into leadership: Now, she runs "AI Playground" workshops at Adobe every other Friday, helping other designers debug, prototype, and stay ahead of the curve.
The takeaway: All work and no play keeps the Big Tech offers away. If you're afraid of learning a new technology, stop climbing and start experimenting.