Awaiting Approval. Season 2, Episode 2 : Christopher Nguyen - Momentum

Chris Nguyen has lived more creative lives than most designers ever get close to. He is the Founder of UX Playbook, former Head of Product Design at TrueMonkey, and previously UX Manager at Wizeline, where he helped grow the team from a dozen designers to more than forty.

In this episode, Chris joins Adam for a fast, honest conversation about designing a career on your own terms. He shares how he went from dropping out of computer science and working in restaurants, to stumbling into a tech company in Vietnam, getting fired, freelancing, and eventually landing his first product design role in 2015. From there, the story takes him to Seattle, Mexico, Thailand and back to Vietnam, leading teams on products with millions of monthly users.

Chris talks openly about walking away from his “dream job” with no backup plan, spending years launching many startups, and finally going all in on UX Playbook. Along the way he uncovers the pattern running through it all. He is at his best going from zero to one, helping designers turn ideas into something real, and encouraging them to build careers that actually fit who they are, not just the junior–mid–senior ladder they were handed.

Adam and Chris also dig into what it means to listen to your own signals, why encouragement matters more than yet another tutorial, and how he and his sister were able to retire their parents after decades of 16 hour days in a family restaurant. This is a generous, grounded episode for any designer who feels stuck, burnt out, or unsure what comes next.

In this episode, we cover:

• How Chris went from dropped-out student to global product designer

• Discovering design in a Vietnam tech company and getting fired into freelancing

• Growing a UX team at Wizeline from 12 to 45 designers

• Taking on a Head of Product Design role at Ascend Group and why it was not the dream job

• Quitting with no backup plan and spending years experimenting with startups

• The birth of UX Playbook and why designers are “his people”

• Zero to one as a creative superpower and the trap of chasing every idea

• Practical encouragement for designers struggling to find work in a tough market

• Why making more things, and finding the play in your craft, still matters most

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This is Awaiting Approval. A podcast about the messy, human side of creative leadership.

Hosted by Adam Jennings - a creative leader with three decades of experience leading teams and projects for global brands including Microsoft, Salesforce, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Ancestry, Dolby, BBC and many more - this show features honest, unscripted conversations with the leaders shaping design, storytelling, and innovation today.

These are the conversations you don’t hear in keynotes. The ones about imposter syndrome, trust, failure, confidence, and finding your voice as a leader.

Whether you’re just stepping into creative leadership or you’ve been at it for years, Awaiting Approval is your place to feel seen, challenged, and encouraged.

Awaiting Approval is a Cordial Fox production.Hosted by Adam Jennings.Produced by Adam Jennings & Jasmin Egner.© Cordial Fox Limited, 2025.

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