uxtopian
/Creator
The tool that started every conversation
Every company is led by sales, engineering, or design. That’s not a value judgment — it’s a structural reality that shapes what gets built, who gets promoted, and whether your skills compound or erode. Nobody was making that legible. So I built the tool.
Context
Designers keep joining companies and discovering — months in — that the company doesn’t value what they do. Not because anyone lied. Because nobody had a framework for reading the structural signals: who founded the company, what function holds power, what gets rewarded, and whether the public narrative matches the internal reality.
The career advice industry is full of personality tests and culture-fit surveys. None of them answer the question that actually matters: does this organization’s power structure create the conditions for my work to matter? Career Decoder was built to answer that question in minutes, not months.
Approach
Built a diagnostic framework that classifies companies as sales-led, engineering-led, or design-led based on structural signals — founder background, what gets funded, who gets promoted, how redesigns happen. Not opinion. Pattern recognition across hundreds of companies.
Added a Rushkoff layer — the gap between what a company says and what it actually does. Every company claims to value design. Career Decoder surfaces whether the evidence supports the claim or contradicts it. The say/do gap is the most valuable signal in the tool.
Designed two modes: “I work here” (understand your current org and get a playbook for navigating it) and “I’m researching” (evaluate a company before you join and get a fit map against your working style).
Shipped it live on uxtopian.com. No waitlist, no signup wall. Type a company name, get the diagnosis. The tool does the selling.
Tradeoffs
Designed and developed in under a week
Built end-to-end in Claude Code — from concept to live product. The speed is the point: when thinking and building happen in the same step, you ship in days what used to take months. Now iterating based on real user feedback.
AI-dependent accuracy
The diagnosis relies on Claude’s knowledge of company structures. For well-known companies it’s sharp. For smaller or newer companies, the signal is thinner. Designed the output to show confidence and reasoning so users can judge for themselves. Currently integrating new data sources, enriched logic, and supplemental company intelligence to deepen accuracy across the board.
Outcomes
2
Investor conversations
Inbound from investors who were interested in building in the career/recruiting space
2 active
Partnerships
A recruiting startup and Second Harvest Co engagement both originated from Career Decoder visibility
Dirk @ Fusion Talent
Recruiter validation
“Feels like a fresh take on Glassdoor” — saw company intelligence angle immediately
Pam Earle
User validation
“I used Career Decoder to research the company beforehand. It gave me exactly what I needed to walk in prepared and ask the right questions.”