Product Bakery – The Product Management, UX & Design Podcast · Alex Dapunt and Christian Strunk

#101 Get The Salary You Deserve!

·25 min·1 clip

Netflix’s senior UI UX designer range is 50K to 600K, and a design manager goes from 190K to 800K.

LinkedIn starts the whole detour. Christian and Alex riff on work social media, Instagram, and copied TikTok habits, then settle into salary transparency. The California law gives them something concrete to push against: job ads with real salary ranges instead of the usual fog. Simple idea, awkward execution. The episode keeps poking at the same tension, because pay talk gets weird fast. A candidate has a number in mind. A company has a range it can defend. Then both sides have to decide how honest they are willing to be before things get uncomfortable. Negotiation comes off less like a clever script and more like a muscle. Books can explain the theory, but the hosts are pretty clear that the useful part happens when someone actually negotiates, hears a real answer, and learns where the line is. Their applicant advice is blunt in a helpful way: if there is a job you badly want, do not make it your first interview. Warm up somewhere else, get the nerves out, and build enough rhythm that the important conversation is not your first run at it. They are careful about timing too. Do not let one number swallow the whole relationship before both sides understand the fit. For employers, the message is just as plain. Murky pay creates mistrust. Fairness is not charity; it is one of the ways a company keeps adults from quietly checking out. The episode stays loose and practical, more conversation than formula.

As heard by us

Salary transparency becomes a plainspoken lesson in negotiation and honesty.

The episode opens with California's salary-range law and broadens into pay transparency, negotiation, and what honesty looks like inside a company.

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Why you'd press play

A salary transparency discussion worth hearing before you sit down to negotiate.

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