To me it's been handling difficult stakeholders and decoding feedback. UI is a very subjective thing to feedback quickly on, it's important to frame and ask the right questions to get the most out of design crit sessions. Own your design and share your work early on.

• Pen & paper for rough concepts.
• Figma for all things design – lo-fi, hi-fi, specs and handovers.
• Illustrator for specific icon/illustration fixes
• Userpilot for data insights
• Ballpark to conduct user tests
• Glyphic get insights in potential customer meetings

Perfect is the enemy of good — don’t focus on details too much.

I’d say I wish I would focus more on human behavior earlier on my career rather than getting good on a specific tool. Trends, tools and techniques come and go, but we’re still the same humans interacting.

Join forums, talk to people outside your industry. I recently got into Ambition Empower which is a subscription service where thought-leaders in UX, service design, and product design helps you and your team to grow. It is optimized for a busy schedule, allowing you to spend as little as one hour per week. It’s really good!

In general my creativity gets fueled by staying curios and playing around with concepts that aren't business critical or even connected to anything I necessarily need to finish, just to try things out and play around more.