Design-led vs experience-led and why it matters
Over the last few years, as more organizations started accelerating their investment in design teams, many design leaders have been advocating to move from engineering or product management-led to “design-led” organizations. I probably hear this once a week in an interview, a conversation with a design leader, or a coffee
Keep asking the "basic" user experience questions
Over the last few months, we’ve been focusing a lot of our work on ensuring we’re telling end to end stories [https://medium.com/vmwaredesign/multi-layered-design-stories-7a2204dec40f]. These end to end stories focus on a specific outcome that a specific persona, or set of personas, want to achieve. In
Empathy at work
In design, we often call out empathy as one of the core skills a designer needs to have in order to deeply understand their customers and hands on users. To develop empathy, we spend hours with our customers in their environments to understand the pressures they’re under, the pain
The five elements to good management: ask, listen, take action, empower, and follow up
There isn’t one magic recipe for management. There are many of recipes. The challenge with giving advise to managers, especially in design, is the changing environment in which managers operate. Different environments require different styles of management at different times. Different people have different personalities and imposing a single
Building our product design career development framework
Note that this article focuses on our individual contributor career development framework. With a fast-growing team, building a robust career framework becomes a necessity. The goal of our framework is to facilitate ongoing conversations between a product designer and their manager about achievements, motivations, blockers/constraints, and development opportunities. These
Building psychological safety into the core of a team’s culture
One of the most important aspects of any team is its culture. When teams grow, culture is generally a representation of what people believe the culture to be instead of what leadership might want the culture to be. For example, although the leadership team might want an open and inclusive
Few questions to ask before preparing your next work presentation
Over the past few years, I’ve been spending a bigger portion of my time either presenting or listening to presentations. The topics of these presentations are different and no single style of presentation is best for all contexts, audiences, and environments. That said, I have learned a few tips
Find the strengths in people’s unique backgrounds
Before leading design at VMware, I was an engineer. I guess I am still an engineer in addition to being a designer. I studied computer science at the University of Washington [https://www.cs.washington.edu/] (Go Huskies!) and worked as a front-end engineer within VMware before co-founding Clarity [http:
Productivity, not activity. How I try to ensure I am focusing on the right priorities.
A few months ago, I had a conversation with a designer on my team about managing her work. She was subtly hinting to me that she’s overwhelmed with the level of work she’s been handed and is trying to figure out how to manage it. As we went
Have an opinion and earn your “seat at the table”
I spend a lot of time on cross-collaboration with product managers, engineers, and designers working together to deliver the best experience possible to our customers. Overall, it’s a healthy environment of genuine focus on our customers, even when our opinions differ. In enterprise design, we’re transitioning design as
