Thoughts
It's time for my next chapter
Earlier this week, I shared with my team that I’ll be leaving VMware at the end of February to pursue a new opportunity outside of VMware. It’s been quite a week ... VMware has been my professional home for close to a decade. Leading the design team at VMware
Don’t assume all closed doors are locked
I once read a study that said if you close a room’s door without locking it and then ask people to go into that room, most people get stuck and won’t even try to open it. The point of the study was trying to highlight is how artificial
The lonely leader and compassion fatigue
Over the years, a common theme I’ve seen leaders across the industry talk about is the phenomenon of the lonely leader. Most leaders I talk to either feel or have felt at some point in their career, especially early in leadership journey, that their experience as a leader is
The surprising impact of sending thank you notes
Every week, I spend fifteen to thirty minutes sending thank you notes. I send them to members of my team, the larger cross-functional teams, and others across the organization. It's become a ritual for me and a ritual that is both satisfying and pays dividends in my relationships
Embrace the uncertainty
Lately, I’ve been enjoying jigsaw puzzles. Working on puzzles has been a relaxing activity for my wife and I to do together with The Office running in the background on near-silent since we’ve already memorized the episodes. Solving puzzles is the perfect activity to create enough of a
The single pane of glass or the single glass of pain
One of the biggest user experience and product strategy challenges in large companies is the proliferation of products and services that try to address the same needs. There are many reasons why companies have so many products targeting similar personas with slightly different features and levels of quality. However, much
I hate acronyms
With dozens of new designers joining our team over the past few months, acronyms have been one of my enemies in making sure we’re building an easy on-boarding process and a more inclusive culture. A few years ago, I read an email that is supposedly sent by Elon Musk
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
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
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
