Hiii!

I’m Q! A Design/Engineer from Toronto, Canada.

My jam is improving the lives of other designers and developers, and empowering them to become better at what they do. This often includes creating custom tools, automating things, improving processes, providing resources, and mentoring.

How did you get started in product design?

My first product design gig was in 2014, at a company called Customer.io. I had already done a bit of design and code, but this was my first official job doing product stuff. Prior to this, I didn’t even know what a “SaaS” was!

Since then, I’ve dabbled in illustration, product design, design systems and front-end development.

Where do you work today? What is your title?

I’m a Principal Designer at Automattic. Previously, I was a Design Engineer at Help Scout.

How big is your company? How big is your design team?

About 1,165 strong, all over the world. I believe we have about 85 designers. They’re spread across the org in different teams.

What types of things are you responsible for day-to-day?

I work in the Open Source space. (At Automattic, we refer to it as “dot org”, referring to wordpress.org). For the past while, I’ve been responsible for spearheading a large initiative for the WordPress Gutenberg project. If I could summarize my daily responsibilities into a couple of words, it would be “communication” and “planning”.

I also build lots of projects on the side. You can see some of my side projects here.

What do you love most about your work?

I love that I’m able to experiment with new ideas within this space. I also love finding ways to help make other designers and engineers lives better.

What drains you at work?

I operate best when I understand how all the dots fit together. Something that drains me is when there’s a lack of “connections”, or when it’s difficult to form connections for reasons outside of my control.

Can you walk us through your typical work day?

Where do you turn for inspiration?

I’m a very curious person. Someone who’s obsessed with the design of design. I guess another word you would use would be “creative process”… perhaps “efficient creative process”. A couple of industries that I constantly research and draw a lot of inspiration from are Animation, Game Design, Culinary, and even military history. Video (YouTube) is my favourite research medium! There’s a ton of great content that explain or showcase creative process.

Here are a few of my favourite channels:

• Extra Credits – Gaming industry + History
• Game Maker’s Toolkit – Game design analysis
• New Frame Plus – Animation analysis
• Retro Ahoy – Video game/Firearm documentaries
• Kim Jung Gi – Artist
• Fireship – JavaScript tutorials
• GameHut – Retro game coding
• Walt Disney Imagineering – Creativity x Engineering

I then take ideas and techniques and try to apply it to my work.

What design or project are you most proud of? (It can be recent or older).

The project that I am most proud of is my work on Help Scout’s Design System.

There were many many challenges, which often involved out-of-the-box innovative solutions. However, the thing that I am most proud of is how it made the designers, engineers, product folks, etc… feel when they used it. A lot of process and overhead became invisible. This freed up crafters to focus and do what they do best. Making things.

Walk us through the design process you used for a recent project (you can pick any project).

The most recent project that I’m working involves creating a styling system for the new Gutenberg-based WordPress experience. My typical process involves…

1. Understanding the problem deeply
2. Understanding the mechanics deeply (almost always involves tech)
3. Exploring contraints/solutions
4. Connecting all the dots (This is probably the most important)
5. Communicating the connections with others

 One thing that I am always mindful of is… To consider the experiences of not just the end-user, but also the experiences of the people working on the project.

What career advice do you have for product designers just getting started?

Be curious. Relentlessly curious. Find out how and why your favourite products, designs, and interactions work. Go as deep as you need to. Go as deep as you can handle. Don’t be afraid to learn new skills. Don’t be afraid to learn about code, public speaking, marketing, or project management. All of these are tools. The more tools you have, the better equipped you will be to solve design challenges.

Where’s the best place for folks to learn more about you or follow you?

Folks can follow me on Twitter @itsjonq!

Ahh! Hello! My name is Dezzie. I like to eat, think, and take things apart. 

How did you get started in product design?

Oh dear. There are a few stories. This is going to be long but it was complicated:

During high school, I started making websites. I was obsessed with modifying how my OS looked, I used to hack my Windows install so it would look like Mac OS, things like that. My very first website was on Geocities and it was a collection of things you could do to make your OS look like the dashboards in Starcraft. As I craved more control and freedom over what I could make, I would move my site to more “real” places, where I could use code, like Tripod, or Angelfire.

At the same time, unrelated, I was covering for a classmate who never did his homework because he went to too many raves (I was obsessed with electronic music, too, but didn’t get to go to shows). If I covered for him that week, he’d bring me a mix from that weekend. One time, he didn’t bring anything, and felt bad, so he offered me a burned copy of Adobe Photoshop 6. I asked him what that was, and he said, “It’s like MS Paint, but way better.” I took it home and it changed my life. Eventually I outgrew what I could do on the free hosts, and I started trying out for blog rings–which was a thing where, a person who owned a hosting account would give you a subdomain if they liked your stuff, and you just had to come up with a new layout for your website every week or so.

That was all a hobby, but it was all-consuming. If I wasn’t doing homework or at school, I was doing this. Once I was in college, this let me work for the university web group as a front-end developer, which, as far as work-study jobs go, it paid twice as much than other jobs on campus. Plus, I learned a ton from the people on the team. When the A List Apart article on responsive design came out, we started doing it immediately. When 37Signals came out with Ruby on Rails, the team made a timesheet app the next week. I got to work with a dedicated content strategist and an information architect. My code was clean and standards-compliant. Looking back at that situation, I had no idea how lucky I was and how much I would learn. It was such a blessing for the future. I loved what I did. I started skipping class. I did this in high school but in college it was not sustainable. A combination of working on websites for everyone, and also not being interested in my premed major landed me on academic probation, and then depression.

I got a strong message from professors and guidance counselors that this work was a bad idea, the the hobby was more like a vice. There was no “web design” major. People still remembered the dotcom crash. No one suggested computer science or graphic design because no one saw the connection between the two, and neither department took the web seriously. Plus, you don’t go to a fancy school, if your family is working-class and no one’s ever even graduated high school, to play on the computer. So at this point, for both practical and emotional reasons, I pushed it all away. I needed to get serious about graduating and landing a job after graduation. It turned out well in the short-term. I got deep into the psychology research scene at the university and started a PhD after graduation, intent on becoming a professor in academia. The irony in that turn of events is hilarious now, given the changes that academia and the tech industry have undergone since.

Once I was in grad school I sort of tried to bring back design and tech in my doctoral work, but it got major push-back, and pretty soon I was miserable again and ended up taking a leave of absence. Since I didn’t have my funding during that time, I started freelancing to pay the bills. I got a job as a Mac Genius too (which has its own story). I still fully intended to finish my PhD, I just wanted a break. But the Genius job, as much as it could suck, was one of the best decisions of my career, because it was watching users fail at using software day in and day out. It made me understand how things could be beautifully designed–but not always usable. And so the love affair with design started again. For the first time I realized that this was what I wanted to be doing, and I didn’t care about being successful in other people’s eyes. I kept failing at those careers anyway, and had to find a way to make a living.  By now both the tech industry and academia had changed enough that no one was denying that web stuff was just a hobby. Few people in academia were finding stable work as a professor.

When my leave of absence was up, and I went back to my program, I barely finished a semester of class. I remember going into my advisor’s office, where I just told him I was quitting and joining the tech industry. It was weird and freeing and awesome.

After that I worked for an immigration non-profit for about a year while I put together my portfolio and brought my skills back up to speed. Eventually I felt ready to start networking, and seeing if I could get my portfolio out there, since the DC tech scene was in a boom. I got lucky on my first try, probably because the president of that agency was incredibly wasted. They were hiring for a government contract, and sure, he’d interview me. I was not allowed to know who the agency was, or what I would be doing, which made me uneasy. I was planning to just go and do it for practice. The Space Shuttle was supposed to be doing a flyover of DC that day, and I really thought about skipping the interview to see it–luckily, I chose not to be a dumbass that day.

Audrey Chen was building a design and tech team at a brand new government agency called The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau–the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, who recently announced her presidential bid. We had a conversation in that interview, where she asked me why I had never pursued design until now, and I told her it was because I couldn’t see myself truly helping people through it the way I could in other jobs. So she told me her own story, about how after she was a newly minted designer with an art and math background, she got a great job–but was assigned the Phillip Morris account on her first day. She never went back to that job. After years of doing very neutral work, she took the CFPB position because it was the first time she felt she would be able to help people. That really resonated with me, and it’s why I took the job.

The setup at the CFPB was great, they had a fellowship where they hired senior-level people from around the country with amazing experiences to work remotely with us. On top of that, we were a government agency, so we had different motivators and indicators for success. It was a great environment to learn how to champion users. The foundation of how you work as a designer is shaped by your early experiences and habits, and having these folks and design problems to work with was again–super lucky.

After a few years there, I realized I just didn’t really see myself in government–even though I was fully invested in the mission of the agency and I was inspired by the work we were doing. I was just getting an itch to do something different and I didn’t like how everything found its way back to an election. I was also mad that I was making about 30K less than a government worker for the same exact work, could not be promoted or lead projects, and couldn’t go to conferences.

So I went and worked for an agency. They had a great UX team. I learned a lot from my manager there and got promoted really fast. But the drinking culture was too much–one time me and another female colleague were asked to go to a meetup where our president introduced us to his friends as, “The women I told you I’d bring you.” I think that experience just pissed me off and I went through a phase where I wondered where my place in the industry was. So I did what all frustrated cerebral people do–I applied to grad school. I got to the last, final interview phase of a famous product design program, then gave the worst interview of my life, and got rejected. That year was a lot of validation and rejection at the same time.

I had to think about what I was looking for–and it went back to trying to connect the dots in my background. This was around the time where companies were investing heavily in building in-house design orgs–and IBM was one of the industry leaders in the movement. Their artificial intelligence division seemed neat–and they were hiring. I crashed SXSW that year, literally loitering around, got into IBM Design’s party-and immediately decided I needed to work there. Apparently they felt similarly, because about a month later I was looking at a move from DC to Austin to start on their Watson design team.

I keep saying how I learn a ton in every job, but hands down, the experience I got working at IBM, is where I found product design and product design found me. It was the most formative job I have ever had. They are known for their design thinking work, but what they don’t always mention is that they have a lot of classically-trained designers behind it, and there is a lot you can learn from them. I worked for a lot of ex-industrial designers, who put our design research habits in the tech industry to shame. Many of these people worked there to fund their art practice. Learning from all of those perspectives transformed how I worked on the “computational” side of things. It was when I stopped thinking of my work as, “the thing that I seem to do very well and can pay the bills” to “this is my vocation.”

After a few years there though, the whole conversation around AI started to go places where–knowing I wasn’t working on anything evil was nice, but I wasn’t really working on anything good either. I felt confident in what I could do as a designer and I realized it was time to start choosing my work more intentionally—to align it more with my values. Without getting too much into it, I’ve always been passionate about the open web. I feel very strongly about the walled gardens we’ve built. I am not the type of person that can have a day job working on whatever so long as it funds the side project I really care about. Too many potential points of failure in that approach to life. So I applied to Automattic, which I had followed since WordPress 1.0, and seemed to be one of the few companies who actually were making the web a better place. Now I am here, hello.

To summarize, this is probably a story that you don’t want to use to inspire people to get into product design. I got into product design because:

• I got pirated software from a kid who was probably a drug dealer
• I thought I wanted to be a doctor, but it was just my parents’ idea
• I was on academic probation at Notre Dame
• I couldn’t make it in academia
• I got into a fight with a Mac Genius (I won, by the way)
• I was broke and I don’t have parents who would just fund me like other Millennials do
• I am good at this and it was about damn time

Where do you work today? What is your title?

I am a Senior Product Designer for Automattic, Inc. Automattic has been one of the companies I’ve admired in the industry for many years. I’ll point out that Matt Mullenweg either rejected or forgot about my application back in 2014. But four years later it worked out, probably for the better. 

How big is your company? How big is your design team?

800-ish, with 60-ish of those in the design organization. 

What types of things are you responsible for day-to-day?

Everything. Right now I am responsible for all design research and execution related to my projects. The hardest parts are communication, alignment, scoping, and planning, because we are all-distributed. The easiest parts are focusing–because I don’t have to deal with a silly open office plan anymore.

What do you love most about your work?

I feel very lucky to work on something that helps run a large portion of the internet, but supports an open web. It would be nice to contribute in bringing down some walled gardens someday.

What drains you at work?

The tax of working in an all-distributed company. The tax pays for good things, but it is still a tax on the work, like not being able to have in-depth discussion or good critique sessions with everyone present and engaged. I was spoiled in this area earlier in my career. I have not found an equivalent alternative to sketching something out with a colleague. If I feel like I can’t dig into a design problem with my team, even if it’s through no fault of their own, it’s very draining.

Can you walk us through your typical work day?

Where do you turn for inspiration?

I actually don’t seek out inspiration. I’m a believer in the line, “Inspiration is for amateurs–the rest of us just show up to work.” It’s something that I have leftover from not having the luxury of starting my design career in a coddled way. A better line is, “Inspiration comes of working,” which I got off a folder made by the Japanese brand Delfonics–but which sounds very Mexican too.

I do intentionally think about what motivates me, what stimulates me, so I can I keep my creative energy healthy. For example, I need a consistent drip of intellectual stimulation–so I turn to books or critical articles on the web, or good conversations. They’re usually not about design either–the design (and tech) industry doesn’t do a good job at connecting its work to the broader world.

Usually if I have writer’s or designer’s block it’s also not so much a question of whether I have been sufficiently inspired, but because there is lack of alignment and clarity about the work. If it isn’t, it’s probably fatigue, which I’ll exacerbate by forcing myself to chase an invisible spark. At that point, the best thing I can do to keep my mind clear and creative is by shutting it off. I do that via exercise, sleep, manual labor, meditation, or playing with my child.

That’s a long-winded way of politely saying that I think most design inspiration sites, blogs, and communities are not good. Those are good for consuming, not thinking. They focus on popularity and trendiness, you’ll end up with all FOMO and little work to show for it.

What design or project are you most proud of? (It can be recent or older).

This project is not publicly available anymore because it got taken down by IBM PR’s team. That in itself is part of why I’m proud of it. It was a skunkworks a few friends and I did in early 2016. Each of us needed a way to blow off some creative steam. In my case, I had been wrestling with this question about the effect of people’s personality on their thinking and behavior patterns. I had been observing much on how social media and the modern web held our time, and I was worried that the next presidential election in the US would be influenced by all that.

At the time, one of the few profitable uses of machine learning technology was for scaling up marketing campaigns. Having friends in government who had run presidential campaigns, and hearing them talk about how they approached the work, it seemed incredibly similar. There were a lot of what-ifs between psych and design and tech that I sort of didn’t want to know the real answer to, because I was afraid I wouldn’t like it–Facebook, for example, had caused a stir in the scientific community a few years before when it was revealed that they had been manipulating people at risk for depression without their consent and without providing a means to undo any damage.

So my friends and I created a little thing that would go through a person’s Twitter feed, and make a prediction of who they would vote for based on their personality, attitudes, and behaviors. The amount of content people produce on their social media profiles is more than enough to generate a full personality profile. This is in addition to the explicit content individual posts convey. At the time, there were tons of people in the running, and we hadn’t reached the primaries yet, so it made the project something that people could use to explore candidates that they hadn’t considered.

For me it was a lot of fun creating the personality profiles of all of those candidates. I used their social media feeds but also transcripts from debates and interviews, leaked emails, speeches, and content from years before they ever ran for president. But when we shipped the thing and started testing it, we saw that a ton of people aligned most with Donald Trump. If you followed the news at that time, no one took him seriously, especially in the time leading up to the primaries. The thing got shut down on the basis that it was obviously not working and would cause a PR backlash.

I remember how disappointed we were, and I personally felt like I had dragged my friends on this crazy idea. It kind of reminded me of the times I tried to connect my design and technology interests when I was a doctoral student, and no one would buy it. So I felt like I was both a bad “idea person” and a bad leader. Then of course, the election happened and we started finding out everything that was done on social media. This was a little vindicating, but it also meant that some of my biggest fears about what people would end up using the internet for were coming true.

What career advice do you have for product designers just getting started?

I don’t think our work is ethically neutral anymore, as mundane as the project you think you’re working on is. Everything’s always been in flux. As the work we do now has broader impact over our lives, our minds, and our world, it’s important to know the context of how some things came to be. Some aspiring product designers almost worship the four big tech companies or startup culture. But do they actually know what the business models or histories of those products are? Are you going to be comfortable, as a designer, in being party to some of those things? If you want to be a product designer, you have to think about those broader things. If you don’t think you have to, you probably won’t be successful as a product designer, or you’ll need to be okay with having those skeletons (and their effects on all of your users) in your closet.

This is one of the reasons that I dislike most design inspiration sites, and the whole cult of celebrity that’s spawned around design teams and individual designers. Those sites rarely tell the story of the work, who really was involved, and how much of it is real.

I also urge people to get acquainted with internet history, and the careers of industry veterans. While the tech industry undeniably bankrolls much of the design work you see today, the design industry itself wasn’t always so welcoming to the tech industry, particularly when it came to the designer who taught themselves. The design industry didn’t take the web seriously for a long time. The people that paid it forward for us to enjoy the opportunities we have today, are more often from the early web community, not the classically-trained design community, or even the tech industry for that matter. Yet there’s this stigma towards people who used to work under titles such as Webmaster, or web designer.

Lastly, I try to tell people not to model themselves or their idea of success against what they see on social media. A designer who has thousands of followers or who did something that went viral does not mean they’re a good designer. You’ll figure stuff out about some people as you progress in your career, and hear stuff through your networks and trusted communities. Work on your reputation and portfolio over your personal brand. You might feel like a little fish in a big pond but it’s actually a very small world.

Where’s the best place for folks to learn more about you or follow you?

I tweet sparingly @thedezzie, and have dusted off my blog at dezz.ie

Hi! I’m Shpetim, a Product Designer working remotely from Pristina, Kosovo. I’ve been working remotely for ~7 years now and enjoying—maybe not every part of it—but surely most of it. I’ve gone back and forth from in-office jobs to remote and vice versa and can safely say that I can be/express myself best working remotely.

I was very passionate about drawing, especially watercolor painting—I would do it all the time. It didn’t matter what I’d draw/watercolor as long as I could make it something I’d like. Sadly, I didn’t draw for years but the creative aspect of expressing myself and the desire to make things look better is still there. 

Being passionate about many things is a superpower in our line of work. The creative process is mostly output, that is, most of the time we create things from the hypothetical. And thus, having hobbies that I do for fun, is a source of inspiration or input for me. Those include reading a good book, traveling, playing volleyball/football or snowboarding. Occasionally, getting lost in some fictional world in a video game is a nice change of pace as well, among others. 

How did you get started in product design?

I started studying Computer Science and English Literature, but dropped out from both and ended up watching tutorials of people doing image manipulations in Photoshop and would follow along. Never actually thought that that would land me my first real job as a designer. 

I started as a Graphic/Web Designer in a Swiss Agency based in Kosovo. I was very keen to learn more about UX/UI and would read a ton because everything fascinated me. Every topic felt like a fresh perspective that would change the way I saw designed objects—be those physical or digital. That got me deeper into Product Design and Psychology, Cognitive and Behavioral Psych in particular. It was world-changing finding myself at the intersection between how people make decisions/behave and designing products. 

Having worked on diverse roles and industries throughout my career—while it had its challenges—it was an invaluable experience to be able to fully embrace the role and responsibilities of a Product Designer. 

Where do you work today? What is your title?

I work remotely as a Product Designer with a company based in Bielefeld, Germany. The company is Egoditor and the product I work on is QR Code Generator. While QR Codes generally don’t have a reputation for good design, we’re working really hard to make the experience of creating, designing and managing QR Codes the best experience possible, while being considered a leader in the industry. Judging from the growth we had in the last 3 years, I’d say we did a pretty good job.

As a side thing, I mentor and teach UI/UX Design to new designers through CareerFoundry—also a German company, but based in Berlin. It’s been humbling to be able to help others advance their skills, transition from other industries or just navigate through intricacies of becoming a job-ready designer in a very fast-growing and competitive industry. A lot of what I’ve learned about design is through others—be that from articles, books, talks, works etc—so I feel that this is one of the best ways of giving back to the community.

How big is your company? How big is your design team?

We are now just above 40 employees, mostly in our office in Bielefeld, but we also have people working remotely and are actually hiring. When I started, we were 13 or 14, I think. I’m the only Product Designer, but the whole design team consists of 6. Everyone is amazing and I am very proud with what we’ve been able to achieve in the last 3 years. 

What types of things are you responsible for day-to-day?

Being the only Product Designer means that I have to be flexible and usually I’m working on two or three projects simultaneously. While this can be challenging, it also means that I’m wearing different hats on different days. 

This can depend on the type of project we tackle, but it’s usually me being included from the brief, to problem framing and creating hypotheses to sketching/wireframing, to high fidelity design and prototyping which include animations and micro-interactions. That’s usually for showing/explaining a particular idea to stakeholders, developers or just testing how it feels. 

What do you love most about your work?

It’s really hard to pinpoint what I love to one thing only, as it kinda depends on the day. There are times that I just love losing myself into design details and interactions. Sometimes, it’s seeing something that we improved being used by actual people. Other times, it’s just interacting and conversing with some of the smart people I work with. 

I guess I love that moment when I have a brief with a problem before me and I get to explore solutions. Often those are wrong solutions but the satisfaction of diverging into different approaches—just to converge on something that can potentially be a good solution, after lots of iterations—that’s what makes me love Product Design. Basically, the process.

What drains you at work?

Decision fatigue, most definitely. While multitasking can also be the cause, most of the time, that’s a productive hack for me. That’s why I always like to have 2-3 on-going projects at a time because when I don’t feel motivated to work on a particular thing, I know that I always have something else. This has worked for me for years. 

However, whenever I’m forced to make many decisions throughout a day, it’s always draining for me. Decision fatigue happens to all of us, especially when doing more cognitive work. I try to be very conscious of it and minimize the number of decisions that I have to make per day, but as you can imagine, it’s really hard. 

Can you walk us through your typical work day?

Where do you turn for inspiration?

Going back to having many passions, I find that if I don’t take little things for granted there’s inspiration everywhere. Traveling and photographing helps a lot but also just walking throughout a new scenery—real or virtual—can inspire me immensely. 

I really like to explore interactions others create, mostly on real apps but also Dribbble and similar sites. I have a tab “Bag of Tricks” which I populate with UI patterns, elements and interactions on a daily basis and go through them often. It’s amazing the amount of idea generation one can do with a big enough backlog. 

Recently, I’ve been quite interested into interior design. We got a little office and decided to just do everything ourselves. My wife did the illustration on the wall. While we didn’t do anything fancy, like modeling on a 3D software or something similar, we actually designed the interior ourselves, just to give the whole thing a little bit more personality. This was a really good source of inspiration and something quite different, so a very nice change of pace. 

What design or project are you most proud of? (It can be recent or older).

Improving the whole experience of how people use our product for creating, designing and managing QR Codes has been quite something to be proud of. When I started the tool was already quite powerful, but we really stepped up our game on that regard. While, the tool itself is quite complex, with lots of iterations and feedback we managed to create something very powerful, yet very easy to use for the average person. 

I always would get that feeling that, as an empathetic designer, I could do more with my skills and work on products that impact people for the better—like designing for health products, social change and so on. I’ve grown to understand and accept the idea that no matter where our impact is, we can always be shepherds and the voice of our users. 

Walk us through the design process you used for a recent project (you can pick any project).

We recently improved a very important part of the product. We call it “The Creation Process”. It’s basically a flow where users choose their QR Code type and create it. Since there are quite a few options to choose from, we were aware that users might struggle choosing the right Code type. With that hypothesis in mind, we did some research and gathered enough feedback to validate our concerns. 

We synthesize all that feedback into a nice brief and ran it past stakeholders. Then I get into divergent modes of thinking, where I try to go as broad as possible with explorations while keeping in mind the brief and constraints. Even though a lot of times, we end up with the simplest and obvious solution, the exploring phase is paramount to suggest more options as fun alternatives that also act as inspiration for potential innovation.

Working very closely with the PM, we share ideas back and forth a lot before gathering feedback on iterations from stakeholders. Once I do that, then I usually converge into a preferred direction—which means I go in more high-fidelity and work on micro-interactions or prototypes to test flows, ideas, or in general the feel of a particular interaction. 

This project or any other project for me doesn’t end with a hand off. I always follow up closely with engineers about any issue they might face and am ready to improvise and if needed even go back and rethink a particular solution. That rarely happens though as we try to involve engineers early in the design process.

When the project is done and ready to go into production, our engineers have a specific task where they assign me to review the implementation, something I thoroughly enjoy. 

What career advice do you have for product designers just getting started?

As a Product Designer you will work on a variety of problems that will require you to be very self-aware and conscious about your design abilities, industry-specific skills, and personal experiences in general. 

So, learn as many design skills as possible, but be aware of your limits. Educate yourself about the world history, business, psychology etc. And last but not least, understand that everything you learn and all your experiences come with biases attached, so be aware of them and avoid reflecting those on the products you design.

Where’s the best place for folks to learn more about you or follow you?

I’m quite active on Twitter and Instagram

This year I will also try to be more deliberate about using Dribbble and will probably post more of my works in the upcoming months.

I’m Megs Fulton, and I currently reside in Portland, Oregon but was born and raised north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I share my home and life with my partner, dog, two cats, and parrotlet. I’m passionate about social good, creative expression, and how those things intersect with technology.

I enjoy a wide array of hobbies. To me there’s nothing more satisfying than squishing paint, mixing dough, or exploring a random flea market. I also love visiting new places and am fortunate that I get to travel as part of my job working for a fully distributed company.

How did you get started in product design?

It was a bit of an accident but not a surprise. I had been dabbling in web design and development all throughout high school, mostly messing around with animation and building small games in Flash. It gave me an inkling that I wanted to be a “web designer.” When I started to look at college programs for design, I realized they were primarily at art schools which required a portfolio of non-digital artwork to get in. I had pretty much resigned myself that I would study computer science instead as an alternative way into the field. But then I was so fortunate to have a high school art teacher who saw potential in my weird Flash experiments. He helped me prepare a portfolio that art colleges would consider acceptable and recommended schools with strong graphic design programs for me to apply to. I ended up attending Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and studied in their Graphic and Interactive Design program. 

My professional design career began in advertising where I was the lone “Web Designer / Developer” at an advertising agency. I did that for over a year while I finished my degree. After graduating, I moved across the country to San Francisco mostly on a whim and for a change of scenery. It was the middle of the 2009 recession, and I moved without knowing anyone, without  work lined up, and with enough money to make rent for three months. I ended up taking the first job that came my way which was creating banner ads for a mobile gaming startup. The app experience was rough around the edges and I persuaded the powers that be to let me try my hand at designing for the product experience. I ended up loving it and taught myself as much as I could with what was available at the time. 

Where do you work today? What is your title?

I work for Automattic and I’m part of the design team working on mobile applications. I’m a Principal Product Designer. 

How big is your company? How big is your design team?

Automattic is over 800 people and the design team is over about 60 people now but always growing. 

What types of things are you responsible for day-to-day?

Coordinating and communicating with the engineering and design teams, making sure that everyone has what they need from me so they’re not blocked, heads down work time to keep my work moving forward, and sharing progress on my work to get feedback early and often.

What do you love most about your work?

I love the variety that comes with being involved in all the stages of product development. From conducting user research, developing a strategy and goals, designing the user flows and interactions as well as the screens, collaborating with engineers, making sure everything is working according to spec before it ships, and analyzing data after it’s out in the wild and in users hands. Not being stuck in a particular phase of work means I’m never bored. 

What drains you at work?

If you had asked me this a few years ago, I would have said commuting and open office floor plans. Now that I’ve successfully eliminated those stressors from my working life, I’d have to say that I miss being able to quickly and casually riff or bounce ideas around with a colleague. There’s a certain energy around it that’s not easily replicated remotely. I find having to schedule and plan a meeting for brainstorming isn’t draining per se, but it creates a formality around it that I’m not fond of. 

Can you walk us through your typical work day?

Where do you turn for inspiration?

I turn to sources outside of the design and technology industry because it’s so important to know what’s happening outside of the bubble that you’re operating in day to day. I follow fashion, visit museums and galleries, and attend local dance and theater performances. I also have a soft spot for kitsch and pop culture. To me inspiration is about getting out of your own head, a bit like a mental palette cleanser. Even just going on a walk around the neighborhood can be enough for me some days. 

What design or project are you most proud of? (It can be recent or older).

Hands down the Spruce Dermatology Clinic. It was a mobile app where you could have a virtual visit with a licensed dermatologist to receive a diagnosis and treatment plan with prescriptions sent to your preferred pharmacy. I loved hearing people’s stories about how having access to affordable medical care made such a positive and meaningful impact on their life and well being.

Walk us through the design process you used for a recent project (you can pick any project).

My process varies so much project to project that it’s hard to pick which one to use as an example. So instead, I’ll share one part of my process that’s my favorite. When I’m ready to start getting into designing flows or screens, I always start sketching with paper and pencil so I don’t get too caught up in tiny details just yet. At this stage I tend to focus on the content and the interactions. Then for each screen in the flow I ask questions that are loosely based on an empathy map: 

• “What are they thinking right now?”
• “What are they feeling right now?” 

By asking and then answering those questions, I can start to understand and try to mitigate what fears, worries, anxieties, annoyances, and other complexities might be a barrier to helping a user accomplish what it was they set out to do. 

What career advice do you have for product designers just getting started?

You don’t have to learn or know it all. The field of product design has expanded to include so many different disciplines that it can be overwhelming to know where to begin. Pick what you’re most interested in and see where it takes you. But if you really can’t choose, start with typography because it’s fundamental to the art of visual communication. 

Where’s the best place for folks to learn more about you or follow you?

Probably over on Twitter. 

Hi there! My name is Jannis Hegenwald and I’m a designer from Germany, currently living in Austin, Texas. I like to work on things that make people and teams better, because I believe that together we are better than alone.

When I’m not doing design at Atlassian and Trello, I like to read at a coffeeshop, take weekend trips, and explore the Texas outdoors with my wife and our two dogs.

How did you get started in product design?

I originally went to school for business and engineering but never really enjoyed it. The way it was taught at my university didn’t resonate with me—it wasn’t the way I saw the world.

When I learned about design, I felt immediately at home. The ideas, the approach, the methods, everything seemed more aligned with my natural way of solving problems. So during my Master’s degree, I went to design school, took design courses, and read pretty much everything about design I could find. In addition to that, I just did a lot of design work, some for clients, most for myself.

Eventually, I landed a full-time job as a design researcher at a consultancy in the U.S.. After doing design strategy work for a while, I felt the itch to be closer to the execution again, to work on a product. So I started looking for roles in product design and luckily found a great team at Atlassian.

Where do you work today? What is your title?

I’m a designer on the Trello team at Atlassian, where I currently work on the integration between Trello and Atlassian. My title is Staff Designer.

How big is your company? How big is your design team?

The whole company is almost 4000 people. About 200 of those are part of the design org which includes designers, researchers, and writers. My direct design team is currently at 14 people, but I think we will grow a little more next year. 

What types of things are you responsible for day-to-day?

I spend most of my time as the lead designer across two squads that are integrating Trello and Atlassian. Essentially, we are trying to make it easy for teams to use all of Atlassians products, whether they are software teams, a group of students, or a department at a local municipality. In practice, this means a lot of design research, conceptual mapping, and collaboration with the engineers on my team.

Aside from my active projects, I’m supporting other Trellists with their research. Trello is a constant stream of ideas and questions, so there’s always someone looking to test a concept or a hypothesis. I give advice and guidance on methods and best practices.

What do you love most about your work?

One of the things I love about working in UX is that it involves creative and analytical work. I’m either making sense of things or trying to come up with new things—or both at the same time. And the fact that this happens at the intersection of humans and technology makes it even more interesting. 

The part I enjoy the most about working at Atlasssian is that I get to work with a bunch of super smart people who are excited about making quality products. It’s motivating and inspiring when your teammates are excited about ideas and want to explore them with you. 

What drains you at work?

Like many people, a lot of back to back meetings can make it difficult for me to be at my best and to add value to the discussion. Over time, I’ve gotten better at managing my energy throughout the day. Aside from just getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, and eating good food, I have found that meditation and walking meetings are a good way for me to keep my energy up during long days. 

Can you walk us through your typical work day?

Where do you turn for inspiration?

Movies, books, and blogs are a great source of ideas for me. I’ve also learned a ton about design from playing games or reading about them. Mostly though, I get inspired by people. Whether it’s my teammates, my wife, or friends of mine that are not in the field of design—I regularly find myself being inspired by their ideas or what they’re working on. 

What design or project are you most proud of? (It can be recent or older).

When I was working on Stride, Atlassian’s former chat app, I lead a project in which we developed a set of communication archetypes that we used to equalize participation in chat. It helped us develop features that would enable anyone on the team to participate in the conversation, regardless of their context, personality, and the culture of their team. That way, teams could focus the best ideas, not the loudest voices. Even though Stride was eventually shut down, I love that we took the idea of equalizing participation and made it real within the app.

Walk us through the design process you used for a recent project (you can pick any project).

I start all of my projects with some sort of kick-off activity in which we capture the goals, scope, and impetus for the project, as well as some sort of success metric. Some of the things we discuss during the kickoff are hunches, but having a baseline helps us make decisions if we want to change course later on.

Based on this, I try to understand who the users are and what their needs are. This often involves some sort of design research activity like user interviews or a competitive analysis. Whenever possible, I try to involve teammates in the research, as this builds a shared understanding and helps establish a sense of ownership across the team.

Once I feel like I’ve got a good understanding of the problem space, I explore a number of different ideas and solutions. This means sketches on paper or the whiteboard, lots of sketches. When I feel content with the concepts, I decide on a few different ones and share them with the team. Together, we decide on which ones we want to prototype and test.

I try to prototype and test at least two different concepts because the spectrum helps us get a better understanding of our users’ needs. I prefer testing in person with users, because it allows me to be more creative with the method and include participatory design activities. If time is tight, however, we might outsource the test, do guerrilla testing in the street, or run it on Usertesting.com. It’s not ideal but usually better than not testing at all.

At this point, we have a concept or solution that’s generally meeting our users’ needs. Depending on how confident we feel in our solution and how much there’s at stake, we either do another round of iteration and testing or move on to speccing and shipping.

While the team is building the feature, I will work with the date team to set up data analytics for our feature. That way, we can track how our users are using the feature once it’s live.

Generally speaking, once a feature is shipped, we track it and evaluate if it’s successful (i.e. meeting the goals we set). This could be done via analytics or through regular benchmarking. Depending on our results we will make changes or leave it as is for now. Usually, we roll features out to small cohorts first, track their behavior, and then decide if we need to iterate before scaling it up.

The last step of the project is doing a project retrospective. This helps us understand what went well, and what we can improve for the next one. 

What career advice do you have for product designers just getting started?

Three things come to mind:

1. Always start with the core problem you’re trying to solve. You will have a ton of ideas and there will be a lot of people asking you for things, but you need to keep the core problem front and center, and it’s usually not the interface. If you’re interested in learning more about this, check out the “Start at the epicenter” section of Jason Fried’s book Rework or Astro Teller’s blog post “Tackle the monkey first“. They’ve capture it extremely well.
2. The other thing that is important when you’re starting out is don’t get too worked up if your designs aren’t that great yet. Especially in the beginning of your UX career, your designs will probably fall short of your expectations. But that’s normal and over time, your skills will catch up and your designs will be where you want them to be. So don’t worry too much if you can’t quite get it right at the start and instead just explore and spend time designing. Ira Glass has written a great little blurb about this part of the creative process.
3. Look beyond the craft of design: There are a lot of technical things to learn about design but at the end of the day, design is about people and there are disciplines that have studied people for a lot longer than us designers. Sociology, psychology, anthropology, and ergonomics are some good fields to start with to deepen your understanding of why some designs work well and others don’t.

Where’s the best place for folks to learn more about you or follow you?

I love meeting other designers and talking about design, so don’t hesitate to connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn. I’m also part of a few design communities on Slack (product tribes/other slack thing) so if you’re part of them as well, let’s talk. 

Also, we’re always hiring designers at Atlassian, so if you’re looking for a great job, check out our open positions here. If you have questions about a position or Atlassian, feel free to reach out to me as well. 

Hi there, my name is Courtney Burton Doker and I’m currently based in Atlanta, Georgia. Last year my husband and I lived in our Airstream trailer for 7 months, traveling around the country while working remotely. Before that I was living in Brooklyn, New York. I’m passionate about houseplants, southern hospitably, intersectional feminism, inclusion, and the desert. I love vegetable gardening, watching documentaries, making collage art, and long road trips. 

How did you get started in product design?

The design school that I attended was very much focused on old-school design thinking, design history, and print. Because print has little room for error, the values taught there were geared more toward perfection, legacy, and craft. My personal values are more aligned with the love of imperfection, impermanence, and the incomplete. I bias hard towards constant evolution, so I gravitated more to the digital space as a playground for experimentation and iteration. I worked with one of the directors of the program to create a digital design track and was one of the first people to emerge from that program into the world of product design. I got my first job out of design school at Razorfish (now Publicis.Sapient) working on a team that redesigned Delta.com. The foundation of that work is something you can still see echoed through the site 8 years later.

Where do you work today? What is your title?

I work remotely for Automattic as a product designer leading the team that is building design systems.

How big is your company? How big is your design team?

Automattic has about 800 employees and the design team as a whole is around 60 people.

What types of things are you responsible for day-to-day?

For more context, the team I lead building design systems is cross-functional. Having a design language system enables our product teams to design, develop, and ship features faster while at the same time creating a more cohesive and usable customer experience. Practically speaking we do this by providing a comprehensive set of design principles, best practices, development guidelines, and by making our design and code reusable.

I’m responsible for working with our Engineering Lead and our Design Producer to set our team’s goals and roadmap, and then making sure our team is focused on the right work at the right time in service of those goals. We also need to make sure that our work is aligned with roadmaps and work streams across the organization in order to optimize our team’s ability to impact work in progress. I’m also responsible for making sure the other designer on our team has everything he needs to do his best work. I do my best to take on any work that might be distracting or blocking his progress. I also make sure that the work our team does gets shared more broadly across the organization so people understand and see the value.

Design systems is a fairly abstract concept and our team is introducing this idea to Automattic for the first time. Because of this a lot of my time is spent advocating for design systems which most frequently takes the form of giving systems feedback in org wide design reviews, answering questions around how to use the system, hosting AMA’s with teams, attending alignment meetings, and a lot of writing. I’ve learned that leaders of projects that bring big foundational changes across an organization spend a lot of their time doing the invisible work of change management. It’s hard not seeing the physical fruits of my labor as I once did but I try and stay focused on the long term vision we’re moving closer towards everyday and celebrate small wins as they come.

What do you love most about your work?

I really love collaboration. I’m energized by combining, remixing, and extending ideas to create something bigger than the sum of its parts. Everything I’m the most proud of has come from teamwork or building upon the ideas of others.

What drains you at work?

Miscommunication is really hard to manage and is really draining. Things like differing terminology and naming conventions can cause conversations to spiral and lead to confusion that can sometimes take weeks or even months to untangle. Clarity and consistency are words I live by these days.

Can you walk us through your typical work day?

As an individual contributor my schedule was a lot more predictable and structured. My time was mostly my own to divide up as I saw fit. After transitioning into leadership the biggest unexpected shift was the unpredictability of my week. Most of my time is now spent in service of others and their work, and I have to make a concerted effort to block off time for myself. No day is the same, no week is the same, and I need to be a lot more available and flexible with my time.

Before my workday starts	Setting the tone for the day I like to have a lot of time in the morning to wake up and do things around the house. I generally make pour-over coffee, make my bed, and listen to an episode of a podcast while doing some light cleaning. I work from home so keeping things tidy is an important part of mental clarity and productivity for me. I also try and mediate and write for 15 minutes each morning.
Start of the workday	Catching up on asynchronous communication I start my work day by catching up on messages in Slack and through our internal communication tool we call P2. Because design systems work spans across the entire organization it can take some time to stay caught up, and because our organization is fully distributed work is happening around the clock.
Late morning	Alignment and collaboration My first meetings for the day start. At the beginning of the week this takes the form of stand-ups, and during the rest of the week these meetings are usually for alignment, review, feedback, or collaboration. Depending on the day, meetings take up between 1 and 6 hours.
Early afternoon	Small breaks throughout the day I would love to say that I take lunch breaks but honestly I frequently work through lunch either because of meetings or because I’m locked into whatever task I’m focusing on for the day. I find time to eat during smaller breaks here and there.
Late afternoon	Deep work without interruptions  When I was designing it was easy for me to focus on a singular task at hand, but as my work has shifted into leadership I have had to make more effort to give myself time to write, think, and plan. As a leader, part of my job is being available to answer questions and connect the dots from project to project. The constant alerts can sometimes lead to multi-tasking and a general feeling of being scattered. To alleviate that I fully close Slack while writing or planning so I’m not tempted to check in.
Early evening	Alignment and collaboration Jump on Zoom or Slack to catch up on responding to questions or requests. I end my workday and set my computer to sleep

Where do you turn for inspiration?

I find most of my inspiration from artists. I love experiencing art, reading about artist’s lives, and re-creating creative processes. The Creative Independent is an amazing resource of interviews where artists talk about various themes like making a name for yourself, the importance of being idle, or the value of starting over. 

What design or project are you most proud of? (It can be recent or older).

I’m really the most proud of the work I’ve done building design systems at Automattic. It’s been challenging, rewarding, and has really pushed me out of my comfort zone into learning new skills. 

Walk us through the design process you used for a recent project (you can pick any project).

At this point in my career I do more information design and storytelling than product design. I work to make abstract ideas concrete and digestible. I do quick sketches on paper that I then share with my team to narrow in on the right direction, and then I do lots of iterations in Figma. A big idea or plan is usually communicated through a diagram or a verbal video walk through, as well as in written form. People process and understand information in a lot of different ways, and if you want your message to reach as many people as possible you should be inclusive and varied in the ways you teach and share. This is something I’ve learned from working in a remote company that I would definitely use future forward in an office environment as well.

What career advice do you have for product designers just getting started?

The amount of skills that designers are “supposed” to have experience in nowadays is truly overwhelming. Start off by focusing on what you’re most passionate about and the rest will come over time. Also never underestimate the power of a network. The tech industry is smaller than you might think. In every job I’ve had as a product designer the people I’ve worked with have never been more than one or two degrees of separation from people I end up working with in the future.

Where’s the best place for folks to learn more about you or follow you?

You can get more info about me and my work on my website courtney-burton.com. If you want to look at photos I share of my life scroll on over to @scorpio.in.here on Instagram. If you’re in Atlanta swing through the ATL Design Systems meetup I help organize. I’d love to meet you!

I’m Luis, a half Moroccan, quarter English and quarter Welsh designer currently living in London. Like my heritage, my approach to getting things done is a tad scattered; my desk is a mess. 

I’m passionate about building designs that scale, regardless of team size. My artboards and files are meticulously named and I’m more than happy to host an hour long meeting to make sure that our designs and code are aligned. 

Aside from that, you’ll usually find me in the kitchen, having robust discussions, writing my newsletter, managing my publication 8px, or trying to sound professional on my podcast Noise.

How did you get started in product design?

Like most people, I didn’t necessarily seek out product design as a discipline. In a digital sense, my job title didn’t even exist when I started working. I came into product design via what I’d traditionally call a web design background, via a hell of a lot of self learning.

Whilst in my final term at university, I landed a remote internship for an e-commerce company based in London. I worked on some graphic design and did some rudimentary code (PHP!) for their Facebook page – remember custom Facebook pages? They were impressed. After graduating, I spent 4 days in their office polishing up some other design and tech projects for them and I was offered a position without even having an interview. 

Sometimes, you’ve got to be in the right place at the right time and work your butt off to get a way in; our industry is cut throat and unless you’re willing to put the hours in the doors won’t open.

Where do you work today? What is your title?

I work for @Upgrade Pack, a #loyaltech startup aiming to disrupt travel upgrades. I’m their lead designer.

How big is your company? How big is your design team?

We’re currently at 23 people, with the product team being 6. We’ve hired quite aggressively in 2019, doubling the product team and the company size overall.

What types of things are you responsible for day-to-day?

Starting as the only designer, I worked on our app, website, and any design collateral that was required on a daily basis as we scaled. Now that I’ve hired a junior designer, I’m still responsible for the overall creative output, but at the same time spend a lot of my efforts on helping her level up. 

This isn’t just showing how tools work, but teaching fundamental parts of the role, like typography hierarchies, spacing systems and a general ‘systems’ mindset. We’ve spent hours working through how components are structured, and it’s fantastic that we’re allowed to spend the time working through this, as it impacts the whole product lifecycle.

I find that I get most of my energy in strategising with the team and working out the simplest (not always the quickest) solutions to complex user problems, and then fleshing those out with polished visual designs. This might mean that we end up with 10 versions of something as simple as selecting your payment card, but I’m just not going to offer a sloppy user experience if I can manage a better workflow.

I’ve always seen myself as someone with the broad interests and approach that would allow others to grow, and sharing work in progress is key to this.

Aside from the designs, I actively contribute to our blog, social, and marketing strategies, pitching in ideas on how we can scale our platforms. We’re currently in the process of drawing up a plan for vlogs, which I’ll be helping to shape and you may even see my face pop up on. 

What do you love most about your work?

Flexibility and the ability to contribute to various parts of the business.

What drains you at work?

Idea generation. Sometimes staring at a screen is the opposite of what you need to come up with fresh concepts. This is why sharing your work often can help overcome this. 

Can you walk us through your typical work day?

We’re currently trialling a 4 day work week, which means that my schedule is up in the air. I’m currently giving this a shot:

Where do you turn for inspiration?

This is a curious one, because I don’t think I do this.

I don’t typically like to browse through things Like Dribbble, I find it vacuous and mostly an incorrect way of looking at how real products are built. There are only so many clones of a design someone can tolerate. 

I like to keep libraries of inspiration as I go about my everyday life. At work, I’ve compiled an InVision board of app designs or treatments that I’ve seen in the wild and that I like. It’s paramount for me that inspiration comes from real world examples, and not unrealistic dreams. The thing is though, this board was created and forgotten. The ideas I stored are probably floating around in my memory somewhere, but I strongly believe that learning fundamental design principles and understanding your brief can get you over the line on most projects. It’s where you need artistic flair that ‘inspiration’ will be required.

Separate from that, we can learn a lot from physical product design. Considered composition, delicate use of colour and ergonomics are things a lot of our designs could use a bit more of.

What design or project are you most proud of? (It can be recent or older).

It’s definitely my podcast, Noise. This project took almost a year to complete, and was a stretch, but along with my co-host (based in Los Angeles, who I’ve never met!), we managed to launch a first season that included some incredible designers from around the globe.

The podcast is a audio series where we chat with creatives not just about the tools they use, but what drives them forward. Whether it’s working on side projects, traveling, or meditation, we’ve tried to ask some questions that you possibly haven’t heard elsewhere.

I’m incredibly proud to have got this project over the line, and very excited for how podcasts are going to shape the industry going forward.

Walk us through the design process you used for a recent project (you can pick any project).

I struggle with the concept of a single unified ‘design process’. Anyone who has this down to a tee is either a robot or a superstar, as our processes are typically fudging pixels around a screen until something clicks.

The fact that we end up with dozens of versions of our designs, to me, signifies that a process can only really exist outside of your artboards. This means being embedded in a traditional Agile process, or working to a familiar timeline of briefing, delivering, and testing.

For me, it all starts with a discussion of what we’d like to achieve. For example, the user needs to be able to purchase through our app. At this stage, we can start to flesh out the user flow, how did they get to this screen and where do they go next? From there we think about the page requirements, that means we need to list their ‘basket’, the price, their payment card options – including edge cases, how many cards do they have, what happens if they have no cards stored? – and a clear call to action. Then it’s into the tool, hashing out various designs based on our component library, or if something new is required sticking to our design system guides. Share it with the team, and possibly do some UX testing, then work through the formal internal sign off process and get it into the tech sprint. Voila.

What career advice do you have for product designers just getting started?

This is advice not just for people trying to start their career, but socially too – don’t wait for anyone. 

If you want to learn something, go out there and find the resources, they are all out there. On top of that, you won’t get anywhere waiting for someone else to help you – everyone is busy with their own thing, and it’s up to us to push ourselves to get ahead. This is especially true for our hyper competitive industry.

Investing this time in yourself will ultimately land you at the feet of some excellent designers who  will be willing to help push you to the next level.

Where’s the best place for folks to learn more about you or follow you?

Twitter is probably the best place to get me: https://twitter.com/disco_lu. 10 points to the person who gets the Simpsons reference in my handle.

Hi, my name is Tony. I’m a designer from Albany, New York. I love to work with my hands, whether it’s renovating my house, fixing my truck, or a wood project. My love for building all started with my Lego sets as a kid. I also enjoy traveling, collaborating with friends/coworkers on projects and spending time with my family. Fun fact: I am looking for a van or small RV, so I can occasionally live the digital nomad life.

How did you get started in product design?

I was a business student for a couple of years in college but I took an Intro to Computer Science course and that changed everything. My professor (Dr. Johanna Horowitz) saw potential in me and encouraged me to change majors. Shortly after, I started as an Engineering intern at CSC (which has since merged with HP) and was the first hire for their new internship program. 

I then got a job as the Student Manager for my college’s IT help desk. After I graduated from school, I was hired full-time to work on New York State’s Medicaid and Medicare system. I designed and built websites for organizations in my free time so early on I knew that my passion was in visual and interaction design. 

In each subsequent position, my goal was to work closer to the user interface. In early 2013, I joined a project to build the Obamacare System (NY State of Health) as an engineer. After we hired a new director for that project, I asked him if I could switch to design and work with a design firm we hired called New Spin Digital. From then on, I either worked in a dual (design/development) product role or exclusively in design. 

I always felt like I was behind because there was so much to learn in design, but I worked hard, read, and collaborated with folks much more seasoned than me so that feeling would start to fade. This approach definitely fast-tracked the learning process for me.

Where do you work today? What is your title?

I work at Auth0 as a Product Designer. Auth0 provides an easy way for developers to integrate authentication and identity verification. We’re a remote-friendly company based in Bellevue, Washington with offices in Buenos Aires, London, Tokyo, and Sydney.

How big is your company? How big is your design team?

Auth0 currently has about 460 employees and our design team is comprised of about 16 talented, humble, and fun-loving creatives. My team is extremely passionate about what we do. We are currently split into two teams: product design and marketing design.

What types of things are you responsible for day-to-day?

I am on two different product team triads. (Triad is a term that was started at Atlassian. It is a 3-person leadership team within the larger development team that helps create balance between the business, the customer and the product), our Operator and Administrative Experience teams. I am responsible for research, knowing our competition, building prototypes, creating new products/features, working with engineers, and designing UI components. Outside my normal role, I am working with a new project team and company leadership to demo some exciting stuff at our upcoming company retreat in Los Cabos!

What do you love most about your work?

1. I love the freedom and flexibility that remote work can bring.
2. Collaborating and sharing laughs with my co-workers. No one takes themselves too seriously, so we have a lot of fun.
3. Auth0’s commitment to delivering customer value.

What drains you at work?

Meetings lol…I can be somewhat introverted at times.

Can you walk us through your typical work day?

Where do you turn for inspiration?

I really enjoy getting inspiration from public spaces around New York City like Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum. I build things out of wood, renovate my home, or tinker with some tech to get inspiration. I also have a bookmark folder called “Favorite sites”. Whenever I find a site that I am inspired by, I add it to that folder. I also use Dribbble, CollectUI, Site Inspire, Nicely Done but sometimes inspiration just comes from taking a nap.

Walk us through the design process you used for a recent project (you can pick any project).

Typically, my design process begins with research. I comb through analytics, data, customer feedback, competitive analysis, and perform product thinking exercises like personas, empathy maps, and user story mapping. I then start on sketching and wireframes. Some of those wireframes may become prototypes that I will test out on customers. Next, the final designs and spec are created to hand-off to a developer. Lastly, once the feature is launched I’ll keep tabs on how it’s doing and iterate as needed.

What career advice do you have for product designers just getting started?

• Know thy users, their problems and pain points.
• Learn something about everything, and everything about something
• Train your design eye. You may be an amazing UX designer but without solid visual design chops people may be a bit skeptical of your abilities. 
• Take all this advice as a grain of salt because experience is really the best teacher. Embrace that you can’t be in control of everything. You may not get hired. You may be fired. You may quit. Being driven, positive and happy despite external factors is pretty important. Just do your best. Jobs can kill you with stress if you let them.

Where’s the best place for folks to learn more about you or follow you?

I’m occasionally on Twitter. Instagram has photos of some of my travels. Also, Auth0 is always looking for great talent, so if you want to chat about the company or just send me a general question my email address is linked in the footer over at https://tonybagels.com.

Hello! My name is Tristan. I leaned over to my wife and asked her to describe me in one sentence and she said: “well he’s very kind, and passionate about what he does, uh, open to feedback, very loyal, might take a couple reminders sometimes to get to the point, but like, in a good way—this is hard!”

That’s totally spot on, so pardon if I ramble a bit but I promise I will eventually get to a point. Places have had such a big impact on who I am: I was born in Santa Cruz, California; grew up in the Shangri-La town of Ojai, went to kindergarten at Patagonia’s GPCDC, spent nearly every summer in Yosemite and learned about the real world, went to school in Berkeley, then moved across the country to Boston, and now reside in the bike-friendly town of Somerville. I love places.

I have way too many hobbies to list (my friends tell me this is because I do not yet have kids) but the two I’m spending time on right now are bicycling, and singing in a local community choir.

I’m passionate about making things. Most of my other hobbies tie to that: some spin on creating something out of nothing, and doing it in the best way I can. I just feel incredibly lucky that I can bring creativity into my day to day work too. I feel incredibly lucky for a lot of things.

How did you get started in product design?

I probably came to design and UX in a roundabout way (like everyone), from being mystified by Microsoft Paint on my Grandfather’s i386, to discovering the web in the ’90’s and figuring out how easy it was to make a web page, to realizing there was a whole field geared around making web pages better. I remember reading Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Cederholm, and Doug Bowman’s blogs and wanting to be like them when I grew up. I made my own blog and tried to copy the trends and put my own spin on it, and suddenly I was a web designer.

I had an influential experience in high school, in which I discovered a small computer lab in town that was teaching classes on web design and design tools, taught by Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin. I walked in and asked if I could intern over the summer, and they let me. They later went on to make videos or something like that.

Web design wasn’t a major when I went to college, so I dove into computer science (I remember being embarrassed for only knowing Javascript) and to be honest, it was a blast. I really enjoyed learning how computers really work and the core concepts of designing good software code.

During college I started to get into photography and really wanted to get back to design, so I started an open-source photo gallery called Zenphoto, and it allowed me to stretch my product legs. I would say it was the first product I really designed. I wrote a blog post announcing and asking for feedback, and got 100 comments within a week. I could see the demand, and started to parse through what people wanted and try to figure out why, and design a product that would make them happy (not to be confused with what they asked for).

Where do you work today? What is your title?

I work at Appcues as the Head of Product Design. Appcues is a platform for improving your user experience through supportive guidance and annotation. It’s ridiculously cool to be designing not only an experience tool, but also the experience that millions of people see every day by proxy.

How big is your company? How big is your design team?

We’re up to around 75 now! There are three total designers on our team: myself, fellow product designer Jennifer Maggio, and Tanya Higgins on brand & marketing design. They’re both phenomenal and I’m so fortunate to be able to work with them (and you would be too!).

What types of things are you responsible for day-to-day?

As the manager of the design team, I’m responsible for making sure everyone on my team has whatever they need to be incredibly successful and happy. Happy and excited designers make great products.

As the Head of Product Design, I’m also responsible for experience strategy (how we go about achieving the experience our product needs to be successful), and design process and activities. I also get to think a little more long-term about the future of the Appcues experience, which is exciting.

What do you love most about your work?

Absolutely without a doubt it’s the folks here. I’ve learned more in the last 3 years at Appcues than at any other time in my career, and it’s pretty much only because I’m surrounded by people who challenge me, teach me, and encourage me to do my best every day.

Second to that—on the design side of things, the Appcues product is just so much fun to work on. We get to design a solution that helps our customers design a solution to problems that are actually important to their users and their business. It’s very hard, confusing at times, and takes all of our design skills to pull off. Because of that, it’s pretty fulfilling and exciting.

What drains you at work?

Working alone for too long. I get energized by collaborating either one-on-one or in a small group. I have a lot of experience being the only designer at various companies, and I would always have to rope anyone I could find into whiteboarding or feedback sessions, if only to bounce stuff off of them and see if it changed my thinking. Now that there are three other designers around the office, it’s a dream.

Can you walk us through your typical work day?

Where do you turn for inspiration?

I’m going to give two non-example examples. First up, my team: they are constantly doing top notch work and inspiring me to do better. Second: our users. When I’m uninspired, nothing gets me more energized than talking to a user who can show us what it’s like for them to use our product and help us understand a problem or opportunity better through their eyes. Design is about solving problems for real people—I always go to them first.

What design or project are you most proud of? (It can be recent or older).

Recently we re-branded Appcues, thanks to our wonderful marketing designer, Tanya. She went through a great process trying to find our who we were as a company so we could present that to the outside world, and she integrated the whole product design team in the process. Because of that integration, we were all excited and inspired along the way, and I started experimenting with how the product could shift to meet the new standards of our brand. I really like how it turned out—it feels light and airy, and more mature with a solid visual system and a flexible navigation that can help our information architecture adapt for the future.

This was a good start, and the other product designers have already taken it way further than I ever could, refining and improving pretty much every part, in particular accessibility and contrast, and many other visual and UI system refinements. Most importantly, the real product ended up looking pretty close to the concept, and continues to improve beyond it, thanks to our awesome UI platform engineers.

And even more importantly, it helped our users get a better sense of the product and what it can do. To me, information architecture is how a product talks about itself; the key to understanding its basic structure and purpose. It has to be good.

Walk us through the design process you used for a recent project (you can pick any project).

I’m going to reach back a bit to before I hired my team for this one. At Appcues, we’ve loved the idea of onboarding checklists for as long as I can remember: psychologically and usability-wise, they have so many advantages. We wanted to take this experience and make it available to any app in only a few steps.

I began by trying to understand the opportunity as well as I could. I defined the goals, read articles on checklist psychology, read the Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, and did a survey of checklists in use across the web and apps. We realized a few things would be special to this pattern, and some principles and clear needs emerged, as well as many decisions to test. The Notion doc was comprehensive and helped spark great debates and discussions.

That clear list of possible directions led to some good sketching and divergence. We got together as a team, did some fun crazy-eights and post-it-ing, and that led to lots of ideas. Ideas turned into sketches, and a picture of a generic pattern that might just work for a wide variety of apps and products emerged.

The next step was cool: I decided to make a fully realistic prototype in React. I wouldn’t normally put in the work to make a full demo app, but a) I’m really comfortable in React these days and I love designing in a CSS-first way, and b) as an end-user pattern (what we at Appcues call the interfaces that our customers can create and place on top of their products), the fidelity mattered at every point: details of the design quality, animations, and the feel of this pattern all were essential to understanding how our customers and their users would respond to it.

After we had a basic prototype, I started getting it out there as soon as possible. Over the course of a month or so I had 35 calls with customers and non-customers alike. Since it was a brand new pattern, I talked to potential users and made adjustments and changes along the way until I was confident they would love it. Most were excited and gave great feedback—some said they would never be able to use it. We learned a lot, but by the end we knew we were onto something good.

The last step was making it real and getting it into the product. The prototype left few questions unanswered, but that was almost a crutch—one thing I’ve learned is that high fidelity can be deceiving. It’s important to keep talking through the work even if it feels certain; maybe even especially when it feels certain.

Overall, I was pretty happy with how it turned out and with the process. I mostly did things in the right order and derived a successful UI from good understanding, lots of divergence, and a whole lot of talking to users. If there’s one thing I’d do over, it would be to have more conversations pre-prototype as well as post-prototype: we learned a lot of things that probably would have influenced our thinking before we had created a more detailed prototype, and that would have saved us time and rework later on. Generative research to understand problems, situations, and assumptions is just this incredible hidden value that’s so easy to skip.

As for the product itself, I think it turned out great. It’s a way to get an awesome behavior-driven learning experience into any product super easily.

What career advice do you have for product designers just getting started?

Work with the best people you can find—and the best people can be found in the most unexpected places. You don’t need to work at a famous name or a hot startup to find a great team. Find larger companies with good managers and experienced designers who you can trust and learn from, because surrounding yourself with more experienced folks will be the fastest way you’ll learn and grow.

This comes from a couple experiences I’ll share to back it up: first, I started a company straight out of college. I was headstrong and thought I knew how to do anything, and I learned a lot in the process (read: did not know how to do anything). If I could do it all again, I’d find a great team at a big company and work and learn for at least two or three years first.

Second experience: when I was at a decent sized company with a design team of five, even with a few years of experience under my belt, I still learned and improved so quickly that I was astonished. Like, every 3 months I’d look back and not be able to look at my work from 3 months ago it was so different. Working directly with skilled folks is a superpower. Watch them work, copy their style and process shamelessly, and ask them for feedback on everything you do.

Where’s the best place for folks to learn more about you or follow you?

Twitter for sure. @trisweb. Also check out my personal web site, http://www.trisweb.com.

Photos by Meryl Ayres

My name is Arsenije Catic, but I go by Archie. I’m a design generalist from Belgrade, Serbia, passionate about running and various esoteric disciplines. 

I enjoy hanging out with my roommate — Sushi the cat.

How did you get started in product design?

Guess it was 2010 when I discovered Quora. There were numerous stories on “product design”, mainly by Rebekah Cox but also from some early Facebook designers. That exact term struck me because for the first time I was able to see that “UX design” can be practically applicable by a single person. It was a paradigm shift for me.

At the time I was an “interactive media” student, and had a burning desire to get my hands dirty with building software product from scratch. This is how, together with couple of friends, I founded a startup called “Taksiko”.

Where do you work today? What is your title?

I currently work with Seven Bridges as Head of Product Design. We are helping researchers around the world to be more efficient in finding cure for numerous diseases — cancer among others. 

How big is your company? How big is your design team?

We are around 240 people in total, where design team currently counts 6 extraordinary individuals. 

What types of things are you responsible for day-to-day?

I always thought that behind the fancy job title lays a fancy job, but I learned it’s quite the opposite. All the responsibilities I now have towards the people/company could be tucked under the line that “I’m trying to help some designers do their best work”. 

What do you love most about your work?

For me there are 2 main things: problems and people.

In order to succeed in our mission, a bunch of tough problems needs to be tackled. Some of them can’t be solved from the first shot (some even require years to be solved), so over time you start falling in love with problems instead of solutions.

I love the people I work with. Working with them is a perk by itself. They are constantly pushing me to broaden up my creative thinking. 

What drains you at work?

Toooooo many things to be honest, but I’ll mention some highlights.

The industry we are building our business in is super sensitive, conservative and slow when it comes to the adoption of new things. This results in a lot of technical/product restrictions, unusual user pain points and slow feedback cycles. 

Engineering driven culture is not the friendliest place for designers. Often times you need to double down you efforts even for the most usual stuff.

Can you walk us through your typical work day?

Where do you turn for inspiration?

I really like to dig into the Internet. This is something I’m really patient with and it makes me feel like some sort of a forensic technician.

Sometimes this includes following designers I look up to, and watching them develop and grow their careers over time. I like to read whatever they have to say, where the sweetest part is actually discovering their inspiration.

Besides that, for product design I currently try to learn from design systems of outdoor sports gear manufacturers, nuclear plants and ultimately nature (as in biomimicry).   

When it comes to visual design, I’m a huge fanboy of a couple of swedish design agencies who are constantly pushing what I call “elegant brutalism”.

And finally I try to draw as much inspiration as I can from my friends and peers.

Also, what Desirée said here.

What design or project are you most proud of? (It can be recent or older).

I’m one of those people who are never satisfied with their own output. I think Dustin sums up that syndrome very well.

A project that’s close to my heart was the website for a local tech conference I had a chance to help with. It was a wonderful experience collaborating with that crew and under such an amazing art director. The best thing was the fact the website boosted ticket sales and the conference was sold out in two weeks. 

Over the output itself, I value the sense of ownership I had here, and the easily measurable results. That was very satisfying.

Walk us through the design process you used for a recent project (you can pick any project).

Processes are not my cup of tea. 

I always try to cut the time between paper sketch and tangible product (prototype). This means cherry picking standard methods and using only essentials — the most effective ones for the context and time frame. It tends to look chaotic in practice.

Once the creation is in hands of users, the real work starts. 

What career advice do you have for product designers just getting started?

Don’t believe the hype. 

Don’t focus on the tools. 

Understand that product design is all about people. 

Where’s the best place for folks to learn more about you or follow you?

I tweet under the pseudonym @R2k and try to deliver a tiny monthly newsletter. I always love to hear from people via email, so if that’s your thing feel free to shoot me one.

Shout out to Dave Martin for making all this happen!