Inside Segment Design is a series designed to shine the spotlight on the talented team of designers and researchers that make up the Segment design team. A Little Outside Segment Design refers to people just outside the design orbit we want you to meet too! We’ll publish a series of articles that will follow each team member on their career path and journey to Segment.
Medium, meet Tido: my boss, and Segment’s CPDO (Chief Product Development Officer) and CFO (Chief Fun Officer — not to be confused with Chief Finance Officer…. which is not nearly as fun, I imagine). Tido oversees Segment’s Engineering, Product, Design, and Security functions, so he has a lot of free time on his plate — I’m very grateful he took the time to chat! He’s known at Segment for being an incredible leader and DEI advocate, unbelievably fast Slack responsiveness times, incredible management and recruiting prowess, and for having the world’s cutest dog that has the world’s best name: Taco! …
Inside Segment Design is a series designed to shine the spotlight on the talented team of designers and researchers that make up the Segment design team. We’ll publish a series of articles that will follow each team member on their career path and journey to Segment. Read our previous piece in the series here!
Medium, meet Dylan— one of our amazing product designers at Segment. Dylan is one of those designers who only gets more and more impressive the more you get to know him. I remember interviewing him and being struck by how detail-oriented and thoughtful his work was. …
I recently realized its been about a year since I first transitioned to a design management role after starting off as an Individual Contributor (IC) at Segment. Beyond reading The Making of a Manager (great book!), nothing truly prepared me for the transition to management besides a (really fortunate) string of fantastic managers I got to learn from in my career thus far.
Here are some of my biggest lessons in transitioning from IC work — which I loved!— to design management, which I now also love. Hopefully, if you’re considering a similar transition, this can help you too!
1. Think of it as an entirely new role, not a career upgrade
This is one of the best pieces of advice my manager gave me when I was first transitioning to management. Because a lot of how we perceive career growth tends to be with the lens of thinking about how and when to transition to managing people, it can be difficult to disentangle the desire to grow as a designer from the desire to be a design manager. …
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