How and why I do monthly leveling with my design team
Does this conversation sound familiar?
Employee: “I’d like a promotion. Here’s where I see myself…”
Manager: “I hear you. And I see solid progress. I don’t see you at that level yet and here’s why…”
Conversations about promotions and seniority are super challenging. When there’s little to no agreement, the discussion can be fraught with tension, disappointment, resentment, and may become one of the reasons someone chooses to leave a team or company. As a designer and design manager, I’ve been on both sides of these hard conversations.
Two of my goals as a design leader are to help my…
Key questions that impact hiring decisions
We’ve all lost out on jobs. It’s soul crushing, especially if you had your heart set on a particular company. As a candidate, it can feel like the hiring manager is rejecting everything about you. While it may feel that way, it’s not true.
As a hiring manager, I want to shed light on the other side of hiring decisions. It’s my responsibility to strengthen our design team’s capacity to make great products that our customers love to use. That means I have to decide if I think a candidate will thrive on a specific team for our company’s types…
It’s 2pm and you want to grab dinner tonight with a few friends. After skimming reviews of restaurants on OpenTable and other sites, you circle back to one of your favorite restaurants with availability at 7:30pm. On the OpenTable app, you make a few taps and your reservation is set.
When you and your group make it to the restaurant, you check in with the host, who makes a few taps on an iPad with a dynamic screen of colorful squares, circles and rectangles. She says, “Welcome back! Do you want your usual table?” …
Lessons on how to knit together product design mentorship and guidance
I didn’t go to art school or study design at college. I studied sociology at Berkeley because I wanted to work for social change. When I graduated, I found myself looking for both mentors and nonprofit work. (I’ll tell you how I got into product design another day.) One day, I responded to an email on a list-serve about joining a nonprofit leadership development group, which I did and became known as On the Verge. What I didn’t know then was that I’d wind up spending years after work and on weekends collaborating with young, emerging leaders to facilitate meetings…
Sometimes we find ourselves in tough situations on a project, on a team, or in a company. We want to hide in our work, complain to our colleagues, and do everything besides deal with the issue(s) or situation. These problems likely won’t go away on their own, so how might we become more resilient — and even thrive — when things get hard at work?
Before I joined OpenTable I was a product designer at Pivotal Labs, where I taught client product teams lean UX and agile methods. Every 3–12 weeks I would join a new client team that I…
Recently, one of our designers at OpenTable shared an article about managing ambiguity by Marta Harding, a senior design lead at IDEO. The article invited you to imagine being in a high-level stakeholder or client meeting and being asked an unexpected hardball question. The author then asked, “What would you say?”
The main point of the article was to learn to come from a place of confidence and vulnerability in saying “I don’t know yet” to a client, and then work together on solutions.
My first response was that saying “I don’t know” can be a vulnerable admission depending on…
