Unicorns are real…. I am one!
I’m a unicorn. No, not the magical, mythical being you immediately thought of — I AM a magical, mythical being for sure, but in this case, I’m referring to the industry term that represents a person who can not only design but write code as well. Since people like this are rare, we call them “Unicorns.” So how did I become this magical, mythical, rare being?
It started after college. I graduated with a degree in Psychology. I was told I couldn’t do much in the real world without an advanced psychology degree. I didn’t have any direction, I didn’t know anything about the real world, and I had no job prospects aside from working in a coffee shop. I knew that a career in something creative was calling me; as part of my challenging college curriculum, I’d included art classes for stress relief and I loved every single one I’d taken — most notably, I’d taken a class on computer design in my senior year at Hofstra University and loved it. I’d also taken programming classes (in Pascal) and absolutely hated it.
After college, I enrolled in a continuing education course which taught me Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, QuarkXPress, and Flash. I ended up loving it so much that I later taught those classes. Dreamweaver got my feet wet in the world of hypertext markup language (HTML), but I wanted to take the honorable path and code my own websites, not rely on a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) interface to do it for me. So I sat and learned HTML — there weren’t any bootcamps at the time that could teach me the front-end web development skills I wanted to learn. And once I learned, I ended up creating my own curriculum and how-to website; the school I took classes from ended up hiring me to teach for a summer. I was hooked; I *loved* web development. It satisfied my analytical brain’s need to compute while simultaneously allowing me to create something. I felt like both sides of my brain were finally satisfied in this role I’d stumbled into.
My career evolved over the years and I got pulled into the marketing department (and sadly, pulled away from web development). My life became customer relationship management. I became lost in spreadsheets, analytics, business intelligence, SQL statements and eventually people management. I lost my creative side over the years. I didn’t touch a design program for years. I didn’t write any code or keep up with my tech skills. I actually felt like I’d lost myself.
I try to invest in my skills by taking a class every few years; it had been at least 15 years since I took a design or web development related class. I found out about Ironhack from a friend in the industry; they are a school that offers Web development and User Experience Design bootcamps. They also offer a plethora of free events that you can learn from, so she brought me to a women’s weekend workshop on how to code in HTML. I met with the admissions director at Ironhack and she interviewed me about what I liked doing, what I wanted my career to become, etc. My original intention was to take a web development class, but she mentioned that the new User Experience Design class might be right up my alley. I ended up taking that class. It was life-changing.
All of my design skills up until this point were self-taught or edited by my managers over the years; if someone didn’t like a font or color, I didn’t know any better than they did to be able to push back. Ironhack taught me how to gather user research, how to empathize with users, how to create and test prototypes, and how to rapidly develop a solution that users want. In the last module of our class, we briefly touched on HTML, CSS and some javascript.
That last module on coding got me hooked and right after I graduated the UX course, I hopped right into a full-time web development bootcamp. And for nine arduous weeks, my life became code — days, nights, weekends were dedicated to learning and exploring Javascript and the MEAN stack.
While I was in the web development bootcamp, I really started to think about my career path moving forward. I didn’t just want to be a UX designer. I didn’t just want to be a front-end web developer either. I wanted to combine those two skills into something, but what?
All of the career research I saw pointed me towards becoming a product manager. In this role, I would own the development of a product (an app, website, or utility) from start to finish. I would be able to write the requirements for a product, understand its impact on users, and I could guide a team of developers (and write some code myself!) in building that product. With my newly updated technical skills, I could now understand data and information architecture.
This also allows me to approach the relationship between designers and developers in a cohesive way. I know more about how to communicate with developers, and what code or system limitations they might have in actually executing the designs I come up with. I also now understand what a “design pattern” is (design patterns are templates for help to solve common design issues in object-oriented software — an example would be a search box — since it’s used so commonly, it’s easy to just create since we know what search boxes typically look like). Finally, I can now empathize more with the amount of time a development task might take a developer.
I’m now in a role similar to one where I’d been happiest in my career — I am actually creating something that is beautiful and useful to the world. I work for Cross.Team — we build experiences to elevate and empower organizations. I am currently working with a client to modernizing an internal platform used by a crucial team in the organization. In this role, I am using my combined user experience, web development and data knowledge to execute building a modernized experience for the organization.
If you’re interested in learning more, I will be speaking at UX and WebDev — Which One’s Better on November 14th at Ironhack. RSVP Here!
