Q&A with Industry Dive product designer Christina Chiang
This is a Q&A with Industry Dive product designer Christina Chiang.
About Industry Dive: We keep business leaders up-to-date with the latest trends in their industry. Over 12M business leaders across 24 industries read our 27 publications. We also help marketers tell stories that create connections, enhance trust and drive leads.
What is your story? How did you end up in the design field? How did you end up at Industry Dive, a business media company?
My road to product design started in retail. I specialized in visual merchandising and loved the process of curating in-store guest experiences. As a merchandiser, I strived to hit that delicate balance between great presentation and high sales performance.
As much as I enjoyed merchandising, it was not a sustainable career and lacked the professional growth opportunities I was looking for.
At the end of 2020, I enrolled myself in a product design “boot camp.” The most impactful part of that program was learning to explain how my seemingly-unrelated retail skills were transferable to a product design position. Learning to speak about my past professional experiences in this way gave me greater confidence when applying to product design roles.
I ended up at Industry Dive after learning a great deal about the people and company through the Design Department’s blog posts. The blog gave me an insider perspective on what types of projects the team worked on, how the department was structured, and, most importantly, what the people were like.
What is your role like as an Industry Dive product designer?
At Industry Dive, the product design team is comprised of four members — the Director of Product Design, my manager, and three product designers. Each product designer is paired with one engineering team and is responsible for a specific set of products.
I primarily focus on the design of internal tools. My projects range from adding features to our content management system (CMS) for our journalists to improving the promotion of industry events across our 26+ Dive publication websites.
During a typical week, I collaborate with the rest of the product design team for feedback and to iterate on my designs. I am also responsible for presenting my design solutions to our product management and engineering teams; at this step, the conversation shifts from UI and UX design to technical feasibility and timeline.
What are some ways you feel like you’ve grown as a product designer since you started at Industry Dive?
Before Industry Dive started building a product management team last year, I had to learn to think like a product manager. My supervisor, Natalie Gilmor, challenged me to carefully consider the technical feasibility and edge cases of my designs before presenting them to Industry Dive’s developers. This even included helping craft the engineering task acceptance criteria.
Working with an engineering team without product managers pushed me to think more critically about my designs and helped me better understand the perspective of Industry Dive’s developers. This made me a better designer because I am now more confident at stakeholder presentations and better equipped with a shared technical vocabulary.
What I loved about this experience was how supported I felt each step of the way. I got to discuss my work with my manager during our weekly 1:1s, learn about Industry Dive’s process for mockup annotations and pick up some basic front-end development knowledge from the engineering team. These were all incredibly valuable experiences, and I’m eager to learn more!
You live in Texas and work closely with coworkers in at least 3 other states. What is that like? How do you collaborate and stay coordinated?
I enjoy working with everyone on the product design team, even though we don’t always share the same projects. I always look forward to any face time I get with them. We meet online at least twice a week and always make an effort to have our video cameras turned on; seeing the other person live makes a huge difference.
Something else that helped our team was defining and sharing our work styles. Natalie set aside time for each member of our team to create a “user manual,” a guide that includes information about our communication preferences. Our whole team got together to share our answers about work habits and how we like to receive feedback. This exercise helped me tremendously because we are constantly iterating on our work based on teammate feedback. Understanding everyone’s work styles upfront helped us avoid any frustration or awkwardness.
What advice would you give someone who wants to transition to product design from another career path?
Actively think about the good and bad design decisions that you encounter in your everyday life. This can be anything around you — a mug shape, a button position in a vehicle, or even a store layout. Be mindful and ask yourself — is there a particular reason why this design works or doesn’t work? Treat everyday situations as opportunities to practice your ability to articulate your design feedback. This is a good first step before you look into a product design boot camp or a similar program.
