A magazine changed my life
How I literally read an article and found my purpose.
I’d like to share my story of how I figured out what I really needed to do with my life…
Back in 2005, I was reading Dwell magazine and came across an article about David Kelley and IDEO. At the time, I had no idea that that kind of design existed. For me design had always been the outside of the box of chocolates; the decoration; the perfume bottle but never the substance itself.
And here I was, learning from someone who presented design as the “what” —
— the “form”, and the “thing” that gets created versus merely the package that it comes in. It was upon reading this article that everything came together — my modus operandi and a definition of design that I had never even considered until reading that article. It was beautiful and it was at that cafe reading about David Kelley that
I decided to create the “what” instead of just the packaging.
To understand the significance of my epiphany, you’ll have to know a little bit about how I grew up.
My family moved from Peru in the late 80’s when the country was on the brink of civil war, and due to economic instability.
My dad found a job in Washington DC and it was his engineering degree that got us out. Our family got a ticket to a new country, a new life and a ton of opportunities. So it was no surprise that when I got to college and told my dad that I wanted to take sculpture and Italian, he gave me the
“I don’t think that’s a good idea — those are things that would never have served me well as your father” look.
It was hard because he was giving me really good advice.
Sometimes when people give advice they’re talking to themselves in the past; but I had to honor it. After all, it was his way of thinking that gave our family a new life.
So I hacked together a major in economics —
(because I love math and working with numbers) with a minor split in art history. When I wasn’t crunching numbers, I often found myself in the photography or jewelry studios or chipping away at things in the wood shop.
But those were extras — things I did for fun; not things on which I could build a career, right? Creating things with my hands brought me a lot of joy. And, there was something fun about working with large data sets and being able to run regressions to find out what was really going on with the data. I had to strike a balance but at Dartmouth there wasn’t an easy way to combine those two things.
So I go on, of course, and coming from an immigrant family, one is highly valued over the other so all of this art stuff had to get left behind as I pursued a proper career in business.
My first job after school was at Wells Fargo combining data sets. I started to work in spreadsheets and run tons of numbers through spreadsheets. I went on to work at The GAP, where I had significant responsibility — determining the buy plan for a $6M division. I would make all of the purchasing decisions for 100,000 units and,
as you can imagine, that required an immense amount of manual labor in the early 2000’s —
every week, sifting through sales data which was basically a stack of papers almost a foot high on my desk. The painstaking process of identifying the right data was like reading tea leaves. I imagined what this might be like for other divisions or for people less data-savvy and it got me thinking. There had to be a better way.
Once I found it, I realized that I could do this for others —
depending on what their unique needs were. I created a one page print out of just the things that mattered and made it easy to report on the sales for the week; for me and for my peers.
It was around this time of intense problem solving and “product” creation that I found myself sitting in a cafe reading Dwell magazine. The article on David Kelley and “design thinking” stood out immediately…
and I was like “Oh! Oh my gosh, right!?”
I realized that this combination of problem solving at the product level was something that existed and had already been doing with my spreadsheets. “Design thinking,” is the process of creation that involves innovation based on observation, iteration and constant improvement. And, I thought to myself
— “oh my god, this is what I need to do with my life.”
It would take several years to get there and my plan was to get into the business school first and then take classes at the Design School (d.School) at Stanford, where David Kelley taught. The 0.03% odds of getting into the d.School only strengthened my resolve. I never once stopped to think about the odds because it was something so clearly meant to be that I maintained perfect focus — all of my energy spent on making the right connections and taking the right steps to achieve my goal. In the end it paid off. All along the way, the right people materialized and supported, coached, and encouraged me to make it happen.
I believe that each of us was born with a unique set of talents.
Sometimes in our lives we have the opportunity to work on one part of who we are. At other times, we can focus on a completely different part of ourselves. I was lucky and had a chance to do both and I learned that no matter the circumstances, when given the chance to work (and play) on both sides that I needed two things:
- to be open to the opportunity even though it was unlike anything I had experienced and
2. to do everything humanly possible to take advantage of that opportunity!
Melissa recently founded Pegrin — a project management solution for engineering teams. In a past life, she started Tiny Post, a viral storytelling company which was bought by TripAdvisor in 2013. She then led tablet, TV, and mobile product, there but made the most impact through injecting the company with design thinking — She holds an MBA from Stanford and a BA in Economics from Dartmouth.
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