Open Book: Annie Tang
Hear about Annie’s love for architecture, ceramics, and Michelle Obama.
Open Book is a series of interviews where you get to meet our creative design team at Opendoor.
What do you do at Opendoor?
I’m the design manager for our consumer products team, which includes seller experience, trade-ins, partnerships, and mortgages. My job entails helping my team lead the vision and strategy for our products, developing our design processes, hiring great talent, and elevating our design culture.
How did you become a designer?
I studied architecture, so my path to design like most designers wasn’t straightforward. The architecture department at MIT had a close relationship with the computer science department, and through taking project-based computer science classes, I got exposed to UX and product design.
Architecture and UX design are actually quite similar. Both require thoughtfulness about how people interact with spatial systems — with architecture it’s the physical space, whereas with UX, it’s digital. For example, a dashboard is similar to common areas like a lobby. Both are spaces where people need to easily come back and find their way to other places.
What I like about architecture is that it forces you to zoom out and think holistically — you’ll fail if you start designing the layout of a single room before thinking about the entrances, exits, and connectors. Similarly, UX designers must start with information architecture and core flows before diving into specific screens.
I really like your ceramics that you post on Instagram. How did you get started with it?
Outside of work, I’m a serial hobbyist. Three years ago, I took a 6 week ceramics class because I wanted to make planters to house all my succulents, and I became obsessed. Ceramics is a lot like chemistry — there’s so many different clay bodies, firing temperatures, and glazes to test. I love experimenting with layering glazes to achieve textured multi-colored effects like this and this, which require a lot of trial and error.
Has ceramics influenced your approach to design or vice versa?
When I first started doing ceramics, I was obsessed with perfection. But when you’re throwing, there’s only a short period of time before it becomes too wet to work with, and turns to mush.
The way to get better was to let go of perfectionism. My instructor told me to go broad, keep making pieces, and iterate quickly. You can extrapolate this to doing effective product design. By focusing on perfecting one small piece, you’re keeping yourself from iterating and exploring. But by going broad and aiming for volume over perfection, you can get a bit better every day. I now approach both ceramics and design with an iterative mindset, and focus on incremental learning over perfection.
How do you want to grow in 2019?
In past years, I’ve focused on my personal growth. This year, I want to be more deliberate about how I can lift others up in my communities as I grow. I find myself thinking a lot about what my story is and can be — as a woman, a design leader, a second-generation immigrant — in the context of those larger communities.
I read Becoming by Michelle Obama at the start of this year, and was inspired by how she was always lifting up people around her in each step of her life. As she gained more success, she made sure many others from her community in Chicago did as well. I loved that she saw her own story as a small piece that fit into a larger story arc of black female leaders in America.
“None of these women could ever have imagined a life like the one I now had, but they’d trusted that their perseverance would yield something better, eventually, for someone like me.”
When I map this thinking to my day-to-day work as a design manager, I’m excited to spend more time thinking about how I can nurture and grow others. It’s an exciting year at Opendoor with lots of new initiatives, so I’m looking forward to empowering people to do and be recognized for good, impactful work. Michelle’s humility in thanking those who set her up for success, and her mindfulness in providing opportunities for others, inspires me to do the same.
P.S. If you liked what you read and are interested in learning more, check out our jobs page! We’re always hiring.
