From Agency Associate to Founding Designer

How Whitespace Fellow Jessica Phan became the Founding Designer at Zugata

By Julia Cox

Meet Jessica Phan, a Whitespace Fellow who’s now spearheading the design team at Zugata! As a design leader, she utilizes the insights she gained through Whitespace to help her team excel on an individual, and group, level. We caught up over lunch to talk about life at Zugata and how she leads her design team.

Design School Dropout

Jessica graduated from San Jose State with a BA in Design Studies, and after getting partway through her MFA in Graphic Design at Academy of Art, she dropped out to find more hands-on, real world experience.

Her design career started with creating ads and doing production art in the e-commerce space. As the company’s design team expanded, she moved into a management role and switched her focus to designing web page layouts and flows inspired by other exceptional e-commerce experiences.

“Most of the time my designs were shot down, which left me discouraged and frustrated. I was mostly frustrated with myself that I wasn’t able to articulate and defend my decision on why my approach would be more effective.”

Her inability to effectively communicate the reasoning behind her choices drove her to seek out new job opportunities where she could “learn from–and with–other product design experts.”

That’s when an old classmate told her about ZURB, a design agency with clients like Yahoo, Ebay, and Netflix. She applied soon after and landed the position of product designer. There she developed a more thorough understanding of product design–including front-end development, user research, and user experience. She says, “I got the opportunity to present my work to clients like SAP, Samsung, and JCPenney, and whenever I did stumble defending my design decision, I would receive immediate feedback on how I could get better. And I did.” After a year, Jessica was ready to leave ZURB and explore new avenues of possibility. Armed with the skills acquired through her time in the agency, she took the scary leap into freelance to search for new opportunities.

Open to Opportunity

During her time as a freelancer, Jessica wrote a blog post titled 6 Lessons from an Unemployed Designer that our founder, Deny, stumbled upon. He said,

“she was sharing thoughts that I thought were concise and succinct and could help others. It said a lot about her personality so I reached out to learn more.”

It goes to show how important it is to keep producing work even if you don’t think anyone will see it! They got to talking over coffee, and Jessica joined Whitespace’s Design Fellowship in Spring 2015.

Jessica’s choice to join the program was greatly influenced by the opportunity to expand her design community and be in touch with design leaders. Even now, years after the end of her Fellowship, Jessica is in touch with her classmates through the Whitespace Slack channel and occasionally geeks out about design during get-togethers.

During her Fellowship, Whitespace paired Jessica with Zugata, a startup focused on building the only performance management software that empowers employees. At the time Zugata only had five employees (including herself), which was perfect for Jessica.

“I was very impressed that Whitespace made my wish come true. Working on a small team enabled me to ship features out really quickly.”

Another pleasant surprise was Whitespace itself.

“I got out a lot more than I expected, because it was more interactive than I anticipated. In school, most of the feedback I received came from the professors, but in Whitespace it came from all over the place. Deny even brought in design leaders like Soleio, Tim Van Damme, and Noah Levin to provide feedback on our work.”

After Whitespace: Growing into Design Leadership

After the Fellowship , Zugata happily brought her on full-time as their Founding Designer. Today she leads their design team (which includes another Whitespace alumni!) and has carried over a lot of ideas from Whitespace that she incorporates into the daily running of her team.

A key component of her leadership style is to encourage and cultivate her team’s creativity.

One way she does this is by incorporating weekly design scrum (meetings) into their schedules. It’s a practice she carried over from Whitespace, and it gives her an opportunity to get her team’s creative juices flowing. She assigns activities that push conceptual thinking, and always tries to base the activity on what she knows they’re struggling with or could improve upon.

“At my previous company, I wasn’t really focused on developing my team members; I was mainly focused on having my team accomplish as many tasks as possible.” Now Jessica thinks more critically about questions that help her guide their learning and growth–like “how do I continue to coach and mentor designers in a way that encourages design thinking?”

They also use scrum time to touch base on what each of them is working on and to get feedback–another model that Whitespace utilizes to help their designers grow and stay connected.

When asked what she thinks of managing, Jessica said, “I like it because it’s a new challenge, and ultimately it’s rewarding to see how much impact you have on a person’s development.”

We feel the same way, Jessica! We’re happy to know you’ve found your groove, and can’t wait to see how you continue to grow.

Whitespace builds up designers and design teams through education, mentorship, and community. Receive these articles and insights through our newsletters at whitespacecrew.com