Working with Nina

my design leadership goals

This doc is an aspirational description of how I’d like to lead my teams and work toward’s my company’s mission. You, the designers on my team, are the audience. I hope this doc helps you know what I’m striving for and so you can give me feedback to help me get there. I’m interested in all ways I can raise the quality bar of my own work to serve you better.

TL;DR

I want to support you through your work and growth. I hope to be open, direct, and reliable. We’ll both make mistakes along the way and that’s ok if we reflect and grow from it. In this doc:

The Work
Meetings
Communication
About Me

You make our team and company better

I aim to work in service of our design org and product domain. To do that well, a trusting, empowering, supportive relationship between you and me is among my top priorities. I measure my success by both the outcomes from the design work and the strength and satisfaction of our team. Please use me like a coach and thought partner.

I became a manager because I care deeply about designers, our discipline, and how we collaborate with our cross-functional peers. In my career, I’ve been most effective supporting, hiring, setting context, and coaching makers to do their best work. And most importantly, I enjoy it.

Though you will make most of the decisions, ultimately I am accountable for them. I am responsible for:

• ensuring we ship great work, thoughtfully and quickly
• attracting and retaining great designers
• managing and building a successful, inclusive design team
• setting context so you can make good decisions
• seeing positive outcomes for our business and customers through design

Have fun, make mistakes, and own your work.

The Work

Health and safety first

I cannot think of one task in my entire career more important than mental, physical, and emotional health. I deeply respect and carry a strong work ethic. However, I hope to not celebrate overworking, though guilty of it sometimes. When you are sick, I will likely insist you take a sick day rather than working from home. Rest. Offline. Getting better is the best way to serve your team.

Your workplace should be safe, inclusive, and welcoming regardless of your sex, age, gender, class, color, background, abilities, beliefs, preferences, and life circumstance. If it’s not, talk with me immediately. Without this, I can’t expect you to do your best work.

I’ll help you onboard

I intend to be quite hands on during the first 90 days. We should meet, talk, and pair on tasks together more often than usual. Let’s use this time to learn about each other so I can continue setting you up for success. Observe behavior around you and ask a lot of questions.

Build relationships

We have two teams — horizontal (cross-functional) and vertical (functional). Our peers are engineering, product management, research, content strategy, data, and product marketing. Healthy cross-functional relationships are as important for executives as they are for makers.

I often feel successful when I’m aligned with my peers and set up to make decisions together, have healthy debate, and can collectively offer a diversity of approaches to get to our shared goals.

Prioritize deep work

I care deeply about the maker schedule. Seriously.

Modern tools are incentivized to distract you. You are welcome to spend some of your time unresponsive to inbound messages. Quit slack, hide notifications, or pair-design with someone when you need to focus.

Take responsibility, be reflective

I want to do what I say I will do and work to let you know when I can’t. Let me know when I get it wrong. I’ll do my best to infrequently surprise you. To build trust with me, I ask you do the same.

Meetings

1:1s are your meeting

Our one-on-one is a regular meeting for us to talk about things like what motivates you, what’s blocking you, feedback, as well as your wins, growth, and priorities. It’s my most important meeting of the week.

I’ll likely schedule at least 30-minutes weekly, longer when you’re onboarding. Freely schedule more time with me without asking first.

I find a shared doc for our 1:1 works well. You should set the agenda, though I may bring discussion points too. Great topics include how you are feeling, moments to celebrate, challenges, fears, ideas to ruminate on, or something else. “I don’t know what we should talk about” is a fine agenda item.

Design your day

If you don’t, someone will. You don’t need to attend all meetings you’re invited to. Structure your days so you get time to work in flow. I cannot expect you to be successful without this! Prioritize, experiment, and ask me for help.

Working with my calendar

I aim to be punctual for you and others. If we need more time, I prefer we schedule a follow up rather than running over the clock. My schedule sometimes looks bonkers. If you don’t see time, let me know and I’ll make some.

When exploring a problem or idea, I much prefer to think out loud and consider several options. When possible, my outcomes are often better when I can think something through, discuss with my peers, or articulate my thoughts in writing. If you need a decision on the spot, let me know.

Communication

When in doubt, Slack me

I’m generally online 9am to 5pm on weekdays.

• Slack: fastest way to get in touch with me for a semi-asynchronous short conversation. I’m online at work.
• Email: best medium to share a longer message that I may need time to digest. I check email once or twice a day, but only from my computer, and may not respond immediately. I read them all.
• Face-to-face: usually my preferred meeting type for complex, personal, or difficult topics. My calendar is up to date. Send me an invite with 1–2 sentences and any links for context.
• Video: if we are in different locations, I prefer Zoom over Google hangouts because the video quality is better. Slack calls are fine too, especially for ad-hoc meetings.
• Jira+Confluence: slowest way to communicate with me. I’m likely to drop the ball on replying here. But I’m actively getting better at this.
• SMS: use this for emergencies any time, day or night. My phone number is in my Slack profile.

You push, I’ll pull

When you help me know what you’re working on, where you’re blocked, and what you enjoy, I should be able to do a better job setting you up for success. I’m a inbox-zero-clear-all-the-badges type. So if you don’t hear back from me, that’s odd. Ping again.

Push: Send me questions or updates about your work. Slack me, email me, tag me, write comments, or schedule time together. If you wait until the work is done, you may have waited too long. I’m as interested in your process as I am the artifacts you create.

Pull: I will ask about your work in slack, email, comments, and IRL. Our roles are such that you have a deep view and I have a broad view. The more we’re in sync, the more I can help you and others connect the dots.

I’ll often ask about your decisions to learn about your thought process. Own your decisions and be willing to change direction when new information calls for it.

I tell it like it is and work to be as transparent as possible. I am comfortable giving direct, critical feedback about work and personal development. I like the Situation, Behavior, Impact framework for both giving and receiving feedback. In the beginning, I am likely to be more diplomatic while we are building our relationship.

Social Media

I’m fairly active on social media. You are invited and welcome to follow me on any and channels, especially those that are public. However, it is in no way required or expected by me. If you follow me but prefer I do not follow back, that’s completely fine. Please let me know. However, my personal instagram account is private. I follow some coworkers but have a policy on not opening my account to direct reports.

Leaving the company

Birthday parties are fun surprises. Two-week notices are not. I hope you and I work at this company for a long time. But some day you’ll move onto a new venture and change jobs. Let’s work on that together.

I want you to be the happiest you can be. If you’re unsatisfied at work or need something different, be open with me. I might know about an opportunity inside the company that’s not posted yet. If not, I can use my network to help you find something new. But I need more than two weeks. I am still in touch with most of my direct reports from previous jobs and I hope the same for us.

About me

Design as a career snuck up on me. I started by learning HTML and Photoshop to style my online journal (before there was a thing called blogs). My first design job was doing layout at a newspaper, in fact it was Gannett’s second largest newspaper after the USA Today. I was laid off during the crash and quickly took whatever work I could find: organizing photos at the Kinsey Institute, pouring wine at a winery, and doing graphic design projects.

My career transitioned to tech after getting a master’s in HCI at Indiana University. I did consecutive contract-to-full times, including at a translation startup in Tokyo, until landing a my first fulltime ux design job at Twilio in San Francisco. From there I joined Pivotal Labs where I developed a depth of design experience, perspective on how to work, and the opportunity to scale the practice worldwide and launching our office in Berlin. I briefly retunred to being an IC at Stripe where I wanted to learn from the company’s design practitioners and leaders. I then returned to management when I moved to New York and joined Mailchimp. There I built out the design practice in Brooklyn working on integrations, design systems, developer tools and docs, and our Transactional Email API. Now I’m at Faire 💜.

I moved to Brooklyn in 2018 after about a decade in San Francisco. I’ve also had short and long projects working in Berlin (12 months), Tokyo (3 months), and London (6 months). Most of my family is in Chicago but a few are down the street in the Lower East Side.

I’ve had some wackadoo hobbies like visuals in nightclubs, putting on music tech conferences, working in a winery, teaching friends to Konmari, and Burning Man sewing projects, reading tarot cards, and making music in Ableton. I’m snobby about house and techno, yoga, and Taco Bell. I daydream about nature trails, remote James Turrell exhibits and writing a book someday.

Pet Peeves

• Lorem ipsum in mockups is unfinished work. Copy is part of the design.
• Names of friends, coworkers, or celebrities in mockups is distracting and unprofessional. Make your work realistic and base as much of your work as possible on real data.
• Title case text everywhere is hard to skim.
• Long line lengths, small font sizes, and centered paragraph text usually hurts legibility.
• Be accountable. Be on time. Let people know when you cannot meet your commitment or will be late.
• Saying ‘hello’ in chat without more context is disrespectful.

I like this joke 🌭

A Zen master visiting New York City goes up to a hot dog vendor and says, “Make me one with everything.”

The hot dog vendor fixes a hot dog and hands it to the Zen master, who pays with a $20 bill. The vendor puts the bill in the cash box and closes it. “Excuse me, but where’s my change?” asks the Zen master.

The vendor responds, “Change must come from within.”

Thank you

Sarah Milstein, Marc Hedlund, David Zhou, Perri Lapidus, Gloria Lin, Stephan Hagemann, David Randall, Annie Steele, Leslie Yang, Jason Joseph, and Chelsea Otakan.