Community and Learning at theCOOP
The following is a follow-up to a previous post, Shared Understanding is the Currency of Lean UX.
Landing a job after attending a bootcamp is no easy feat. Even if you’re lucky and have a strategy down, the job search can take months.
This is where theCOOP comes in. theCOOP is an accelerator for recent bootcamps grads in design and engineering that aims to provide experience, resources, mentorship, and more to help speed up the job search. In short, theCOOP is a community, one full of learning and collaboration.
The consistency and support of this community have proven essential as we all navigate the job search together.
Design at theCOOP
We are a small and mighty remote team of 15 designers and engineers, and growing, that meet from 11 am — 3 pm ET on weekdays via Zoom. We start off the day with a daily team stand-up that leads to individual design and engineering stand-ups.
After stand-ups, designers dedicate one hour to learn about and brush up on design-related topics; we call this incubation hour.
Since collaboration and learning are key, on Mondays this incubation hour is dedicated to a UI design challenge done as a team. On Tuesdays, we focus on a general design challenge.
My favorite team exercise: Lighting Talks, happen on Fridays, where one engineer and one designer give a 5-minute presentation on a topic of choice in their respective disciplines. This is followed by a Q&A; per protocol, when a designer presents, engineers are tasked with asking questions and vice versa.
Sprinkled through the week, we have workshops, guest speakers, and of course, time to collaborate and work on our individual projects, which are completed in 2-week sprints.
All of this happens in community. We are consistently learning from each other and with each other. Rare is the day when I have not learned something new from one of my colleagues at theCOOP. Our Slack community lends itself well to the back and forth of resource sharing; and as a design team, our repository of design-related resources is constantly expanding.
The First Month
My first month at theCOOP has been amazing and that can be traced back to the onboarding. On my first day, I, along with three new COOPers, was given an onboarding plan for the month. During the first 2 weeks, we spent time incubating or learning about assigned design practices that designers at theCOOP deem essential and doing design challenges in Figma with different core members of the design team.
We also made time to get to know existing members, engineers and designers, via 1:1s.
During the second week, we were tasked with researching and writing a Medium article on a topic thoughtfully suggested by Caitlin, the core designer who led our onboarding.
In our 3rd week, we were given individual briefs with the goal of contributing to one of three in-house products at theCOOP, with this continuing into week 4. One of the new COOPers and I were paired up with a more tenured designer to kick off UX research content for t.ux, a UX learning platform. t.ux is one of the three in-house products engineers and designers contribute to at theCOOP.
Currently, my cohort of four is focusing week 5 on revamping our respective portfolios.
The first month at theCOOP flew by, I learned an immense amount from my cohort as well as the more tenured engineers and designers. Most importantly, I found myself welcomed into a team of super smart and humble designers and gained a bit more clarity as to what type of designer I want to be.
