How Designers Turn Into Design Leaders

It often starts the way it did for LaiYee Ho and Nick Stamas.

LaiYee, a UX designer, and others on her team at the home automation company Wink were frustrated by what they didn’t know about their users. She put together a guerrilla effort, with no budget, to visit people’s homes. She brought engineers with her.

“When we brought engineers into the home with us,” LaiYee told us, “it was the first time we were able to see firsthand how the customer was really using it in the environmental context. What did the homes look like of the people that were using our product? Who were the other people that were interacting with it?”

From these trips, LaiYee and her team discovered users of their products the team never knew existed. Those newly revealed users became the focus of new product development, and the Wink team saw substantially increased product adoption as a result.

By taking the engineers into their customer’s homes in a no-budget guerrilla effort, LaiYee became a design leader at Wink. That got her promoted to become Wink’s Head of Research.

Nick’s story is a little different from LaiYee’s. When Nick arrived at WeWork as a Creative Lead for their internal tools group, he found there had been little UX design on the products he was looking to support. (This wasn’t a…