Valuable Lessons From My Internship at Wish

Since late August, I’ve had the privilege of working as a product design intern on Wish’s Platform team. From pushing pixel-perfect mockups on Sketch to communicating design rationale to stakeholders, I’ve learned a myriad of valuable lessons at my role this fall. Here are my top six:

1. Ask for the projects you want.

Early on, my manager and I scheduled weekly one-on-one meetings to offer a space to reflect on my goals, progress, and performance. During these intimate conversations, I’ve voiced my interests in certain projects by proposing ideas for specific areas of work I wanted to dabble in. Personally, a topic I particularly wanted to learn more about was sculpting design systems — a skill university courses had given me little to no insight into.

As a result, I had the opportunity to help flesh out our current pattern library. I observed where inconsistencies lied in past features, defined guidelines and visual aesthetics for new components, and dove headfirst into the codebase to engineer elements into our digital collection. Once it was built, I had the chance to present the updated design system in a team meeting. I explained why having a design system is important, where to access it internally, how engineers could start using the components in their projects, and the value of a communicative culture where engineers propose components to add.