A day raising the bar as a Principal Designer
Interested in taking our expert career track? Principal Designer at Zalando Lounge, Kaan Lutfi Caglar, lets us in on his typical workday.
My working day usually starts the night before. I take a few minutes to look at the day ahead, prepare for meetings, plan enough breaks in the day, as well as some quality hands-on time to deliver what’s needed.
7am: I get up quite early and like to go for a walk or a run. A big burst of fresh air first thing is the best way to get my mind clear and ready for the day.
9am: My day starts officially with checking emails and messages and — as it’s a Monday– setting targets for the week ahead. What am I trying to achieve this week? Where should my focus be today? How can I be most helpful to my project teams? I update my targets as the week goes on and check the board I’ve created every morning to make sure I’m on track.
10am: The first big meeting is my weekly check-in for Personal Relevance, one of the ‘opportunity areas’ that I’m currently responsible for as a Principal Designer. I’m part of the Lounge team, and Personal Relevance focuses on creating experiences that are more tailored to individual customers. For those who don’t know, Lounge is a shopping club for Zalando customers, where we sell fashion and home goods at a discounted price. It’s got a very strong and growing following among our customers who love fashion, and love a bargain. It has a ‘treasure hunt’ aspect for its devotees, who can capture exclusive deals every day.
Today’s meeting involves a cross-functional squad made up of user research, product design, product management, analytics, data science, and engineering. We have so many sales and products that go live on any given day, and our goal is to provide customers with the most relevant presentation and navigation, based on their preferences, gender, current needs, and previous behavior on the platform.
On this project I not only work on design for the final product, but am designing our ways of working as a team — planning and scoping design processes along the full product development cycle. As a senior leader supporting teams, I lead and steer projects from inception to execution with design, engineering and product leaders. I collaborate with product managers at a top level, driving strategy together, solving business problems with the ultimate aim of delighting our customers. But more generally, I aim to act as a bar raiser by regularly participating in design reviews.
1pm: Time for lunch! Zalando encourages transparency, so I have a lunch blocker in my calendar that is viewable by everyone. This avoids getting meeting invites during that time, and it also serves as a reminder to myself to eat more healthily! I attended a Mental Health Day at Zalando recently, and a big theme was the importance of nutrition for both mind and body. Since then I’ve been giving my food more attention — making sure that I schedule in a time to eat (but also stocking up on jars of nuts and dried fruit for brain food to graze on during the day).
2pm: I squeeze in some hands-on design work between meetings. One of the big deliverables this month is a solution design document, again for the Personal Relevance opportunity area. It’s a standard step for the Product Development Process we have at Zalando. The project team needs to provide a detailed design solution, working backwards from the end-user experience and business impact, and getting stakeholder buy-in. As a Principal my role is to act as a bar raiser on the quality of the design solution and to support our dedicated Product Designer, Christine. In practical terms, that means looking at designs, attending walkthroughs and leaving feedback for the team on a regular basis. As we are nearing the design review date, I am taking some time today to review the updates on the most recent version.
4pm: My last big meeting today is dedicated to Communication and Rituals: something I feel very passionate about. Lounge has been scaling quite rapidly over the last few years, and has undergone a lot of changes. Which means team members have sometimes found themselves in a structure and environment with unfamiliar ways of working and communicating. So I’m involved in a workstream to address that, developing new tools and rituals to get the best out of everyone and support each other as we grow and adapt to new environments. It’s an opportunity to reflect and look around, and ensure our own ways of working uphold best practices from within the tech industry, but also across the various teams we bring together.
5.30pm. Talking of rituals, here’s one I like to observe at the end of every working day (having planned and prepared for tomorrow, of course). Remote working has started to blur the boundaries between work and home, so to mark the transition from my deskspace to my homespace I turn to music. I’m an avid vinyl collector and amateur DJ, and today I wrap up a busy working day with a little celebration DJ set. Starting with some stomping soul and disco, I move through to a more ambient and triphoppy vibe.
The perfect way to transition to relaxation at the end of a pretty intensive day.
