Meet the person behind the Zendesk Design team’s Tools and Systems

Zendesk Design
Zendesk Design
Published in
9 min readDec 5, 2022

The wizard isn’t behind the curtain when it comes to our creative and design team’s software tools and information systems. In fact, Brandon Perry, Senior Design Program Manager, Tools and Systems, makes it a point to bring others in to ensure the tools available to our design team are both inclusive and effective. And while he’s a one-man show, he’s at a point in his career where he wants to ensure others see the opportunities he’s found along the way. Check out his story about creating a career in digital asset management and design operations and finding opportunities, like attending AfroTech this year, to share that journey with others.

How are you supporting the design team as a program manager at Zendesk?

My role is being a design program manager for certain areas that support the design team: tools and systems, whether they’re strategic, tactical, day-to-day, you name it in terms of managing, owning, investing in, and growing our software tools and the information systems that the designers, researchers, and all the other people in the global design team use on a regular basis. I’m here to help them with having the right tools to do their jobs.

You said you were easily able to find information that made you feel prepared to ask the right questions for your interview at Zendesk. Was there any one thing that made the decision to join Zendesk a definite yes?

What convinced me to join Zendesk was that I just really loved my interview process. I spoke with people that ended up being my direct and indirect leadership management team and some of my closest partners that I still have great relationships with today. That was just a great experience, and ever since I came here my role has continued to grow and change because the business asked for it. I started as the sole owner of just the DAM [digital asset management system] or Brandland as we call it, and now it’s the DAM and 40 other tools, including Figma.

You came to Zendesk from the gaming industry. Tell us a bit more about your career path. How does one get into digital asset management?

Before any of this started, I was on track to becoming a librarian. I’m classically trained as a public or academic librarian, and I have a master’s degree in library information science. At the last public library I worked at, my mentor at the time told me about this idea called digital asset management. She said, you know you can do this library stuff in a corporate environment or do librarian work with content that you actually care about a little bit more.

I’m a born and bred gamer. I love video games. I owe so much of my life to video games and just having been able to transition from working in libraries to working in the video game industry doing digital asset management at the time was a massive shift in my trajectory. It changed everything for me, and what I learned is that our careers are very long, and we can find ourselves reinventing our careers and ourselves and doing things that we never thought were possible. When I came to Zendesk in the tailend of 2020, I was coming from the gaming industry and specifically looking to continue in digital asset management.

Amongst more than 40 other tools, you are the administrator of Figma, and that’s become a very popular tool at Zendesk. What’s the biggest challenge with this tool?

We’ve had Figma since 2021 and recently deployed the enterprise level of that tool, which was brand new at the time. Whether you’re doing design work or brainstorming and ideating with FigJam, it can all be done with a single tool so that was a huge win for us. It just makes design so easy, which means everyone wants a piece of it. One of the challenges that I have to field all the time is folks wanting a tool in the system and the program to grow faster than what is reasonably possible. So there are financial concerns. There are process concerns. There are day-to-day concerns, like what is the impact of onboarding a team of 200 people across different time zones? We have to just figure out ways of breaking up that work into something that’s manageable for us. Rome is never built in a day. It’s piece by piece.

How do you address the challenges around popular tools like this in a way that reflects our core values as an organization?

Launching FigJam is still one of my biggest accomplishments at Zendesk, but it couldn’t have been done without a governance team behind me. That governance team protected me from stuff that was really disruptive but also helped elevate the importance of this work and get leadership buy-in. Once we launched Figma, I established the governance team. So not only was it me, but there were other producers, other designers and leadership that were involved and had visibility.

How do your manager and the leaders you work with here support you to do your best work and be the best version of yourself?

I’ve been at Zendesk for two years, and one of my barometers for measuring whether a workplace is going to help me flourish and simultaneously enjoy the work is evaluating whether I get the support I need when I ask for it. Instead of the answer always being you’re going to have to work harder or longer or take your laptop with you on vacation, I feel like my time and expertise is truly respected here. Anytime that I’ve been given a directive or a request to look into something or figure something out, if I find the project to be a little bit more challenging or more of an investment than that leader thought it would, I say so–and they almost always agree. When you’re treated like a subject matter expert, you can then partner to either overcome that challenge with more resources or reevaluate the need. Being a partner to senior leadership in the creative and design team has been great as opposed to just someone that’s doing the work and not able to speak. That’s been really great here, and I’ve only gotten that at Zendesk.

As part of our digital first policy, Zendesk offers fully flexible roles for almost all full-time employees. How have you enjoyed the flexibility of digital first?

One of the things I really like about Zendesk is the digital first policy, and we all embody that. I was not in the cohort that started in the office and had to migrate home and figure that out, so working away from the office and away from people but always being connected to them digitally has been the norm for me. One of the experiments I tend to run is seeing if I can take a trip and find a local WeWork and still be effective, and every single time I’ve done that, it’s worked. Sometimes that means that I could be three hours ahead of my main team, but that just gives me three hours to work with the folks that I wouldn’t be interacting with as much in general. We can be effective anywhere we have an internet connection.

You attended AfroTech with a group of Zendesk employees in November this year. Why did you want to go?

I wanted to do my part in being visible and being present towards just showing and demonstrating that whether you’re a soon to be college graduate, established in your career and looking to make a transition to tech, or just considering a career with Zendesk, I’m doing pretty good and so is the rest of my team. And thinking back to when I was looking for a role, it’s hard to see people at companies unless they’re giving talks and doing a lot of the speaking circuits where they have built-in visibility. So going to a conference is a different way of being physically present.

I’m at the point in my career where I have to make decisions about whether I want to allocate a little bit of time to being seen and sparking interest in somebody, or just being there to just have casual conversations like this with people because that’s just as important–and I want to make that more important. I want them to see what they can turn into. I want them to see that what I’m doing is possible, and what I will be doing later is possible, and they should add that to their list of what they can do, what they can be, and what that can look like.

You shared a mentor who spurred your transition from being a librarian to working in digital asset management. Is there anything else that has influenced your career, whether it’s the decision to pursue this particular type of work or your career growth?

One influential aspect of my career so far is having really great leadership. I think it’s underestimated, that is, the importance of really good leaders that understand what we want to do and figure out ways of helping us grow. A good leader can help us and save us from ourselves sometimes, and can demonstrate what good culture and what good performance looks like. So if there’s a bad apple on the team, or if there’s someone or something that’s really painful or damaging, a good manager can purify things that are not going very well, and I’ve experienced that so many times here at Zendesk. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve chosen to stay here and want to be here for as long as I can.

Inclusivity is one of our core values. How do you build inclusivity into tooling?

Tooling requires a diverse set of experiences and a different set of viewpoints and places on the chessboard, so to speak. And as a program manager, one of your core roles is making sure you are operating the train in a way that gets everyone to the finish line. I mainly do this through governance. I make sure that I have a diverse set of roles that are working with me on identifying the challenges that we’re currently facing with this tool and the potential solutions. Then, I task the development or execution of those solutions with my governance team, who have a variety of roles and perspectives to keep us honest.

And we make sure if there’s a perspective that is missing, then we pull this person in, consult with this person, or make sure we’re checking in with this team because they can fill that gap and make sure we’re building solutions that are based on the feedback that people are asking for and also make sure that we’re not missing something that’s glaring. I know enough to know that I don’t know everything.

Do you have any career advice for people reading this?

Always be curious. In my opinion, it is the most important factor to have when going through life and your career. By remaining curious, you can resist the urge to shut down, sell yourself short, or make the assumption that you’re not capable. We’re all capable, and I want to make sure that anyone that looks at Zendesk and sees that capability within themselves and uses that spark to blaze a career path that excites them.

Interested in careers at Zendesk after reading Brandon’s story? Visit our career site to join our community and receive more stories like this, as well as personalized job alerts.

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Zendesk Design
Zendesk Design

Published in Zendesk Design

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