Design Impact in Product Design, UX, and Life.

Design Thinking in Leadership

Happy October, it's decorative gourd season, mkers! 🎃 As we ring in the last quarter of the year, change is in the air. With the arrival of cooler weather and ubiquitous pumpkin spice, this past week felt unusually long. Reorg & Awareness Last week's experience with reorganization left me feeling both anxious

Life

Courage through adversity

After 2 months of fluctuations with prioritization, leadership decided to re-org teams. This meant teams went from semi-centralized product teams to a decentralized model under engineering. One of the best people I've worked with in the last 2.5 years will be reporting to a different leader with a role

Personal

Reflecting on writing a newsletter for 6 months

💌 I started this newsletter 6 months ago in March 2023. I sent my first email to 11 friends who subscribed to my new project. I didn't know where this would go, with no plan for acquiring new readers or content for what I'd write. I managed to come up with

Frameworks

Time Management: Start with "No"

I was awarded August's 1% (out of 15K) Super Mentor and Top 10 Female Mentor on ADP for User Experience. Year-to-date, I've conducted 2,465 hours (~3.3 months), dedicating a quarter of the year to helping others. Mentoring others brought me back to life by filling my empty heart

Writing

How to get buy-in on your ideas?

I'm writing this post from JFK airport, on my way to Detroit for 3 days. I'll be speaking with leadership about pragmatic implementation of Q2 strategy. During this trip, I'm seeking sponsorship and buy-in towards my vision for the future. Writing a “1 pager” is a critical piece for me

Leadership

Design Leadership: The Challenges of Leading Change

I gained 2 email followers! Hello! :) My reader count is in the low 30s, but my engagement rate is 75-95%, signaling you like my content. This past week I picked up a book a mentee launched on Amazon, The Minimalist Career Changer. Reading about his story of changing career from

Career Growth

Leveling up to Senior Designer

How do I become a Senior Designer? The majority of the people who ask believe they perform at a Senior level with 2-3 years of experience. so... What do you call a designer who has been working for almost 20 years? Dinosaur Designer? 🦖🧑🏻‍🎨 Junior vs Senior - Process Junior vs

Personal

June ‘23 Reflections: Config, Authenticity, and Kardashians

How is your Sunday? From my last update in June, I had an intense month of May and decided to take a break from posting weekly. I'm happy I slowed things down. I went to physical therapy and found out I have a frozen shoulder! 🥶 I have a 6-week plan

Communication

Navigating Disagreements and Commitment for Designers

Thank you for your patience while I took a 1-month hiatus from posting weekly. It wasn't planned at all, the last 4 weeks have been an overload and I didn't have the mental/physical capacity to write on my downtime. Highlights: 1. Got Club Suite seats for Taylor Swift's Eras

Burnout

Pitching Proposals and Cognitive Overload

This past week, I had the biggest personal win in the last 2 years at Amazon. I presented a 12-page proposal to 7 directors proposing to shift the organization from Engineering to UX/Product. Given the leadership team are SDMs, it's a long shot at the moon. I reached a

Design

3 Problems with Design Executions

Everybody was out of the office last week, and I noticed common themes with executing designs in the short, mid, and long term that I'd like to share... first some context... 🙈What is "design is not good?" 1. When the users of the design say, it's not good. (Obvious? 😳) 2.

Promotion

10 Tips on Getting a Promotion

If you attended my session on Developing a Career Strategy on ADP last Saturday, thank you. It was a great turnout. I learned a lot from the questions; they gave me ideas for iterating upon my content. A nice bonus was making new connections, even with people who couldn't make

Career Growth

Developing a Career Strategy Talk on April 8, 1PM

I'm doing a 45 min talk on ADPList where I will share my experience developing a career strategy. This session is not about troubleshooting Jobs but an overview of how to frame impact effectively. I'm taking one of the posts I've written a few weeks back and presenting the content

Event

Adobe Firefly, Tech Layoffs, and Career Strategy Workshop

Last week, Adobe released its ethical AI art, Firefly, by training its ML on licensed content from Adobe Stock. I was invited to their beta group and played with the format several times before the release. Besides text-to-image, new features such as text effects and recoloring vectors were introduced. New

Communication

The Power of Influence: Key Strategies for Building Trust and Consensus

In the first three months at Amazon, I worked to align and build consensus with stakeholders from two organizations toward a single system. After I presented facts and figures to leadership, I thought the direction would be resolved. It became a 6-month hot debate. All the options were difficult to

Frameworks

Career & Life Strategy

Three cool things I discovered this week, Kokedama, Geisha Coffee, and Flux keyboard. First, I found a shop in Williamsburg with mini bonsai wrapped in moss called Kokedama. I'm obsessed with the simplicity but not confident in keeping it alive. Second, I was introduced to Geisha, a fancy coffee bean

Mental Model

Mental Model: Process over Outcome with Mechanisms

Last week, designers celebrated my promotion at Little Spain at Hudson Yards. I bought everybody churros and ice cream.🍦Last year, I pushed back against promotions by focusing on my health. It is hard for me to voice how deeply sad and disappointed I was about my choice. I kept

Communication

5 Reasons Why Designers Don’t Need to Write

Last weekend, I reflected on my career and had an epiphany. Years ago, I was stuck and stagnant as an art director. I needed to gain skills to become a C-level executive. I had no idea how to break through the glass ceiling. “… along this journey, I’ve lost my

Introduction

Who is FAANG boss?

FAANG Boss [ Facebook / Apple / Amazon / Netflix / Google baws] An expert at management in a corporate environment. A friend and I were exchanging painful stories being in corporate culture. In a moment of breakthrough, she screamed, "FAANG BBBBBOOOOOSSS"! 🫡 We laughed for 5 minutes and envisioned merchandise with the word "IMPACT" all