Management Your guide to resourcing discussions as a design manager Budgeting and resourcing discussions are difficult conversations for most design managers. It’s hard for multiple reasons. First, nobody really prepares you for it. With engineering management, as an example,
Do your 1:1s If you’re a people manager, structuring and keeping your one on one meetings with your direct staff is critical in so many different ways. Whenever any manager complains about
Management Using a decision making framework: a deep dive into RAPID® I’ve been thinking a lot about operational efficiency and how to build more efficient organizations lately. The velocity of decision making in an organization is at the core of
Thoughts Don’t assume all closed doors are locked I once read a study that said if you close a room’s door without locking it and then ask people to go into that room, most people get stuck
Leadership The lonely leader and compassion fatigue Over the years, a common theme I’ve seen leaders across the industry talk about is the phenomenon of the lonely leader. Most leaders I talk to either feel or
Thoughts The surprising impact of sending thank you notes Every week, I spend fifteen to thirty minutes sending thank you notes. I send them to members of my team, the larger cross-functional teams, and others across the organization. It's
Thoughts Embrace the uncertainty Lately, I’ve been enjoying jigsaw puzzles. Working on puzzles has been a relaxing activity for my wife and I to do together with The Office running in the background
Leadership Making the case to decision makers: the presentation format to follow I wrote before about the five questions you should be asking yourself before putting together a presentation. These questions should offer guidance on what you need to think about as
Design The single pane of glass or the single glass of pain One of the biggest user experience and product strategy challenges in large companies is the proliferation of products and services that try to address the same needs. There are many
Thoughts I hate acronyms With dozens of new designers joining our team over the past few months, acronyms have been one of my enemies in making sure we’re building an easy on-boarding process
Design Design-led vs experience-led and why it matters Over the last few years, as more organizations started accelerating their investment in design teams, many design leaders have been advocating to move from engineering or product management-led to “design-led”
Design Keep asking the "basic" user experience questions Over the last few months, we’ve been focusing a lot of our work on ensuring we’re telling end to end stories. These end to end stories focus on
Leadership Empathy at work In design, we often call out empathy as one of the core skills a designer needs to have in order to deeply understand their customers and hands on users. To
Management The five elements to good management: ask, listen, take action, empower, and follow up There isn’t one magic recipe for management. There are many of recipes. The challenge with giving advise to managers, especially in design, is the changing environment in which managers
Design Building our product design career development framework Note that this article focuses on our individual contributor career development framework. With a fast-growing team, building a robust career framework becomes a necessity. The goal of our framework is
Leadership Building psychological safety into the core of a team’s culture One of the most important aspects of any team is its culture. When teams grow, culture is generally a representation of what people believe the culture to be instead of
Thoughts Few questions to ask before preparing your next work presentation Over the past few years, I’ve been spending a bigger portion of my time either presenting or listening to presentations. The topics of these presentations are different and no
Design Find the strengths in people’s unique backgrounds Before leading design at VMware, I was an engineer. I guess I am still an engineer in addition to being a designer. I studied computer science at the University of
Leadership Productivity, not activity. How I try to ensure I am focusing on the right priorities. A few months ago, I had a conversation with a designer on my team about managing her work. She was subtly hinting to me that she’s overwhelmed with the
Design Have an opinion and earn your “seat at the table” I spend a lot of time on cross-collaboration with product managers, engineers, and designers working together to deliver the best experience possible to our customers. Overall, it’s a healthy
Shifting the mindset on accessibility in design In the software industry, much of the discussion around accessibility is around compliance and cost. When we talk cost, we’re referring to the actual dollars we’re losing or
Design Building your team's skills matrix A couple of years ago, we began a movement to transform design at VMware and with it, transform VMware itself into an experience-led company. Anybody who’s been a part
Design Lead with context In design, context is key. When we design workflows and products, especially complex ones, we focus on providing the necessary context to users in order to help them make the
Management Ask for your next promotion This article will probably land a few more emails in my inbox over the coming weeks and months, but here we go. The more conversations I have with design leaders,
Design Building a design system in an engineering-driven company: a few lessons learned Few years ago, a very small team of engineers and designers built Clarity, VMware's first design system. Today, it's one of the most successful open source design systems out there.
