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 and a more
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” organizations. I probably
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 a specific outcome
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 develop empathy, we
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 operate. Different environments
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 to facilitate ongoing
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 what leadership might
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 single style of
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 Washington (Go Huskies!
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 level of work
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 environment of genuine
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 the cost of
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 of a transformation
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 right decisions at
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, individual contributors, and
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. I often talk
Thoughts Our rating system: 6 o'clock to 12 o'clock I am hoping you've used an analog watch before. Otherwise, you'll have to know how that works before you continue reading. In my team, we use a 6 o'clock to 12 o'clock rating
Management Leaders are great at one of three: Vision, Operations, or Coaching I ran into a tweet the other day that said most leaders are generally great at one of three things: vision, operations, or coaching. Few leaders are great at two, and you can
Design Have you talked to your non-customers lately? Last week, I was reading a report about Netflix's new revelation that one of its biggest competitors is not HBO, it's Fortnite. This was a bit strange to think about at first. Fortnite
Leadership Delegating work One of the hardest skills to learn as a new manager moving from an individual contributor (IC) role is how to delegate. How to use the power of a team to achieve more.
Learning by interviewing Over the past few months, the VMware Design team continues to grow rapidly. This meant that a good portion of my time over the past few months has been dedicated to interviewing. With
Thoughts Recipe for a more productive and inclusive meeting Like with most organizations, meetings is a part of the daily work experience at VMware. Being the extrovert that I am, experiences with meetings are generally pleasant. It mostly depends on what we
Thoughts Writing more Over the last few years, I've tried on many occasions to get more disciplined about writing. My goal has been to simply put my thoughts on paper, practice public writing more, and to focus my thoughts on the most important learnings.
