👋 My Name Is Jehad

Scaling design teams and design recruiting

One of the most challenging roles a design leader plays is scaling a team. The way you get to help shape the culture and execution of dozens or hundreds of people is one of the most rewarding things you can do. As part of that, one of the most important

Design

The shift to subscriptions and its impact on enterprise design teams

Today, in every enterprise company, there is a discussion about the shift to a Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model and the shift toward a subscription revenue model. Those two discussions are critical for design teams to understand and to use as a way to help drive a better

Leadership

It's time for my next chapter

Earlier this week, I shared with my team that I’ll be leaving VMware at the end of February to pursue a new opportunity outside of VMware. It’s been quite a week ... VMware has been my professional home for close to a decade. Leading the design team at VMware

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, there is a need to have this resourcing conversation with the engineering team because their ability to deliver is critical

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 their ability to build trust, get better alignment, or drive faster decision making, I always ask if they have regular

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 how efficient that organization is overall. If you combine the velocity of decision making with the clarity and accountability required

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 and won’t even try to open it. The point of the study was trying to highlight is how artificial

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 have felt at some point in their career, especially early in leadership journey, that their experience as a leader is

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 become a ritual for me and a ritual that is both satisfying and pays dividends in my relationships across the

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 on near-silent since we’ve already memorized the episodes. Solving puzzles is the perfect activity to create enough of a

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 you prepare your content, but they don’t offer a simple format to articulate that content well. Over the last

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 reasons why companies have so many products targeting similar personas with slightly different features and levels of quality. However, much

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 inclusive culture. A few years ago, I read an email that is supposedly sent by Elon Musk

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 hear this once a week in an interview, a conversation with a design leader, or a coffee

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 that a specific persona, or set of personas, want to achieve. In a big company, specifically, end

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 spend hours with our customers in their environments to understand the pressures they’re under, the pain

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 require different styles of management at different times. Different people have different personalities and imposing a single

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 conversations between a product designer and their manager about achievements, motivations, blockers/constraints, and development opportunities. These

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 want the culture to be. For example, although the leadership team might want an open and inclusive

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 presentation is best for all contexts, audiences, and environments. That said, I have learned a few tips

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!) and worked as a front-end engineer within VMware before co-founding Clarity and then leading design for the

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 she’s been handed and is trying to figure out how to manage it. As we went

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 focus on our customers, even when our opinions differ. In enterprise design, we’re transitioning design as

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 fixing the accessibility defects. It’s not the cost to those affected by our software’s inability

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 would tell you that the most important part of a transformation is people. How you transform the