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
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 [https://www.cs.washington.edu/] (Go Huskies!) and worked as a front-end engineer within VMware before co-founding Clarity [http:
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
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
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 the right time. Without a way to predict every single user scenario, providing context becomes a key
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 [https://clarity.design/], VMware's first design system. Today, it's one of the most successful open source design systems [https://github.com/vmware/clarity/stargazers] out there. I often talk to design leaders across
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 system with half an hour increments. In easy terms,
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 [https://www.seattletimes.com/business/netflix-sees-fortnite-as-a-bigger-rival-than-hbo/] . This was a bit strange to think about at first. Fortnite is a video game not a streaming
