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
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 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
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
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.
