Archive

Twitter is shutting Revue down so I migrated my newsletter to buttondown. Some of the older posts may be broken in formatting, but I don't plan to go and fix them anytime soon.

We've been working on a design system at Jiva and I got some time in the last month to go through the Figma Schema conf talks and a few stood out to me [Disclosure: I've not watched them all].

Influence is crucial for success

I came across this podcast thanks to the LeadingConf newsletter. It was refreshing to hear from Katrina about the realities of being a design executive at the GM level. There are so many reasons to revisit this podcast and I’m glad that there is a transcript attached. One of the key takeaways for me was the quote by Katrina below:

It reminds you that your work is not done and that design leadership is still new in the industry and needs to find its space. Here’s to more design leaders making it to the GM level and taking strides in exploring how design can provide value

Sustaining yourself as a design executive – Katrina Alcorn, GM IBM Design

In this episode, Katrina Alcorn, General Manager for IBM Design, joins Peter and Jesse to uncover various aspects of being a design executive, including where to spend your time and energy, how to maintain culture and cohesion at scale, and the importance of showing compassion for yourself.

findingourway.design

Hardik writes about what it means to be a design leader at a fast growing Indian startup.

This newsletter had been sitting in the drafts for a few weeks now. Though a bit dated, I decided to send it out today. Hoping to get back to regular posting again.

Salaries are often the most confidential parts of professional life. The first time I heard about salary transparency, it was way back in 2013, when Buffer talked about their formula and all the employee salaries publicly.

This year, Frappe, a company that I have admired since their publicly accessible demo of ERPNext way back in 2014-2015 showed me that world class B2B software can be built in India, implemented the ‘Pick your own pay’ policy. The write-up below shows how Frappe went about the process of implementing it.

Choosing your own pay, how does this work?

A step-by-step guide on how to implement pick your own pay in your company.

frappe.io

In the last 2 weeks, the topic of design compensation resurfaced so I thought that I would share some of the articles I reference when it comes to design compensation.

I attended the Pave design compensation webinar last week. The conversation majorly revolved around how to approach compensation as a candidate. Panelists shared stories from their experiences which was great to listen to.

My takeaways from the conversation were:

1. For freelancers/contractors/consultants, adding a point in your contract stating that you revise your billing rate every year helps from being under compensated for long term projects
2. Be open about your compensation and the negotiation with friends who you can trust
3. Even if you love the people you work with, if they can’t pay you.. you got to move

I started this newsletter on the 7th of March last year and I have somehow managed to post 18 newsletters irregularly and grown to 32 subscribers.

Thanks for the support and here’s to another year 🥂

Pave is a company on a mission to make the black box of compensation transparent and fair for everyone in the ecosystem. What I’ve linked to is part two in a three part blog series where they talk about what they kept in mind while they scaled the team to a 100 employees. A lot of stuff they spoke about reminded me of doing things that don’t scale and using that as a foundation to build the company on.

They have an upcoming panel discussion about design compensation that you can sign up for here.

I’m new to Figma and one of the things we are trying to figure out at Jiva is to understand how companies use Figma in their workflow. I’ve not found many articles about this and I’m learning by talking to friends. These two articles by the design agency Clay shows how they organize files and what deliverable they provide.

How To Organize Files In A Design Agency - Clay

How To Organize Files In A Design Agency.

clay.global

UX Design Deliverables from a Silicon Valley Agency - Clay

An overview of common deliverables provided by a UI/UX design agency.

clay.global

Kritika has been writing detailed guides complete with scripts and email templates. This is a great guide, if you are just getting started into doing remote research.

Couple of weeks ago, I took part (as a speaker) in my first Twitter space. Hosted by Obvious, It had a few senior design folks talking about hiring designers and what they look out in designer portfolios. You can read a summary of what we discussed at the link below.

Creating a stand-out portfolio: Advice from design leaders - Obvious

Applying to a design role or revamping your portfolio? Here are some tried-and-tested tips from design heavyweights at Obvious, Razorpay, Jiva, and smallcase.

obvious.in

It’s delightful to see a blogpost from someone who has spent so much time working as a designer in the industry. Catt’s public case studies are good references for IC designers looking to build their portfolio.

4 lessons from my dozen-year design career - The Catt Suite

It’s been 12 years since I first became a Junior Web Designer. Here are four things I learned!

cattsmall.com

It’s been two three weeks since I joined Jiva.Ag to work on their products as a senior design manager. Given that I have zero idea about the agriculture domain, I’m excited to have this opportunity of working with this talented team working in this space. 

Onwards…

I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months – Ben Adam

Reflections on working at Amazon, the interview process, the organizational structure, and why it was not an ideal fit for me (but might be for you).

benadam.me

In this article, Ben wonderfully describes the inner workings of his team at Amazon. One of the takeaways for me was that despite the workplace being fast paced and chaotic, their manager being kind and joyful made a difference.

On the first working day of 2022, I resigned from my job as a senior design manager at Gojek. The four years that I spent there were immensely memorable filled with lots of great projects & awesome people.

Back in 2017, when I was looking for my next gig, Noopur sent me this tweet from Abhinit and I cold DM’d him and the rest is history.

That was back when Gojek had just 1.5 floors occupied in the Diamond District building(and 2 floors in the Pasaraya building in Jakarta) and roughly 20-25 designers. When the pandemic hit in 2020, we barely had any space free in our 4-ish floors of the Diamond District building(4 floors in Pasaraya too) and around a 100+ designers. When I left last week, there were around 160 designers in the team across six different specializations.

In the early days, there was no certainty that the projects we worked on would see the light of day..infact the first one I designed got shelved and picked up much after I had moved onto another team. The new team that I joined was just being created out of M&As that had recently occurred. We called it ‘GoMerchants’ internally. Unlike other product teams at that time, this team owned multiple products. This was an exciting time for this team and I felt I was at the right place at the right time.

A merchant using our device during an immersion study 🙇🏻‍♂️

We built the unified merchant app, GoBiz, and launched it in two other countries. We did immersion studies and merchant AMAs to understand the various merchant archetypes. We worked on EDC machine flows, POS flows, Food order flows, Web dashboards and a lot of self-onboarding flows. We did usability studies and bug bashes before releasing products. But it wasn’t always smooth. There were changing priorities, team re-orgs that moved people & products around leading to broken links and complex internal policies to name a few. But the people that you worked with made the difference. For the longest time, I was the only designer sitting in India working on that vertical. But I never felt left out. The folks who came from Midtrans, especially Maji, were vital to my journey within Gojek. They made me feel at home. It truly felt like a place that I could be myself. Every visit I made it a point to meet people I had only interacted on Slack/Zoom in person. Every visit, we bonded over pop culture, food and art.

Japanese food was a great unifier 🍜

Gojek was the place where I felt the urge to transition into a managerial role. Nothing really prepares you for that transition. All these years I’d been spending time honing my design chops but suddenly I realized the gaps in my skillset. It was so easy to use your 1:1s to talk about status reports instead of having a meaningful conversation. It was so easy to shy away from showcasing your work to major stakeholders. It was so easy to not care and take your role for granted. But these people were my friends and I didn’t want to let them down. Yes, I made quite a few mistakes, but I learnt from them. I learnt how to write promotion packets, conduct performance reviews and run retros. I learnt how to plan team growth and design team rituals.

The farewell zoom 👋🏽

Whatever I achieved at Gojek, I owe it to the people I got to work with and I will always feel proud for being a tiny part of this team’s journey ✨

Thank you!

How to Actually Build a Better Boss

Charlie and I read, gutted, or threw a lot of management books across the room while researching Out of Office. Most of them seem to profoundly misdiagnose the problem in the first place — or, just as often, attempt to treat the symptoms of bad management without confronting the actual malady..

annehelen.substack.com

A fairly long interview with Jonathan and Melissa Nightingale of the rawsignal group that is filled with anecdotes of their experiences managing people and training managers.

They have a bi-monthly newsletter where they discuss interesting stuff. Their latest post enquires about how it’s important to know what it is that “thing” that pushes work out of your brain.

Learning By Shipping

Company organization structure defines both how and what a company builds… It is frequently the case that when a company is doing well a given org structure serves as a model for others to follow; and when things are not going well there’s a chorus to change to some obvious alternative. Reality is far more complex, unfortunately.

medium.learningbyshipping.com

A week ago, I hosted a quiz prepared (ripped off?) last minute for our design all hands. Preparing and hosting such events isn’t a new thing for me since it’s something I’ve been doing since my undergrad. With remote teams, events have become an important part of keeping your team engaged. Though there’s more that you can do.

So in this issue, I will talk about the team rituals that we’ve setup in my team.

Critiques

Design Critique was the first one that we instituted. This was a design and research only session where designers could present their work to other designers. These would be weekly and designers were encouraged to show work in progress. To setup this session as a safe space, team leads needed to be vulnerable and lead by showing their own work in progress.

This week at work, a situation made me wonder about the trends in web typography; why did folks switch to system fonts in their stack and why did some companies start creating their own typefaces.

I asked around for links to articles that may provide a hint to why this change began.

Switching to system fonts seemed to have been more about the capability to modernize the font stack from the ancient Helvetica, Arial, Sans-serif stack as @mdo explains in this post.

Shipping system fonts to GitHub.com – @mdo

I’m finally publishing this blog post I drafted over a year ago. It was incomplete when I started to revisit it months ago, but I figured it’s better to share it now than sit on it forever.

markdotto.com

I can’t believe I’ve done 10 of these and still do not have a name for the newsletter. ‘Weekly’ seems a misnomer given my publishing schedule but I can’t seem to think of a better one. I’ve started realizing a biweekly format fits well with me. It gives me time to reflect and frame what I need to write, in fact I feel naturally inspired to write about the 10 day mark.

Anyways, lets get to it…

Talking about design

Re-learning how to talk about Design – Bethany Heck

How a single design decision shapes everything that follows..

medium.com

Platform teams are usually created to solve engineering problems and like everyone else staffed on them, the designers need to have some understanding of how engineering works. Yes, it’s not a glamorous role like building a product but often these are crucial pieces to a user’s experience. Every ‘user’ on your product would experience the scope of a platform designer’s work. A ‘user’ would experience it when they signup, when the app is working smoothly, when they don’t get flooded with spammy notifications and when they want to secure their account.

Platform designers are service designers catering to all kinds of users including the internal ones and I strongly feel this is where the design systems team should be sitting given that it’s goals are about accessibility, reliability and consistency.

Further reading:

Andrey Gargul’s 7 things I learned from my 7 years at Shopify

I was able to frame my thoughts around this thanks to a conversation this week with Abhinit around platform teams.

Trying hard to build a momentum with this newsletter but life keeps happening. Last month, I moved to a new house, took my first flight and got my second vaccine shot Thankfully I don’t actually feel guilty about missing a newsletter date, because in the end, this activity should not become a burden. What I do feel guilty about is that I’ve been walking less, the step count on my phone is at an all time low and I seriously hope I can fix that this month.

Today I’m writing this newsletter using an impromptu desk on our tiny new balcony. DM me your desk recommends!

Insights from a Reluctant Leader - Margaret Lee

Do natural born leaders really exist, and if so, where does that leave the rest of us?

vimeo.com

Margaret Lee, is the design leader who grew the team behind Google Maps[Geo UX] team from 3 to a global org between 2007-2016. I’d never heard of her until this video just showed up on my browser tab serendipitously.

It’s moving week! The weekend was spent packing up some parts of the house, the ones that we do not trust the movers and packers with anymore. This is my fifth move within Bangalore since I first moved here to join NID in 2012 and hopefully the last for a bit.

We need to talk about your Q3 roadmap – Lara Hogan

As people complete their vaccination schedule, as the world around us continues to burn, and as the product roadmap chugs along, something’s gotta give. And I think it’s going to be your feature plans—because the humans behind them need time to recuperate.

larahogan.me

I’ve seen a lot of departures happening this year with most folks not knowing what’s next and taking a break to figure things out. With a few more looming around the corner, I thought of re-visiting this post prophesizing why this is happening.

Your Work is Starstuff

How the distinct ache of lost work is part of a larger story

joelcalifa.com

“For every open job on your team, you need to spend one hour a day on recruiting-related activities. Cap that investment at 50% of your time. “

- Rands

Every time I see someone cribbing about hiring, this sentence by Rands comes to mind. Most leaders end up delegating their head counts to the recruiters. Recruiters are incentivized to close the positions by hook or crook. They are rarely trained to identify good candidates. In fact, how can you expect a recruiter to know who a good designer or engineer is? So most recruiters ask for a list of companies/colleges that they can approach candidates from. Usually these companies are the ones that /seem/ to have their shit together. Unsurprisingly the ‘same’ companies tend to feature in most recruiter’s lists and that’s how you end up with everyone vying for the same folks and competing on surreal pay packages. 

We are seeing the indian design twitter getting back to normal with the Twitter Spaces, Clubhouse sessions and Twitter threads so I guess nature is healing..

And so this newsletter is also back to its weekly schedule after the break. In this issue, I’m rounding up the audio sessions that I attended over the last week

https://twitter.com/dharmeshba/status/1408062660948631559/photo/1

Dharmesh hosted this space with Kishore, Shaheena, Arjun and other designers to give gyaan about the state of the Indian design industry. As the design industry attracts more newcomers, spaces like this help to defuse the artificial pressure that is being created. Aditya has summarized the takeaways from this space in this thread.

As the second wave of the pandemic rages on, there’s a feeling of tiredness and helplessness permeating everywhere. It’s like being in an invisible zombie movie with no end in sight. So please take care of yourself, talk to people isolating themselves, reach out to those you care about and stay safe.

The Importance of Career Laddering – Sarah Drasner

Career laddering is a system used to show what expectations are at different levels of a role, a purpose of which can be defining how one might be promoted.

css-tricks.com

Design orgs are still so new, that often reading about engineering management helps. They’ve been here longer, faced similar problems and have found ways to address them.

This article feels like the missing manual about how to use career ladders at your workplace. It made me rethink my conversations with my reports regarding their job level.

It made me understand –

1. Why asking ‘Where would you like to be in 5 years’ is important
2. Why asking them to self assess themselves is important instead of you doing the assessment
3. Why we should structure their development goals as per 30/60/90 day plans instead of a checklist

If you are looking to adopt a career framework for your design org, you should definitely read ‘Org design for design orgs’. It talks about the qualities of an effective design org, the common problems plaguing design orgs and how to build a design org. You can check out the framework they offer over here.

Related:

1. 'Org design for design orgs’ blog for articles
2. Progression.fyi for other frameworks to reference
3. Career-Ladders.dev - Sarah’s framework
#17
April 18, 2021
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