Five years later

In mid-April I will be returning to speak to the Sioux Falls, SD creative community. It’s been an honor to have a relationship with them — to have met a few local folks on my first visit whom I now regularly chat with — and to have referred a few other colleagues & creative friends to share their perspectives. Since so much time has transpired and so much has changed, I am excited, in my talk, to also explore what has not changed.

Unexpected poetry

Today I received the gift of unexpected poetry, written and read by my colleague Patience. It was during our last 1:1 meeting, marking the conclusion of our collaboration in one organization — and the beginning of what I trust will be many more opportunities to make great work together. It was so touching, kind, poignant, funny, and joyous. And reassuring! The kids are all right. What a gift! 🙏💞

I’m so much better at writing than organically free-styling

I also know your love for poetry, so here I am reciting...

I’ll express to you my gratitude, the way I do best

To you Josh, whose impact no one can detest

Quite fitting for a relationship, filled with puns all the time

The flow comes better, if I include a little rhyme...

From the first time that we met, you saw my potential,

And now, two years later, the growth has been exponential

How lucky I feel, for our chats every week

About travel, food, the world

About processes, growth and design technique

Your impact, and teachings, I will continue to apply

From advocating for boundaries, research, and always asking for the ‘why’

You sparked a culture that before never existed

Curious coworkers, and a fun, genuine attitude that always persisted

I can’t express enough, my gratitude to get to always reflect

on power dynamics, gender roles, and other things which you feverishly protect

I will try to instill in myself, your unwavering enthusiasm to improve

Broken systems, processes, culture —

The concepts that actually make things move

A leader’s role is to do just as you’ve done for me

To empower, to advocate, and to teach;

To be a safe space where expression is truly free

Yes your impact has been huge, on the company as a whole

But on me personally, it is invaluable, your role...

I will miss so many things, even messaging in Slack

And especially knowing that someone always has my back

I quite literally wouldn’t be here without you

and the things I learned are numerous, many more than these few

Thank you for making me feel comfortable from day one

Thank you for empowering me, and always encouraging a job well done

For engraining in me the importance of context

Of standing up for myself, research, and not fearing the complex

Your eye for copy and design, I appreciate so much

But your heart for leading and organizing people, this is your signature touch

Such different background and age,

Nonetheless a bond, that I’m so glad I got to engage

You will me missed so much by me, by everyone

But I know that your time here, and our relationship was a victory well won

So stay your self, and the right people will see

The value, community, and joy, the that your presence frees.

—Patience Dorman

Coaching and Twitter

Recently, I helped my former Twitter colleague, Joe Tutterow, land a role as first designer in a startup. And because I once worked inside the product design team at Twitter, another colleague, Yuan Wang, referred me to a client, Brett Ryckman, whom I helped secure a senior leadership role — at Twitter.

“After years as Product Designer in large tech companies, I found myself intimidated by the start-up world. Josh helped me navigate the terminology, opportunities, and risks associated with the career transition. His guidance was also valuable in navigating salary negotiations. Josh’s insight and assurance helped me make the decision with both confidence and excitement.”

– Joe Tutterow, Product Design Lead, Castro Labs

——

“Josh was pivotal in helping me land a senior leadership position at Twitter. He improved my entire package, including my resume, website, and presentation deck — we also did a mock interview. After listening to my presentation, he suggested several adjustments to amplify my story and align the presentation to the role. His feedback was direct and actionable. His coaching upped my interviewing skills, and helped me gain confidence to step into a leadership role.”

– Brett Ryckman, Twitter Product Design Leadership

Coaching and network effects

Over the past few years, my coaching clients have come from both direct and indirect referrals — which was a signal that my networks are providing opportunities to deepen the practice. Clients have included:

• a startup founder navigating growth challenges, customer relationships, and onboarding new hires

• a first design hire, establishing practices, protocols, and more

• a first design ops hire, establishing practices and protocols, and legitimizing the ops practice

• quite a few designers preparing for specific interviews — looking at a job description and making direct ties to the work they’re showing in their deck, rehearsing their story and delivery, and building confidence

• advising a mid-career designer on where he could go next

“Josh nurtures ideas and the people who have them. As a founder, the early days are a vulnerable time — exciting to be sure, but also a time when the wrong advice or feedback could have dire consequences. Before my company even had a name, Josh helped me uncover the why, the who, and the what. We rehearsed my pitch, built the foundation for the brand, and reached out through his network for referrals.”

– Jason Stephens, Founder, Source.how

——

“I had been designing in healthcare for over ten years. I wasn’t sure if I could transition to another sector, and felt stuck and defeated. Josh reviewed my past experiences and portfolio, and guided me to reframe my experiences as I was applying to a new lead design role in e-commerce. Not only did he provide excellent advice on asking interview questions, he helped me build confidence. I will continue to work with Josh on my career goals.”

– Angel Chan, Senior UX Designer and Strategist

——

“Josh has been instrumental in helping me get my DesignOps practice off the ground. His experience as an early Ops professional with a growing UX team, as well as an advisor for startups, has proven invaluable for mapping out my first year. Josh guided me through difficult scenarios, helping me to educate the UX and PM orgs on working with Ops. And he advised me how to best amplify my work as an Ops team of one.”

– Matt Eng, DesignOps Manager, Genesys

Bring your challenges and questions, and let’s talk

My favorite part of the design process has always been listening. I listen for patterns, for opportunities, for what’s said and not said. I reflect back what I hear – and sometimes that alone is progress. During these unprecedented and challenging times, mentorship and structured support plays a more critical and fundamental role. It’s one I am humbled to provide.

I’ve noticed a distinct uptick in coaching clients this year. Many of them reach out for strategic counseling and operational support, and later, they come back for guidance on their next career move. Here are a few highlights:

“Josh helped me change my career. He was my inspiring, supportive teacher before he became my inspiring, supportive coach. I’m grateful that I continue to benefit from his mentorship and belief in me as a designer. Now as a design manager in my growing company, he’s helped me activate my innate skills. I feel confident leading from a place of caring and strength as I scale the design team to have a greater business impact.”

– Rebecca Rabison, Design Manager, Checkr

——

“Meeting with Josh is a breath of fresh air! He opened up my thinking, coming with suggestions for expanding my impact in my career. He showed up prepared and ready to have a productive conversation. I’ll definitely be meeting with him again. If you’re feeling stuck and need someone to work through an issue with you, do yourself a favor and meet with Josh.”

– Wes O’Haire, Product Design Lead, Dropbox

Transition to Professional Practice Spring 2020

During the spring 2020 semester, I’m once again teaching The Business of Design: Professional Practice at California College of the Arts – a required class for grad students. Although we cover the always-relevant skills of writing about and presenting your work, and giving and receiving feedback, this year’s course is unique because of coronavirus. What does it mean to convert the entire process of researching and interviewing for the job you want, and onboarding into a new role into the digital space? As we figure that out together, students are preparing their portfolios for an emerging world.

Special thanks to our stellar roster of guest visitors, including the design teams at Atlassian and Blend, plus Erika Hall, Peter Merholz, Justin Rands, Shawn Sprockett, Michie Cao, Benjamin Wilkins, Queenie Wu, Arianna Orland, and former students Mike Torchia and Jamie Tsai. 🧡

Between this spring and next year, I’ll be hosting and facilitating four workshops in four cities! They’re all on the same topic, feedback – how to ask for it, provide it, and integrate it into your work. I’ll be very keen to get feedback about it as we go.

Filmmaker Jason Hanasik’s latest short documentary, A Childhood on Fire, is now available to stream on The Guardian’s website. It was a distinct pleasure working closely with Jason on imagery and tone, typography and color, poster design, and film titles.

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All signs point to yes with faculty and staff at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Over a few months, we’ve strategized and workshopped together about internal collaboration, process, project sizing, and marketing to parents & students.

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“Josh’s workshop gave me the confidence to keep going. I absolutely loved it.”

– Ola Okunrinboye, Co-founder of Tahcar (pictured, above center)

Recent workshops: Design Operations Fundamentals in Toronto, Canada (as part of Design Thinkers Toronto), and Master Your Pitch in San Francisco, CA. It’s always a great sign when participants ask for more workshops!

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A year in the making, pioneering cannabis dispensary The Apothecarium is starting to roll out their rebrand. I partnered with Christopher Simmons on the research, strategy and positioning, and new visual identity. This work was inspired by their growth and expansion, and the opportunity to unify visual elements as they continue to expand services and locations.

“Josh helped us strategize and consider the longer term of our recent brand evolution. With sophistication and smoothness, we partnered to lay the foundation for a positive customer response. Also, the work is gorgeous.” –Eliot Dobris, Chief Marketing Officer, The Apothecarium

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• Adobe’s hosting a world of live-streamed events on September 24, World Interaction Design Day – this year’s theme is trust & responsibility, so I’m talking about how that shows up in critique and CritKit

• New York’s got me helping the marketing & communications team at the NYU Gallatin School with my first DesignOps consulting project in higher education over this fall

• Toronto’s got me at RGD’s Design Thinkers conference giving a workshop and talk

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Introducing… CritKit!

Critique is essential to business, because critique is about making work better. And critique (aka “crit”) should be fun – because it’s a conversation about making better work. It involves sharing your work with that right mix of confidence and humility, listening to diverse inputs, feedback from diverse roles and people, the exchange of ideas, co-creation, collaboration, and iteration.

Gratefully, I’ve seen a lot of amazing crits – so I’ve put the best practices in a box. The kit has been tested by the design team at Blend, where I saw how much agency it gave a designer who’d never tried on the role of facilitator. And it’s been deployed by the Data Science team at Twitter – who says it’s their longest-running cultural program – and where all members of that team are onboarded and have visibility to each other’s work. Can you imagine – a critique for non-aesthetic purposes? Amazing.

I’m thrilled to launch CritKit for Product Teams. A version for agencies and another for academia are on the horizon. Sign up to be a beta tester, or join the mailing list to get notified when we launch at critkit.co.

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DesignOps before scale

Since September 2018, I’ve been consulting with the Business Technology Innovation (BTI) team at Salesforce. BTI is an internal consulting group focused on improving the employee experience, making internal practices more effective, and tools more efficient. When I joined, Mario Ruiz, the practice manager, had vision and a set of values, and needed help operationalizing them. Over the course of the year, I’ve advised on everything from their first full-time ops hire to a new employee onboarding experience (above). It’s been fantastic to help establish processes & procedures well in advance of scaling.

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“I deeply appreciate that you are the type of teacher that is on our side, coaching and rooting for us through this design field.” – Mike Torchia, CCA Grad Student

This semester, Heather Phillips and I each taught a section of The Business of Design: Professional Practice at California College of the Arts – a required class for grad students. The semester covered the skills of networking, cover letters, interviewing, writing – and the harder stuff of telling the story of your work. I helped 15 students get clear on the type of work they want to go after, then constructing their portfolio to help achieve it.

To help the students realize that any path is the right path, I invited many guests to kick off our classtime. Many thanks to designers Ash Guillaume, Leslie Cheng (a former student of mine) and Dave Bellona, career coach Mike Joosse, content strategists Karen Wickre and Jennifer Jeffries, and recruiter Mandy Zavala.

In a 60 day DesignOps consulting engagement, I helped the 18-person design team at Blend ship:

Improved systems

• A design system for getting the conversation started with eng partners

• File naming protocol for consistency and being able to find the right things

Improved collaborative models

• CritKit for making better work & making work conversations better

• Team profiles for understanding each other

• Marketing & design social time for improving collaborative rapport

• Networking introducing photographers and designers to the Blend fam

Improved project flows

• Intake form for being the source of project info

• Process for measuring return on investment and working smarter, including a new phase to measure ROI, Debrief

• Project sizes for scoping and expectation setting

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I’m thrilled to be advising Joint Futures.

While the practices of craft (what we make), operations (how we do it), and strategy (impact, differentiation, and value) are equally important – combining and considering them together can achieve so much more. That’s why I’m helping shape the experience of this event, together with Clarity, DesignOps Summit, and other conferences! There’s immense value to thinking holistically.

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Starting off

This year I’m doing four new things, all of which I’m very excited about:

1. Teaching a class at California College of the Arts called Transition to Professional Practice. I’ve guest lectured and critiqued at CCA but have never taught a full semester until now. Spring semester here we come!

2. Taking myself on a quarterly writing retreat / long weekend

3. Office hours at Parisoma and StartOut, plus community office hours every Friday

4. Independently hosting workshops to be announced

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Talking and learning

December 23, San Francisco, CA — Taking stock of my year, it makes me happy to have shared what I’ve learned on five national and two international stages.

It was terrific to be at HOW Design in Boston, and to hear such a variety of successful stories from people like Emily Cohen, Adam J. Kurtz, Josh Higgins, and Stephen Gates. I brought a 20-minute version of the People Layer to the Google Design Sprint conference. And I spoke at Designers + Geeks and Otis College [see below].

In Bucharest, I was the only designer to speak during their Tech Week. And at the GIF London summit, I learned about Google’s A120, connected with exciting strategists and thinkers in the UK, and have plans to return in 2019 for a workshop and a visit to the Imperial College of Art.

Clarity 2018

December 12, New York, NY — Jina did such a fantastic job with this year’s Clarity conference – the third version of the single-track design systems conference, and its first time being in New York. It was the most intersectional, female-led gathering I’ve attended. And I love that it was well spaced-out (not just the type, haha). A tip of the hat to Nathan who jumped in last minute to emcee.

A few months before planning kicked into full swing, Jina and I got together to update the typography, so that it could be, well, more clear. I customized Brandon by lowering the bar in the A to visually connect to its neighbor in the R. Love how it turned out!

Office Hours with Arianna Orland

December 7, San Francisco, CA — To expand the community we don’t yet know, and give back to the community we know and love, my pal Arianna and I experimented with offering free Office Hours. We were absolutely thrilled at the response! In a matter of a few minutes, the time slots were filled up. Over a few months, we connected with emerging designers and with professionals at a turning point in their career. We spoke with individuals in São Paulo, Philadelphia, Vancouver, Portland, Hyderabad, and the Bay Area. We really enjoyed the conversations we had, and we were happy to receive feedback that the conversations were useful. And it brought a comfortable, repeatable structure to our weeks. Look for more in 2019!

Hear + Qwere Qwarterly and Mighty Real

November 2, Los Angeles, CA — To celebrate the first year of international conversations created to celebrate queer people, my partner and I designed and produced the first issue of Qwarterly. Among pride photos and illustrations in 40 pages of all original content, there’s a profile of Gilbert Baker, the creator of the pride flag, an interview with Cecilia Chung, a trans politician, and interviews with the three bands selected to perform at Mighty Real, a party invocation of Sylvester at the Peppermint Club in Los Angeles. Whew!

It’s a very special experience to see everything come together and get jazzed up from its humble origins.

Charrette at Otis College of Art + Design

August 30, Los Angeles, CA — For the very first time, the Communication Design program at Otis College of Art + Design convened a week-long charrette to explore and investigate one theme: citizenship. Interdisciplinary students, faculty, and staff – including Sheharazad, their newly-hired Creative Director – mixed with four visiting artists (two illustrators and two designers) who added their perspective to the topic. The week’s activities were cumulative – it was an honor to be in the mix, and to enjoy the bonus activity of synthesizing the work.

Silas and I strategized approaches & structures for about a month leading up to the charrette week. Mary prompted the students to think small and concentrate their message. And on my day, students clustered around topics such as belonging, unity, empathy and sharing a meal. There was a palpable buzz in the room as faculty floated from table to table offering critique and ideas, and students iterated and refined their approaches whilst figuring out how to collaborate with each other. Table by table, risograph posters were produced as evidence for further explication.

I’m always impressed with what can be accomplished over one day. As a participant and lecturer for this first instance experiment, I’m eager to see where Otis takes it next.

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Tuesdays at Sequoia Design Lab

Menlo Park, CA — I love the intersection of startups and communications & design needs, and had the distinct honor of consulting one day per week for many months with the extraordinary Sequoia Design Lab team inside the eponymous venture capital company. Pictured below is Aine Zhou, one of the team led by James Buckhouse. Over five months I consulted with a number of their portfolio companies on integrated brand / product / marketing strategies, brand identity design, and I authored a designer career ladder for all their portfolio companies.