Management & Mentorship
I absolutely love leading my team and helping others unlock their potential. What started as mentorship and guidance is now transitioning into team management and career building.
On my team, I mentor non-lead designers via 1:1s and weekly critique. Outside of my workday, I mentor junior designers for 9 weeks a year as they go through their graduate school capstone process - guiding them through the whole project, all the way to landing their first job. They always keep me on my toes and I love reconnecting with the academic side of the work.
Management
I've honed my craft in my 17+ year design career, and now I equally enjoy building others' crafts and careers. I have participated in career progression writing as well as team development workshops and team OKR creation. When my team of 11 designers lost our manager, myself and another lead designer co-managed the team, keeping morale high, focusing on retention, and slightly restructured the team to address unhappiness. I then drafted the job descriptions for the Head of Design as well as all IC roles moving forward. I was the interim hiring manager for the Head of Design role, then onboarded that person and 2 more designers all within a 4 month period.
Some management principles I stand by!
Blameless culture - Encourage failure, but learn from it. Not about blame but about learning.
Win as a team - No ego, we’re stronger together, the boat with the most people paddling in the same direction wins the race.
Radical Candor - Create tight feedback loops, always open dialogue, talk directly to the person
Bring your whole self - be comfortable at work, be vulnerable, we are humans not machines, create a safe space
Fail fast - 90% of experiments don’t move the needle, so start failing so you can get to that 10% that do.
As a continuous learner, I love learning about management. A few recent favorite reads are 'Making of a Manager' by Julie Zhuo. And a Harvard Business Review article 'Leadership that gets results.'
Business owner
From Oct 2009 - May 2017 I founded and ran my own interactive animation studio. We partnered with ad agencies, interactive firms, startups, media companies, and filmmakers on large-scale projects such as permanent museum exhibitions, launching new companies, feature length films, and UI for digital products. Each engagement lasted anywhere from 3 months to 18 months. In 2017 I closed the company to focus completely on studying new forms of HCI, and received a Master's from NYU.