Category Archives: Nadyne

career, leadership, management

climbing the leadership ladder: from manager to director to VP

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Recently, I’ve been asked several times what I’ve found to be the difference of being a manager, a director, and a VP. Each of those roles is an interesting one with its own challenges. My thinking on this is heavily influenced by this blog post from Peter Merholz. In his post, he introduces what I think of as the three distinct modes of management: managing down, managing to the sides, and managing up.

Managing down is managing those who report to you, or through you if you’re managing managers or directors. Managing to the sides is working with your peers to communicate information, resolve issues, and make decisions. Managing up is the skill of giving your manager, whether they’re a C-level or a senior manager, the tools and information that they need to help you, your team, and your company be successful.

As a first-line manager, where you’re only managing individual contributors (ICs), almost all of your time is about enabling them to be happy and productive. About 60% of your time is directly managing them: keeping them on track, giving feedback, coaching them, making sure they’re working well together, etc. Another 30% of your time is managing to the sides: ensuring that you’re aligned with your peer managers, resolving conflicts, communicating status information, and removing roadblocks. The remaining 10% of your time is managing up: working with your boss to manage priorities, identifying additional resource needs, communicating status, managing the budget, asking them to remove roadblocks, and setting the strategy within your area of focus.

As a second-line manager (for simplicity, I’m going to call this “director”), where you’re only managing managers, your focus shifts. You’re no longer the one directly responsible for enabling a team of productive and happy ICs. That’s the job of the first-line managers who report to you. Now your role is to ensure that the teams who report to you are happy, productive, and working on the right things. For a director, I’d estimate that 40% of your time is managing down to the team: ensuring that your managers are being effective in their roles, coaching your managers in how to be effective coaches and leaders, communicating needed information, resolving issues, setting direction for your team, setting your team’s culture, and removing roadblocks within and for your teams. As a director, managing to your peers is more important than it was as a manager. I estimate that managing to the sides is about 40% of your job. This is ensuring that you and your cross-functional peers are aligned on strategy and prioritization, that you’ve got the right folks working on the right problems across your teams, and that you are removing roadblocks for your teams and for your peers’ teams. The last 20% of your time is managing up: working with leadership to set strategy, communicating needed information, advocating for your teams, identifying roadblocks that need leadership intervention, and so on.

As a third-line manager (for simplicity, I’m going to call this “VP”), where you’re only managing directors, your focus shifts again. Now your directors are the ones responsible for having their teams be happy, productive, and working on the right things. You are accountable for all of that, plus be part of the team responsible for setting corporate strategy, and delivering on the commitments that you are making on behalf of your team. This means that much less of your time is managing down, maybe 20% of it. Managing down involves is communicating strategy, coaching your directors, resolving conflicts within your organization and between your organization and others, setting your organizational culture as part of your overall company’s culture, and ensuring that your directors are aligned amongst themselves. Managing to the sides is still about 50% of your job. Now that it’s at another level higher, it is even more cross-functional. Now you’re setting strategy across the entire company, identifying opportunities for your company, setting policies, removing roadblocks across your org and for your partner orgs, and communicating needed information across the company. The last 30% of your time is managing up: working with the senior executive team on setting strategy, communicating, making decisions, representing the company, and so on.

Looking back at Peter’s original post, the percentages that he lists don’t match my experience. I think he’s underestimated the amount of time needed at each level to manage up and to the sides, especially at the lower levels. While Peter frames his thoughts in terms of design orgs, I’ve found in my conversations with other leaders as well as my own experience in managing engineers and product folks that it’s held generally true cross-functionally.

If the things that you love are communicating, unblocking, and coaching, you must do more of that at higher levels. The shift that you’re making at each level is that you’re more abstracted away from your core discipline, and that you’re seeing and making decisions on a much broader swath of the company and the business. You are responsible for making a lot more decisions, often with less information than you  would like. I’ve found it to be a lot of fun, and a lot of responsibility.

user experience

making research more collaborative

Recently, I was talking to a new researcher who is struggling because they feel siloed off from the rest of their organization. “Is this really what research is like?” they asked me, after describing a research process conducted almost exclusively by themselves.

One of the things that I like the most about research is how collaborative it is. I shared several ideas for making research more collaborative, including the following:

  1. Make the planning process collaborative by involving others (other researchers, designers, PMs, anyone who is interested!) in the creation of your test plan. 
  2. Make the research phase collaborative by inviting others to your sessions, or asking others to take notes for you.
  3. In the days of working in-office, I used to bake cookies for my research days to incentive people to come and watch the sessions. While they were watching, I gave them a short questionnaire to fill out while watching the session. It was lightweight enough that it didn’t feel like the observers were being imposed on. Questions on it were:
    • What stood out to you the most?
    • What worked well?
    • What didn’t?
  4. Make the analysis phase collaborative through brainstorming sessions. Take the insights that you gathered during the session and run a workshop with colleagues where you identify themes and potential recommendations to address the issues identified.
  5. Make the outcomes phase more collaborative by scheduling watch parties, where you show some videos from your sessions. This could be one particular participant who had a lot of insight to share, or it could be a collection of clips that show a theme.
  6. If the designers who you work with have some kind of critique session set up, start attending them and sharing your research materials for critique there.
  7. If you have enough fellow researchers, create a critique session where you give and get feedback on your research plans, performance while interviewing participants, or final reports.
leadership

leadership lessons from Mike Kruzeniski

Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the death of Mike Kruzeniski. He’s been on my mind a lot in the past couple of months, not only because of this anniversary.

I got to know Mike when he became my boss. He was hired as the very first VP of Design and Research at Included Health. I was a bit nervous during my first few meetings with him, balancing making him feel welcome in his mid-pandemic start, showing the value of my research team, and helping him get acclimated to the new company. He quickly won me and the rest of our design and research teams over.

Mike cared deeply about the craft of design. He wanted design to be beautiful and powerful. He bonded quickly with the designers and encouraged them to uplevel their skills. He gave them space to be creative and to push the boundaries. He didn’t hesitate to roll up his sleeves and get into the details. The design team flourished under him.

I have to admit that Mike’s care for the craft of design gave me pause when he started. I’ve worked for multiple design leaders who pushed designers to greater heights of creativity, and in doing so relegated user research to doing nothing more than validation research to prove how creative the design team was. Not Mike: his support for user research was boundless. He knew when and how to use research. He understood the value of generative research. He knew how to talk about its value to the executive team. He never talked about the design team, but rather the design and research team. My research team loved him just as much as the design team did.

One of Mike’s top strengths as a leader was that he believed in his team. He didn’t second-guess. He asked coaching questions if he thought that something hadn’t been considered. He always made it clear that not only did he trust his team, but he was also all-in on their success. I was the beneficiary of the opportunities that he created for me to grow my skills. At first, I didn’t even realize that it’s what was happening, but quickly came to see the pattern in as I observed him do it for me and for many others across the design and research team.

In addition to his innate belief in his team, Mike was vocal in sharing that belief. If I ever admitted that I was anything less than completely confident that I was going to be successful in something, he was there to cheer and to support. One of Mike’s friends called him the antidote to impostor syndrome, a description that I must agree with. He gave ongoing feedback and advice while reminding me that he believed in me and had no doubts that I could do it.

Although I didn’t get nearly as much time with Mike as I was hoping to, I still learned so much from him. His leadership style has informed a lot of who I am as a leader today. When I was first offered the promotion to VP of Experience Design at Babylon Health a couple of months ago, I immediately wished that I could call him and get his thoughts on making that transition.

I wish I could call him and thank him for everything. I’ll have to try to do him proud instead.

Nadyne

the jerk matrix

There’s always a difficult colleague. When trying to understand how to work with that difficult colleague, I think of the jerk matrix.

The jerk matrix is something that I came up with a few years ago when I worked with a particular cluster of difficult colleagues. I realized that some knew that they were being difficult, but others didn’t. I further realized that some cared that they were being difficult, while others did not. The matrix helped me better understand the difference between them, and to come up with coping strategies.

Those who don’t care that they’re difficult are, simply put, assholes. The difference between knowing and not knowing is whether they’re an outright asshole or an oblivious asshole.

Most importantly, the jerk matrix helped me understand when someone is difficult but working on it. If they both know and care, they’re awkwardly improving. They’re on the road to recovering from being a difficult colleague. On the other hand, someone who cares but doesn’t know that they’re being difficult is simply oblivious. They could get on that road to recovering if they can find enough self-awareness to know when they’re being a jerk.

Another good use of the jerk matrix is if you have that group of difficult colleagues. If you map where they fall on this matrix, you might find that they cluster in one quadrant. In that case, you’ve identified a failure mode of your company or team. It’s worthwhile to consider whether there’s a cultural problem that causes people to become that difficult colleague, or whether the culture has something that makes it attractive to people who are already that difficult colleague.

career

the discovery problem in your career

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A long time ago, I believed that merely doing great work was sufficient to get promoted, and that it was my manager’s job to not only know that I was doing great work but also to ensure that I got promoted for it. This is not true. As your career advances, and this is doubly true when you’re leading a team, the more that your success is measured in terms of others’ perceptions of you. You cannot wait for recognition to come to you. You have to tell others why you deserve recognition.

I know that this is not easy. It’s hard to know where to start. It’s sometimes hard to know when you’re being successful. It feels like getting people to understand the impact of your great work is taking away from you being able to do more great work. Not being able to concentrate on doing more great work makes you worry that you really are selling snake oil. But that’s not true. What you’re doing is enabling people to discover your great work and build on top of it. Help them understand why it’s great. Help them understand how it contributes to them doing great work.

In user experience, we know that one of the common challenges of any product or service is discoverability. I’ve experienced this many times. You get user feedback that says that the one way that you could make your product or service better is to do this thing really awesome. “But it’s already there! I spent months delivering that feature!” Not only is your user frustrated that they think they can’t do what they want to do, but also you’re frustrated that you spent all that time and energy developing the very feature that they need and they’re not actually using it. You’ve got a discoverability problem. You’ve got to figure out how to fix it so that your engineering effort isn’t wasted and your user can accomplish what they want to do. Fix your discoverability problem, and you’ll fix two different frustrations.

And it’s the same with your great work. It’s not enough to do great work. You’ve got to make it possible for other people to discover your great work, to understand it and how it’s a contribution, to be able to build on it. Don’t think of the time that you spend changing perceptions as a waste of time. Think of it as solving the discoverability problem in your career.

career, Grand Rounds

10 Lessons learned about job hunting

Joining Grand Rounds has been an educational experience in so many ways. In the 16 months that I’ve been here, I’ve interviewed more than 200 candidates across all levels of user experience, product management, and engineering. In doing so, I’ve learned a lot about the hiring process that I want to share to help folks who are looking for a job.

As a result of all of these interviews and conversations with my colleagues about these interviews, I’m sharing my top lessons learned about looking for a new job.

  1. Looking for a new job is frustrating, time-consuming, and difficult. Find or create a support system as you look for your new role. You need folks who can hear your frustrations, give you feedback, and help you keep your morale up as you’re trying to find the right next role for you.
  2. Don’t treat the job description as a list of absolute requirements. Under the best of circumstances, it’s written to describe the most ideal candidate. There is no real human being who actually matches that entire list.  If you meet ~50% of the requirements and you think you might be interested in the company, apply for it. 
  3. Get feedback on your resume and LinkedIn profile. If you’re in design or product management where portfolios are common, get feedback on those too. There are a lot of different resources for resume feedback, such as professional groups and mentoring circles. Many of the professional Slacks that I’m on have channels for resume and portfolio feedback. If you’re still in college (or boot camp) or a recent graduate, your college might offer resume and portfolio reviews through their career center or alumni association.
  4. Have appropriate expectations for each part of the job searching process.  Cold applications to a job through LinkedIn or their careers website have the lowest rate of responses, whereas an internal referral often gets more attention.
  5. If you can find find someone in your network who works for a company you’re interested in, check in with them to tell you more about the company and the culture. They might be able to give you an internal referral, too.
  6. Practice your opener: what’s your short (~60 second) response to “so tell me about yourself”? Say it out loud. Preferably say it to an audience and get feedback about it, but at least say it out loud to yourself often enough that you feel comfortable saying it.  I usually start by writing it down so that I remember all the points I want to hit, then reading it out loud a few times. I edit it as I practice it. Then I give it to someone and get feedback. As I say it more, I learn how to riff on certain parts of it, depending on the context where I’m giving my opener.
  7. Take some time after an interview to reflect on your performance.  What went well?  What didn’t go well?  If you feel like you answered a question particularly well, jot down some notes about it so that you can reproduce that great answer in the future.  If you feel like you didn’t answer a question very well, come up with a better answer for it, and then practice saying it out loud. 
  8. … but keep yourself from spiralling into shame or frustration or worry or any of the other negative emotions associated with job hunting.  Don’t beat yourself up if you flub a question, or even flub a whole interview.  Interviewing is a skill.  You get better at skills through practice. Flubbing a single question in an interview doesn’t necessarily remove you from the running.  Flubbing a whole interview, as painful as it is, is probably a learning opportunity for you to determine what went awry and how you can prevent that from going awry in the future.
  9. The job interview is a two-way street. You are evaluating the company and the team to see if you want to work there. Make sure that you gather information to help you determine whether you want to work at that company, with that team, and for that manager.
  10. Finding a job is difficult in a normal situation. Finding a job during a worldwide recession is even harder because there is a much larger candidate pool. You have to find a way to keep your morale and self-esteem up through this process. Job hunting can test your resilience, so know some ways to help recharge yourself as you find the next great role for you.

Now that I’ve dusted off this blog, perhaps I can make some writing momentum and share more here!

Grand Rounds, Nadyne

new adventures

I have been frightfully remiss in updating my blog. As a result, I’m now eight months in to my new role and haven’t even said anything here about it.

In April 2019, I joined Grand Rounds as Head of Research. Grand Rounds is a healthcare startup on a mission to raise the standard of healthcare for everyone, everywhere. I’m responsible for knowing all there is to know about our members — which is to say, the people who use our services. I wrote a piece introducing service design on the Grand Rounds tech blog.

Let’s see if I can dust this blog off and do some more writing this year.

career, women

Systers at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing

I am a long-time Syster, and I have attended and spoken at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing a few times before.  This year, I’m speaking again, and wanted to support my fellow Systers as well.  To that end, I have compiled a list of Systers who are speaking at GHC.  Come see us! (Last updated: 2017-10-03 13:02 PT)

Wednesday, 04 October 2017

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: The Engineer’s Journey: Choose Your Own Adventure
Panelists: Cindy Burns, Pi-Chuan Chang, Leor Chechik, Mary Dang, Nadyne Richmond
Panel discussion of engineering career paths and important decisions along the way

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: The Myth of the Unicorn: Perspectives of Native American Women in Computing
Speakers: Amanda Sharp, Kylie Bemis, Nicole Archambault, Squiggy Rubio, Sarah EchoHawk
These extraordinary women in the tech industry identify as members of indigenous tribes from across Northern America. They will discuss their experiences, what it means to be a unicorn— a “mythical” or “non-existent” figure in tech—and what the tech communities can do to increase support and visibility.

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: Navigating Change: Ride the Waves of Change Without Feeling Underwater
Speakers: An Bui, Indu Khosla, Ariel Aguilar, Vanessa Hernandez, Alex Riccomini

1:50-2:10pm
Interactive Media Research Presentations: Inverse Procedural Modeling for 3D Urban Models
Speaker: Ilke Demir

3:00-3:20pm
Demonstrating Value Presentation: Managing Up: Managing Your Manager with Compassion, Humor, and Data
Speaker: Steph Parkin

3:00-4:00pm
Panel: Systers Celebrates 30 years Supporting Women in Computing
Panelists: Angel Tian, Danielle Cummings, Laura Downey, Neetu Jain, Dilma Da Silva

3:00-4:00pm
Workshop: Consciously Tackling Unconscious Bias
Speakers: Lilit Yenokyan, Amala Rangnekar, Saralee Kunlong

4:30-5:30pm
Panel: Navigating Change: Ride the Waves of Change Without Feeling Underwater (repeat session)
Panelists: An Bui, Indu Khosla, Ariel Aguilar, Vanessa Hernandez, Alex Riccomini

4:30-5:30pm
2017 Systers Pass-It-On Award Winners

Wednesday poster session, 1-4pm

Framework to Extract Context Vectors from Unstructured Data using Big Data Analytics
Presenter: Sarah Masud

Race against Troubleshooting: Predictive Maintenance for Data Protection
Presenter: Dhanashri Phadke

Thursday, 05 October 2017

11:30am-12:30pm
Panel: Why and How to Prepare for Hackathons?
Panelists: Bouchra Bouqata, Rose Robinson, Sana Odeh, Shaila Pervin, Xiaodan (Sally) Zhang

11:30am-12:30pm
Panel: Virtual Humanity
Panelists: Erin Summers, Jenn Duong, Gemma Rachelle Busoni, Elisabeth Morant, Charity Everett
In this panel, industry experts will share knowledge building and creating virtual reality (VR) experiences, games, and tools centered around the human experience.

11:30am-12:30pm
Panel: Hello, It’s Me! Differentiating Yourself With a Multidimensional Career
Panelists: Jenna Blaha, Vidya Srinivasan, Kelly Hoey, Ilana Walder-Biesanz, Cassidy Lara Williams

11:30am-12:30pm
Speed Mentoring with Systers mentors
Organizer: Zaza Soriano
Mentors and attendees sit at tables, each of which has a topic. For 15 minutes, attendees ask questions for the mentor to answer. Then attendees change tables and select a new topic, and the Q&A starts again.

11:30am-5:30pm
OSD Code-a-thon for Humanity with Project Jupyter
Organizers: Carol Willing, Jamie Whitacre

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: Get Out of Your Own Way!
Panelists: Mayoore S Jaiswal, Carolyn Rowland, Maybellin Burgos, Lilit Yenokyan, Lulu Li

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: Navigating Social Impact as a Techie
Panelists: Sharon Lin, Yada Pruksachatkun, Daniella Cohen, Gwen Wong, Gemma Rachelle Busoni
This panel will tackle approaches to creating social impact with technology, from eliminating social stigma of ‘civic technology’ to merging product paradigms from tech startups and philanthropic work.

1:30-2:30pm
Speed Mentoring with Systers mentors
Organizer: Zaza Soriano
Mentors and attendees sit at tables, each of which has a topic. For 15 minutes, attendees ask questions for the mentor to answer. Then attendees change tables and select a new topic, and the Q&A starts again.

3:00-3:30pm
Career Success Presentation: Negotiation Tactics to Make Your Manager a Strategic Career Partner
Speaker: Amy Yin

3:00-4:00pm
Panel: How Male Allies are Supporting Women in Computing through the Local Community
Panelists: Natasha Green, Anthony Park, Edwin Aoki, Evin Robinson

3:00-4:00pm
Speed Mentoring with Systers mentors
Organizer: Zaza Soriano
Mentors and attendees sit at tables, each of which has a topic. For 15 minutes, attendees ask questions for the mentor to answer. Then attendees change tables and select a new topic, and the Q&A starts again.

3:20-3:40pm
Career Success Presentation: Communicating, Promoting, & Developing Yourself Professionally: A Peer’s How-To Guide
Speaker: Rucha Mukundan
I will discuss key takeaways and lessons learned from her experience joining the workforce, and how professionals in their early career can use this information to position themselves for success.

4:30-4:50pm
Career Success Presentation: Negotiation Tactics to Make Your Manager a Strategic Career Partner (repeat session)
Speaker: Amy Yin

4:50-5:10pm
Career Success Presentation: Communicating, Promoting, & Developing Yourself Professionally: A Peer’s How-To Guide (repeat session)
Speaker: Rucha Mukundan
I will discuss key takeaways and lessons learned from her experience joining the workforce, and how professionals in their early career can use this information to position themselves for success.

Friday, 06 October 2017

9:00-9:20am
Open Source Presentation: Getting Started with Your First Open Source Project
Speaker: Mandy Chan

9:00-10:00am
Panel: Highlight and Recognize Your Organization’’s ‘Hidden Figures’
Panelists: Tamara Nichols Helms, Mona Hudak, Rachel Shanava, Larry Colagiovanni, Yolanda Lee Conyers

9:00-10:00am
Workshop: A Hands-on Dive into Making Sense of Real World Data
Speakers: Xun Tang, Jamie Whitacre

9:00-11:00am
Workshop: Learn to Negotiate And Stop Holding Yourself Back
Presenters: Karen Catlin, Poornima Vijayashanker
Learn how to discover your true value, leverage it to craft an ASK for decision makers, and handle common concerns and objections of decision makers. You’ll be able to practice your ASK and receive feedback on it.

9:00am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: From Passion to Product: How a LEGO Fan Learns Data Science
Presenters: Xiaodan (Sally) Zhang

9am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: Importance of Internships and Strategy to Get One!
Presenters: Deveeshree Nayak, Mayoore S Jaiswal

9am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: You were hired to be you!
Presenter: Angela Choo

9am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: How to Successfully Apply to Graduate School
Presenter: Laura Dillon

10:30-11:30am
Workshop: Designing Intelligent Hardware: A Day at Nest
Presenters: Jung Hong, Lulu Li, Soja-Marie Morgens
Hands-on experience of the decisions we make to build IoT intelligent hardware with close integration of cloud services, data pipelines and algorithms.

10:30-10:50am
Security Operations Presentations: When a Picture is Worth a Thousand Network-packets and System-logs
Speaker: Awalin Sopan

11:10-11:30am
Finding Your Fit Presentation: Finding the Right Fit: Discovering a Job You Love
Speaker: Kelly Irish

noon-12:20pm
Putting Yourself First Presentation: A Stay-at-home Mom’’s Guide to Continuing Your Career
Speaker: Adina Halter

noon-1:00pm
Panel: From Here to Internity
Panelists: Melissa Ann Borza, Kelly Irish, Marissa Alexandra Schuchat, Jenna Blumenthal, Chang Liu
Panel discussion of current/former interns and hiring managers on how to succeed in your internship

noon-1pm
Panel: Wonder Woman and the Amazonians: Build Your Local Community
Panelists: Bushra Anjum, Abigail Shriver, Melissa Greenlee, Maigh Houlihan, Marian Tesfamichael

noon-1pm
Workshop: Getting the Glass to Half-Full: Managing Your Moods at Work
Presenters: Mamta Suri, Beth Budwig, Harika Adivikolanu
Are you stressed out or negative at work? Do you react to situations at work impulsively? Being positive and well-balanced is a learnable skill. In this workshop, you will practice mindfulness and learn to apply techniques from Cognitive and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy to the workplace. You can use these tools daily to help manage your stress, stay calm, and improve your mood.

12:30-2:30pm
Workshop: Learn to Negotiate And Stop Holding Yourself Back (repeat session)
Presenters: Karen Catlin, Poornima Vijayashanker
Learn how to discover your true value, leverage it to craft an ASK for decision makers, and handle common concerns and objections of decision makers. You’ll be able to practice your ASK and receive feedback on it.

women

why your conference should have a code of conduct

I’ve been asked many times why a conference needs a code of conduct.  Depending on who’s asking, and whether I feel like taking on such basic education for a conference organizer, I give many answers: to increase attendance of women, to have a documented procedure of how to handle a situation, to do the right thing.

There have been many articles written about the problem of harassment at conferences.  The most recent to cross my radar quotes Leigh Honeywell:

“I’ve had enough crappy experiences at security conferences that I no longer attend them alone,” said Leigh Honeywell, a security engineer.

And that, conference organizers, is why you should have a code of conduct.  When people have bad experiences at your conference, they stop attending it.  When women have bad experiences at your conference, they stop attending it if they can’t come up with a way to guarantee their safety.  And when we have bad experiences at your conference, we talk about it.  I’ve avoided attending conferences because I’ve heard about bad behavior that goes unchecked.

If you don’t have a code of conduct that you enforce, you’re losing attendees.  It’s in the best interest of your conference, including best financial interest, to have a code of conduct.