Settling into 2021... then 2022
Recapping the last year and 8 months since my last blog post and goals for the rest of the year.
Life feels to be finally settling down. The last year has been a flurry of life changes and professional growth. Entering 2021, I had just gotten married and had begun to look for new work. Marriage is more awesome than I had hoped. My wife and I settled into our 1,000sq ft. rental house where I was working out of our dining room. The small dining room fitted our dining set and sit/stand desk, extra-large aeron chair, 30” curved monitor, clackity mechanical keyboard, DSLR webcam, and all. We soon realized we didn’t have enough space. Taking time off and having a good work/life balance was difficult when my desk was a prominent feature of our home. We started looking for a new house.
If there is one takeaway from my job search it is that personal connections are everything. This is certainly true in the product world, but even more so in Kansas City. In UX here, everybody knows everybody. There are really not that many of us! It is a tight-knit group, and it is easy to see when new people come to town or junior designers start their job search.
After a few casual months of searching, I was hired as a product designer at Storable. I feel like my boss is truly someone I can learn from. I am now embedded on a product team and working directly with an engineering team. This new opportunity comes with its many new challenges.
- The company is large and the tribal knowledge is immense.
- Learning to communicate with people with whom I disagree and bridging the communication gap between business, engineering, and our customers.
- Becoming a better advocate of design at a large organization.
- Using lots of organizational tools such as confluence, Jira, and salesforce to document current/future work.
Overall, It has been a season of exciting changes and I am ready to continue adding value to the company through thoughtful - user-centered- design.
... a year later...
My wife and I soon after found a new house and have been loving it. I've spent the last year updating a basement home office. We have been here a year at this point! I also have worked at Storable for over a year now... It has been an interesting season marked with an immense amount of professional growth. More than anything, I have been learning more interpersonal skills. This job is fully remote and most of my co-workers I've never met. Aside from actual design work, I bring stability to the team as well as a different way of thinking. I've been working with a few different internal teams and am constantly advocating for the user. My role as an independent contributor has been marked mainly by attempting to make wise decisions for our users.
In a broader sense, I am less interested in UX and Product Design and am more interested in creating real change at an organization. A chief question I am personally wrestling with is, how do ideas get realized in an environment where nothing is lean? Employee churn, outdated technology, and customer feature requests all act as distractions towards creating really powerful innovative technology. We run agile, but it is not lean. There is a path forward, but it is slow and requires an insane amount of documentation and communication. Do we need another confluence page? It has been an interested challenge to experience. It is certainly nothing I experienced while in school! I recently heard of the 20% theory that speculates that 20% of the workforce does most of the work. I want to be part of that group. I want to make sure our employees are happy as well as our customers.
In a weird way, ensuring others feel good about work starts with myself feeling good about work. Having a dedicated home office has been awesome. It has boosted my productivity and job satisfaction! In a way, I have settled into 2021 and 2022.