Kathy Zheng - How to get promoted to staff designer (Dive Club Ep. 59)

Описание: This week’s episode is with Kathy Zheng (https://x.com/pifafu) who is currently the Head of design at a Web3 protocol called Optimism. But before that she was the first designer at Patreon and went on to spend over 6 years at Github.

So the goal of this conversation is to look at how Kathy grew as a designer while at Github and identify the specific milestones on her journey to reaching senior and eventually staff designer.

We get into the weeds about:

How the role of staff and senior designers differ
The traits shared by the best designers at Github
How to give your ideas a chance to become memes
How to avoid conversational spinout on your project
How to identify opportunities using systems thinking
How Kathy is growing as a design leader at Optimism
Specific techniques for storytelling and presenting ideas

Some of the people mentioned in this episode:

Max Schoening - https://x.com/mschoening?lang=en (former Head of design at Github)
Brian Lovin - https://x.com/brian_lovin (bookmarking repo project)
Kat Fikui - https://x.com/katfukui (coworker at Github whose .readme we mentioned)
Connor Sears - https://x.com/connors (old manager at Github)
Jack Conte - https://x.com/jackconte (Cofounder of Patreon)

Chapters
0:00 Raycast
0:34 Intro
1:48 Joining Github
4:03 Combatting conversational spin out
6:16 Getting promoted to senior designer
10:01 Getting momentum on an unstable idea
19:55 How to break out of the execution box
24:41 Different mediums to communicate ideas
28:21 Meming your ideas
31:39 Kathy's transition to web3
36:41 What makes designing for web3 unique
40:45 Advice for Kathy's younger self
45:08 How Kathy wants to grow as a leader

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