This week’s episode is with Kathy Zheng) 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) (former Head of design at Github)
- Brian Lovin) (bookmarking repo project)
- Kat Fikui) (coworker at Github whose .readme we mentioned)
- Connor Sears) (old manager at Github)
- Jack Conte) (Cofounder of Patreon)
