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)

Kathy Zheng - How to make the jump to staff designer 49:22 Share

Dive Club 🤿

Shownotes Transcript

Kathy Zheng - How to make the jump to staff designer