Find a niche you love, specialize, succeed (w/ Samuel Hulick, UserOnboard.com)
Our guest today is none other than Samuel Hulick, Founder, of UserOnboard.
Samuel started as a developer, and eventually found himself focussing on UX design and customer success. That led him to find that one crucial part of the experience that leads to customers being successful in the product, is the user onboarding experience. From there, he only kept moving up the staircase, became a user onboarding specialist, founded UserOnboard.com, and wrote a book about it.
Samuel wrote his e-book, ‘The Elements of User Onboarding’, entirely on Keynote, which was later developed into a whole package, where he shares teardowns, tactics, strategies and what he learned onboard.
Designing as ‘Change Agents’ (w/ Maria Giudice, former VP Experience at Autodesk)
It is our pleasure to present to you Maria Giudice, Former VP, Experience Design at Autodesk.
Maria founded and led a design studio named ‘Hot Studio’ for over 15 years, which was then acquired by Facebook, where she was a Director of product Design. Later on she took another big leap, left facebook to take on the role of VP Creative at Autodesk, where she focused on building a customer-centric company and leading a design team of ‘change agents’. Recently, Maria left Autodesk and is now taking her time to contemplate her next career move.
Maria also co-wrote a book, called ‘Rise of the DEO’, which is about leaders who understand the transformative power of design, they are change agents and these leaders called DEOs—Design Executive Officers—and they are our new heroes.
Finding Your Product’s Level of Readiness and Manifesting Design systems (w/ Keenan Cummings, Airbnb)
Our guest today is the inspiring Keenan Cummings, Team Leader at Airbnb and former Co-founder/Creative Director of Days (acquired by Yahoo!) and the Designers Debate Club.
Keenan started his career as a designer in NYC, working in brand agencies and doing print work, where he landed what he thought would be a dream project, redesigning and rebranding the Chicago Cubs. However Keenan felt that there were bigger problems he wanted to dive in to, so he made the transition into digital design. He co-founded Days app, and then found his path into product design eventually joining Airbnb, where he led the development of their design systems and leads an extraordinary team.
Scaling a Design Team, Episode #2: The Hacking UI Design Panel event in San Francisco
This November we teamed up with Design&Startups and launched a free product design panel event, discussing product team structures, responsibilities, and workflows. It was an amazing experience for me hosting the first ever Hacking UI event in San Francisco. The panelists were amazing and listening to what they had to say was super insightful!
Scaling a Design Team, Episode #1: feat. Billy Kiely, VP Product at Invision
In this episode we talked with the amazing Billy Kiely, VP Product of Invision. Billy was the first designer at Invision, and he scaled the company alongside Clark, the CEO, with design thinking as one of it’s core values. We talk about the structure of Invision’s product team, about how Billy made hiring decisions, what it’s like to work at Invision on a daily basis, and more.
This is our first episode, so we would love to hear your feedback! Write us in the comments!
