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.

Running a Google Design Sprint from start to end

“This was A productive and fun day. Everyone that attended, said they really enjoyed the process, the option of being a part of the thinking process and the general atmosphere. There is a consensus we need more sessions like these and with additional team members.” – Etay Geller, VP product at 90min This is the […]

Does design even matter?

For the past 5 years I have worked for several design studios and digital agencies designing mostly for startups and entrepreneurs on products ranging from small and niche apps to entire cyber security systems. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot but the main goal for most of the projects seemed to be […]