Design leadership
I've led as a manager and, more recently, as an IC, where nobody reports to you and the work has to do the convincing across design, product and engineering. Leadership wanted a long-term strategies for the news business. Over the years I ran multiple design sprints, built the prototypes and presented across the company, and it shaped squad roadmaps and how the organization was structured.
Role
Led design sprints, built prototypes, presented ideas to leadership, all design teams and cross functional groups
Keywords
Design Sprints. Organization alignment
Date
Spanned across multiple years
I hosted a 3-day design sprint in the LA office with around 10 people: product managers, product designers, content designers, engineers and researchers. To set the stage and expectation, I invited our news GM and SVP of Design to establish context at the start and offer feedback during the final presentation.
Our partners were new to this process, so there was a lot of preparation before the workshop. For example, kickoff meeting, answer individual's questions or concerns, help stakeholders to prepare context presentation etc. It turned into a productive 3 days workshop that creates alignments, and produced ideas the team was using years later.
We have more than 30 new ideas and all were left with an actionable cards for the team to refine and prioritize.
I then led the design team to further develop the ideas.
One of them was Storyline. It packages the key information around a story so readers don't have to hunt across search, social media and dozens of websites. It saved time and take off the stress of information overload
Another one was an editorial tool. Producing a story took a writer to research and draft, then an illustrator or photo editor to art it, about two days end to end. This brought it to roughly an hour. AI drafts the summary and generates the artwork, and editors keep every judgment call.
This concept is rich article with multiple perspectives. It combines reporting from several sources with editorial work on top, so a reader gets what's happening and why it matters up front, and the full piece underneath if they want it.
New initiatives are formed
Led to OEM partnership conversations
Influenced organization structure
Inspired squads roadmaps
Ideas were still circulating years later in other properties
Next project:
Design work and portfolio site made by Cat Tai