Running effective 1:1’s as a design manager

A 1:1 meeting consists of private discussions between two collaborators, such as a manager and a direct report. These meetings are usually held on a regular basis and can last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. Throughout my career I’ve been though my different types for formats of 1:1, as an individual contributor […]

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My father ran his own business for most of his professional life. I always admired that he was able to venture out on his own and not take the easier route of working for someone else. I grew up knowing that running a small business was not easy, to say the least. Not only did […]

Learning to listen

Designers at Automattic have one common goal that is clearly stated in our creed: I will never stop learning. It’s something that I refer back to when being challenged with a new idea, work method or model of interacting with people that feels foreign to me. It’s that initial fear of being exposed to a new […]

Buying views with coffee

At Automattic we love to experiment, and as part of an initiative to be more empathetic with our customers we were posed with the following challenge: Pick a colleague’s post, and explain why you chose that one. Outline a plan for the post to get 1,000+ views. Imagine that you have a US $20 budget […]

Conquering isolation on a remote design team

Every designer has experienced overlooking something along a project lifecycle. We are so focused on the task at hand that we want to keep going and fail to request feedback. In a context of remote work there’s even more room for this to happen as there’s more isolation, and we need to have mechanisms in place […]