Timeline

The Interactive Systems Design program is to “traing students in all aspects of the design and development of interactive systems”, so although it doesn’t say it in the title, it is aimed at grooming UI UX Designers. It’s comprised of 3 core areas:
1. Art – design nice looking things
2. Psychology – understand how people think and use things
2. Computer Science – be able to make these usable & visually pleasing things.

This program was relatively new to the U of S when I took it. My graduating class had only 4 people in it and we were the 4th class to graduates from this program.

While in University, I was an Executive on the Computer Science Students’ Society (CSSS) which involved designing all the brochures and advertising for the Computer Science Career Fairs and contributing to planning events.

And so it began…it’s so true, that you learn more in the first month at a job than your entire education. The biggest change at Vendasta from school was working with a cross-functional team compared to all your projects being with other Computer Science students in University. There are so many smart and talented people at Vendasta, I have learnt something different from every person I am lucky enough to work with.

As you go through this timeline, you will learn about all the different hats and lessons I’ve learned while at Vendasta. 

During this period, I was the PM of our Website Pro product — “managed WordPress hosting on Google Cloud Platform”. This role came about through a concoction of events:
– A trial period of dividing R&D into “Development” and “Strategy” teams
– My love  of dreaming up the big picture of how a system could work (and loved even more: figuring out how multiple systems could work together) 
– My past experience in making WordPress websites
– My “chop-chop let’s just get stuff done” personality coming out in various projects
– The PM I worked with moving on to another opportunity 

During this time, I worked closely with the “Development” team’s PM while I got a taste of:
– Public speaking through being the primary contact for updating the company, stakeholders, and customers
–  Pricing strategy by researching competitors and talking to customers to put together a proposed pricing structure
– Revenue forecasting by trying my hand at proposing what our revenue targets should be for the quarter, year, and next several years

I really enjoyed the PM role but ultimately what I’m most passionate about is solves the big picture. At Vendast each team is a piece of the puzzle. When I was a PM I felt confined to one team. But, as a UX Designer, I had more freedom to bring teams together to solve the big cross-team puzzle. 

I look back at this conference and think “wow Vendasta, you really believe in me!”. For someone 2 years out of school (almost to the date) I’m amazed and so thankful that Vendasta trusted little me to get on the stage at a conference with all our biggest customers there. While at the conference, I also ran a booth for the two products I was the UX Designer for at the time — Website Pro and Social Marketing.  At the time, I  was also the designer for our Multi-location platform, which many of our biggest customers use. I answered questions, discussed customers’ ideas and feedback, and showed prototypes of all three of these products.

In the Fall of 2018, I was a part of kicking off a brand new team.  The process we followed with this team is how I’d love to work with all teams.

We started by having a Team Offsite “Onsite” where we all met in a room at the office for a day. During this meeting we had different people from the company come in to talk about SMBs and their problems (that we could solve). We visited an SMB and showed them our initial assessement report that we had ran for their business. The business owner talked through the report: what they were most interested in, how the report made them feel, and what was missing that they wish was in the report. After, we mapped out the user journey and selected an area to focus on.

As a team, we put together a Strategy doc:
-what is the problem we want to solve?
-who are the key stakeholders (customers and internal)?
-reference feedback that has come in (Hotjar, UserVoice, emails, staff, etc.)
-Draft a plan

After getting feedback on the Strategy doc, the PM and myself put together wireframes to get more feedback on. I put together a plan for how we could iterate on the current report and defined all the new components needed. I applied the componts into an interactive prototype that I then showed to customers, friends and family, and internally. 

Deciding on the highest value items:
I highlighted which items were the most valuable as indicated from my user tests and the developers indicated the feasibility so we could weigh out the best bang for our buck. Once that was decided, I put together a First Milestone mock that could then be used by in marketing resources. Once the milestone was released we measured results and decided what was to focus on in our future iterations.

I have an ever-growing library of activities I pull out to help solve problems as a team. Everyone has something different to contribute. It doesn’t matter if you are designer or not, you still have great ideas for how the user experience should work. My workshops cover a wide range of stage a project might be in. A few of my favourite workshops include:

-Mapping the problem
-Crazy 8s 
-Lightning Decision Jam
-Dot voting
-Design Sprints (deconstructed) 
-Card sorting
-User journey mapping
-Focus groups

I’m lucky to be a part of such a fast growing company and have the opportunity to grow with the company. I am a subject expert at Vendasta, getting to work on some of our most complicated projects, driving vision, and being able to provide leadership within the UX team. 

Yes, this picture is of me doing an All-Hands presentation to the entire company…with Covid-19 forcing everyone in the office to work from home and morale being down, I had to get creative to keep spirits up. Wearing silly disguises in meetings and taking time each week to connect with employees as people were a few of my tactics keep morale up. Because when you conduct an interview on Valentine’s Day wearing heart glasses, how could you not want to be a part of this fun company? 

Previous onboarding:

• Varied by the trainer: in the content covered, in the depth of information, and in expectations of the new hire
• Had to be in-person: the trainer relied on being able to see when the new hire was needing help or out of work to do
• Time-consuming: trainers needed to spend most of the new hire’s first few weeks with them

I first gathered all training resources into one place. Then, when a new hire started, I would train them using all the resources. After, I would look for areas to improve, make notes myself and ask the new hire for feedback. Iterating with every new hire.

New onboarding:

Consistent and repeatable by other trainers. It’s broken into 4 sections:

• Design training
  The design process, measuring UX impact on business metrics, product history, and more. The skills of the Design team are leveraged by having specific Designers teach specific topics. 
• Shadowing
  Shadowing other departments and Product Designers.
• Starter Project
  An independent project, consisting of a user scenario they work through, herustic evaluation, and using Vendasata’s documentation processes.

I took Reforge’s Growth Series that covers: retention & engagement, acquisition, monetization, growth models, user psychology, and experiments. Reforge has a ton of great material for tech companies.

I have a subscription to the program and have taken other modules that I have been able to apply to my job. For example, I took the Product Leadership course and was inspired by the model they use for measuring PM skills and growth. I made my own version of this model for Product Designers that I used with my own design team and iterated on over time. In addition to setting personal goals, my team can use this model to show their own skill set and where they want to grow to their team so that they can better collaborate and learn from each other. Here is an example of the model for my own skills: Design Competency Model: Stephanie 

When Vendasta acquired CalendarHero, their leadership team took over leading my division. The CalendarHero product became the 7th product added to Vendasta’s 6 in-house built products. I played a large role in the strategy and execution for how CalendarHero’s software would fit into Vendasta’s software. 

With new leadership came new ideas that I welcomed with an open mind. We were able to work together to introduce better processes for: 

– UX tracking: Adding PostHog tracking that Design and PMs could easily modify

– “Quick win” prioritization: On icebox where Designers and PMs could put in small valuable improvements that could be executed during a percentage of a team’s time (percentage varied by product). Each team would meet (Designer, PM, and Dev lead) to discuss and select the most valuable items to prioritize each sprint. 

– Documentation culture: Our division has been frequently praised as being the most organized division in the company. 

*Note: when CalendarHero joined, we did a reorg and my direct reports went from 8 people to 3, a much more tight knit team.