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Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Working at a FAANG company (Fb/Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) has pretty awesome perks like competitive pay, benefits, reputation, & impact.
Starfish saying “today’s the day!” Me during offer decisions But although there are lots of articles on how to get into them, there aren’t as many specific insights on what to do after you’re accepted
fish in bags that escaped from an aquarium tank saying “now what?” and designing at the largest tech companies in the world is pretty different than small to medium sized companies due to the scale and ambiguous problem spaces.
Here are some tips I’ve learned along the way
Share your work more!
people watching a presentation Make sure your work has high visibility With a lot of projects going on, it’s up to you to ensure your cross-functional partners and teammates have eyes on your relevant updates and work. This can happen at design crit, 1–1s, weekly meetings, or lunch and learn sessions. Sharing work can help identify any blindspots you might not have been aware of, lead to actionable feedback, and improve collaboration It’s also extremely helpful in performance feedback since your peers will remember what work you’ve done. 2. Don’t wait, learn to unblock yourself
person pressing an unblock button image from Cybernews Being “blocked” means there’s some external issue preventing you from making progress on your design task.
In the beginning, I used to just call out to cross-functional partners that I was blocked on a task during weekly syncs and waited for it to get fixed.
Over time, I got into the habit of always writing down assumptions, POCs, and next steps on how to get unblocked. Taking ownership of the issue, asking for updates, and any ways I could help greatly increased the impact and efficiency of my work.
Hone your communication skills Especially when operating at a large scale company, just a small fraction of time is spent doing design work and the rest is convincing stakeholders this is the right solution via reviews, notes, presentations, alignment meetings, etc.
Pie chart with design at “15%” and explaining decisions at “85%” Design is just a giant Pacman And this small fraction gets even smaller the more senior you get or if you switch from IC to management.
A lot of new designers get frustrated by this expecting to be churning out a ton of prototypes + living in Figma all the time.
But communicating decisions isn’t a downside of the job, it is the job.
Design = Thinking made visual
Thinking = Writing
Saul Bass saying “Design is thinking made visual” David McCullough saying “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.” Pic: AZ quotes Useful resources to improve communication skills:
How to give a killer presentation [Harvard Business School article] The benefits of writing consistently [dribble article] Creating product-specific design principles to support better decision making [Nielson Norman Group article] How storytelling works in design [Interaction Design Foundation article] Communicating decisions is often done in meetings, so it becomes very important to make sure meetings are run effectively
Learn to use meeting times effectively Parkinson’s Law states that any task will inflate until all available time is spent.
Parkinson’s Law states that any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent See more info here I found this to apply to meetings, especially ones without a clear agenda or facilitator.
For example, if a meeting is an hour it will probably end at an hour but if it was 30 minutes, it would probably end closer to that.
There seems to be an anchoring bias at play.
Man saying “there’s no reason for us to have this meeting other than my boss told me to have it. So let’s just sit here quietly until time is up.” Parkinson’s law to the extreme, pic: Dilbert cartoon What I’ve found useful for this is:
📄 come in with an agenda and objective 🪵 have a dedicated decision log 🔙 be assertive in bringing back conversations from tangents. 5. Learn when to decline tasks or meetings This felt uncomfortable at first. But it isn't rude to decline a meeting that isn’t relevant or doesn’t need your input. It’s a necessary skill when it comes to prioritization.
Cup with “Yet another meeting that could have been an email” on it Always consider this before sending a meeting invite Other alternatives are
Adding “heads down Design time” blocks to your calendar that people can’t book over Propose changes to the time have meetings closer together so you have longer durations of focus time Asking for async notes ps Zoom fatigue is so real.
Explanations of ways to avoid zoom fatigue ex. Schedule breaks, have an agenda, make videos optional 6. Your experience is often team-dependent
“What is it like working at x company?”
It’s a bit hard to answer this questions without overgeneralizing because within large companies, there are a ton of teams and each has their own culture, workload, and type of design skills needed
Prior to joining my team, I thought it was useful to do introspection to see how I can work on projects that best reflect:
what my career goals are my strengths the skills I want to hone the culture I thrive in the projects that interest me 7. Responsibility at scale
Thinking through edge cases is important.
An issue affecting 1% of users is still affecting 10 million people when blown up to the scale of a billions of users.
And so is the responsibility of creating accessible and inclusive designs. 15% of the world’s population experience some form of disability
Accessibility statistics and trends ex. 15% of the world’s population experiences some form of disability. 44% of visually impaired users have a mobile screen reader. 0.02% of pages are free from WCAG conformance errors pic: Planittesting 8. Advocate for the user Avoiding decisions that over-index on metrics and making sure you’re advocating for the interest and best experience of users. As a designer, user advocacy is a responsibility of the job
design is a superpower 9. Be ok with shifting priorities and scope
This could happen at any time, so being at peace with the fact that your project could get reduced in scope, modified, or fully scrapped and learning to move on to the next one is a useful mindset.
Conclusion I hope these were useful and good luck! Reach out if you have anything else to add 😄
Working at a FAANG company (Fb/Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) has pretty awesome perks like competitive pay, benefits, reputation, & impact.
Starfish saying “today’s the day!” Me during offer decisions But although there are lots of articles on how to get into them, there aren’t as many specific insights on what to do after you’re accepted
fish in bags that escaped from an aquarium tank saying “now what?” and designing at the largest tech companies in the world is pretty different than small to medium sized companies due to the scale and ambiguous problem spaces.
Here are some tips I’ve learned along the way
Share your work more!
people watching a presentation Make sure your work has high visibility With a lot of projects going on, it’s up to you to ensure your cross-functional partners and teammates have eyes on your relevant updates and work. This can happen at design crit, 1–1s, weekly meetings, or lunch and learn sessions. Sharing work can help identify any blindspots you might not have been aware of, lead to actionable feedback, and improve collaboration It’s also extremely helpful in performance feedback since your peers will remember what work you’ve done. 2. Don’t wait, learn to unblock yourself
person pressing an unblock button image from Cybernews Being “blocked” means there’s some external issue preventing you from making progress on your design task.
In the beginning, I used to just call out to cross-functional partners that I was blocked on a task during weekly syncs and waited for it to get fixed.
Over time, I got into the habit of always writing down assumptions, POCs, and next steps on how to get unblocked. Taking ownership of the issue, asking for updates, and any ways I could help greatly increased the impact and efficiency of my work.
Hone your communication skills Especially when operating at a large scale company, just a small fraction of time is spent doing design work and the rest is convincing stakeholders this is the right solution via reviews, notes, presentations, alignment meetings, etc.
Pie chart with design at “15%” and explaining decisions at “85%” Design is just a giant Pacman And this small fraction gets even smaller the more senior you get or if you switch from IC to management.
A lot of new designers get frustrated by this expecting to be churning out a ton of prototypes + living in Figma all the time.
But communicating decisions isn’t a downside of the job, it is the job.
Design = Thinking made visual
Thinking = Writing
Saul Bass saying “Design is thinking made visual” David McCullough saying “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.” Pic: AZ quotes Useful resources to improve communication skills:
How to give a killer presentation [Harvard Business School article] The benefits of writing consistently [dribble article] Creating product-specific design principles to support better decision making [Nielson Norman Group article] How storytelling works in design [Interaction Design Foundation article] Communicating decisions is often done in meetings, so it becomes very important to make sure meetings are run effectively
Learn to use meeting times effectively Parkinson’s Law states that any task will inflate until all available time is spent.
Parkinson’s Law states that any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent See more info here I found this to apply to meetings, especially ones without a clear agenda or facilitator.
For example, if a meeting is an hour it will probably end at an hour but if it was 30 minutes, it would probably end closer to that.
There seems to be an anchoring bias at play.
Man saying “there’s no reason for us to have this meeting other than my boss told me to have it. So let’s just sit here quietly until time is up.” Parkinson’s law to the extreme, pic: Dilbert cartoon What I’ve found useful for this is:
📄 come in with an agenda and objective 🪵 have a dedicated decision log 🔙 be assertive in bringing back conversations from tangents. 5. Learn when to decline tasks or meetings This felt uncomfortable at first. But it isn't rude to decline a meeting that isn’t relevant or doesn’t need your input. It’s a necessary skill when it comes to prioritization.
Cup with “Yet another meeting that could have been an email” on it Always consider this before sending a meeting invite Other alternatives are
Adding “heads down Design time” blocks to your calendar that people can’t book over Propose changes to the time have meetings closer together so you have longer durations of focus time Asking for async notes ps Zoom fatigue is so real.
Explanations of ways to avoid zoom fatigue ex. Schedule breaks, have an agenda, make videos optional 6. Your experience is often team-dependent
“What is it like working at x company?”
It’s a bit hard to answer this questions without overgeneralizing because within large companies, there are a ton of teams and each has their own culture, workload, and type of design skills needed
Prior to joining my team, I thought it was useful to do introspection to see how I can work on projects that best reflect:
what my career goals are my strengths the skills I want to hone the culture I thrive in the projects that interest me 7. Responsibility at scale
Thinking through edge cases is important.
An issue affecting 1% of users is still affecting 10 million people when blown up to the scale of a billions of users.
And so is the responsibility of creating accessible and inclusive designs. 15% of the world’s population experience some form of disability
Accessibility statistics and trends ex. 15% of the world’s population experiences some form of disability. 44% of visually impaired users have a mobile screen reader. 0.02% of pages are free from WCAG conformance errors pic: Planittesting 8. Advocate for the user Avoiding decisions that over-index on metrics and making sure you’re advocating for the interest and best experience of users. As a designer, user advocacy is a responsibility of the job
design is a superpower 9. Be ok with shifting priorities and scope
This could happen at any time, so being at peace with the fact that your project could get reduced in scope, modified, or fully scrapped and learning to move on to the next one is a useful mindset.
Conclusion I hope these were useful and good luck! Reach out if you have anything else to add 😄
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