I came in with a shaky digital design portfolio, but a ton of excitement to learn fast. I brought strong attention to detail and tenacity to learn and do better when my early work missed the mark. Later on, I stepped into the role of manager, helping a team of 8 designers support hundreds of client accounts. We primarily hired new grads who were eager to learn and grow like myself early on, and it was so rewarding to play a role in their development as professional creatives.

On my team at Yext, we were building client web pages that needed to be free of errors and tightly aligned with their brand. Our work represented not only our team but also the companies we were working for. For that reason, onboarding and training were super important. We wanted to get new employees up to speed quickly while ensuring that the quality of what they produced met our standards.

We often needed to hand off client files from one teammate to another to make all the work fit in the sprint. For that reason, we really prioritized not just clean, great-looking designs but extremely functional files that weren't going to be a pain for someone else to pick up and run with.

We took pride in having our work be accessible to anyone landing on our pages. This included color, contrast, text and tap target sizing, along with screen reader support. We occasionally had to do some finagling when a client's brand made it difficult to meet these guidelines, but enjoyed the creative challenge of meeting client expectations as well as our own accessibility standards.

Aligning a distributed team on clear objectives meant finding the right tools. For us, FigJam was essential. I helped build a virtual team board where folks could find everything they needed about the sprint and R&D. Holidays, stand-up statuses, sprint retros, and a reminder of our team values were all there for folks to reference.

The system worked. New designers:

Over my time leading the team I onboarded six designers and coached four of them to promotion, working with each on a plan to find and shore up their weak spots. I also reworked our process enough to hand everyone about five hours a week back from client work, for their own growth and team projects, without slowing our delivery. The part I'm proudest of: each person found a way to make the team better that played to their strengths, something beyond the day-to-day.