Kathy Zheng - How to make the jump to staff designer
Dive Club 🤿26 Kesä 2024

Kathy Zheng - How to make the jump to staff designer

This week’s episode is with Kathy Zheng who is currently the Head of design at a Web3 protocol called Optimism. But before that she was the first designer at Patreon and went on to spend over 6 years at Github.

So the goal of this conversation is to look at how Kathy grew as a designer while at Github and identify the specific milestones on her journey to reaching senior and eventually staff designer.

We get into the weeds about:

  • How the role of staff and senior designers differ
  • The traits shared by the best designers at Github
  • How to give your ideas a chance to become memes
  • How to avoid conversational spinout on your project
  • How to identify opportunities using systems thinking
  • How Kathy is growing as a design leader at Optimism
  • Specific techniques for storytelling and presenting ideas

Some of the people mentioned in this episode:

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