Episode 59
Kathy Zheng - How to make the jump to staff designer
Dive Club 🤿 · Ridd
June 26, 202449m 22s
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Show Notes
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:
- Max Schoening (former Head of design at Github)
- Brian Lovin (bookmarking repo project)
- Kat Fikui (coworker at Github whose .readme we mentioned)
- Connor Sears (old manager at Github)
- Jack Conte (Cofounder of Patreon)