A Day in the Life of a Product Designer Project Lead: Quarantine Edition
Did you ever wonder what a designer does? Or, what about a design lead? This week, I take you with me during a random Tuesday at work. Off we go!
5:50 a.m. By now, I’ve been at my desk with my tea and water for a half-hour, scrolling aimlessly through the internet. I realize I haven’t checked in with work yet, so I check my email and our slack channel to see if anything urgent happened overnight. Some of our development trains are on the other side of the world, so checking this early lets me get a head start on any issue that might’ve popped up. It happens on occasion, and usually hard to predict. Nothing pops up that warrants my immediate attention, so I go back to my personal life.
8:05 a.m. I check my email and slack again. By now, the rest of the project leadership team is also awake. If something urgent has occurred outside of my normal scope of visibility, this is the time of day I’ll find out about it. We try to communicate our needs of others early to people so that the rest can adjust and accommodate schedules. This has been happening frequently recently, but thankfully, today’s a dud.
8:38 a.m. I go sit at my desk, with a bowl of granola and milk, while pretending that it’s a tastier cereal. I move my agenda and drinks out of the way and wake up my work laptop. Meanwhile, I wrap my RISD flannel blanket over me; It’s my “desk” blanket, and my jumpsuit today isn’t feeling very warm. I decide I’m not ready to log in yet, so I eat my pretend-cereal. I’ve already checked-in twice with work this morning, so I feel comfortable not doing it again until closer to nine. As of now, my day looks like this:
9 a.m. to 10 a.m. Meeting with Legal and Compliance
The first goal is to get my junior designer the feedback he needs, so that he can get their approval and we can move forward with this work item.
The second goal, is to put my relationship manager hat on, and resolve some issues between us and them. COV-ID has placed a strain on all teams, slowing down the normal pace of work. Leading up to this meeting, L&C shared some feedback with me that we (Design) are adding friction to an already complicated situation. Essentially, we’re moving too fast. I am sensitive to our current circumstances, and I need to resolve this. It’s critical for design to never be seen as the root cause of issues.
10 a.m. to 12 p.m. Work Time
I have dedicated work time to get projects that I don’t delegate moving forward. I have two bodies of work that I need to wrap up. I hope that two hours is enough.
My work time is also when my junior designer connects with me, whether they have questions or need guidance on something. This will also be the time I reach out to our director, stakeholders, and others for run-of-the-mill business. It’s not great that I overlapped these two, but I didn’t have much of an option today.
12 p.m. to 1 p.m. Lunch Break
I have a habit of skipping lunch breaks because something always runs over. Since working from home, I’ve found that having a dedicated break in the middle of the day helps me destress. It is also time where my partner and I catch up, despite having desks right next to each other.
1 p.m. to 2 p.m. Meeting Prep
I have a 1:1 scheduled with my director. I want to prepare for that conversation, as I’m not sure what may come of it.
2 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. Denise & Director 1:1
The meeting. dundunduuuun!
2:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. Playing Catch Up
As a design lead, I have to wear multiple hats. We are currently blocked on a few items, due to new requirements that just rolled out. Traditionally, a team’s project manager would resolve these. This is unavailable for me, so I’ll have to lean in and support by getting this work done myself.
4 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Meeting with Project Leadership
The strain COV-ID has placed all over the company, has caused significant delays to the internal approval process. This is resulting in delayed timelines for design work that others have dependencies on. I made the difficult decision to alert the rest of the leadership team before I had a solution, to be transparent; Often, I find that it’s this type of transparency that is the best medicine to bad news. This meeting intends to strategize how to move forward. I hope to have a solution by then.
4:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. Stakeholder Meeting
One of our approval reviews kicked up concerns that need to be addressed with the greater team. I need all the respective owners to give their approval to move forward with this work.
5 p.m to 5:30 p.m. Prep for Tomorrow
At the end of the day, I like to get organized for tomorrow and plan my day out. I also wrap up notes, answer emails, and generally wind down.
8:54 a.m. I log in. Taking notes on my day is going to slow me down. At least, it’s a Tuesday.
9 a.m. Skype is testing me today, by not letting me log in easily. I need to restart the application twice. Luckily, when I make it on the call, I’m not the only one running late. Pleasantries are shared while we wait for the missing stakeholder. My junior designer takes lead and walks the stakeholders through the experience. I am reminded of when I used to be the junior designer, and how much I hated it when the lead designers didn’t let me talk. I’m secretly proud of myself that I genuinely like moving out of the way to let others shine. I wonder if this is a woman thing though...
9:45 a.m. Our meeting ended early. Although I wasn’t leading our stakeholders through the work, one of my many hats is to be able to plug the gaps that my teammates can’t answer. For this meeting, I explained technical front-end and back-end functionality and their constraints, negotiated requirements, explained program leadership decisions, and identified and explained impacts of decisions to other work in flight. Since we ended early, I also took the opportunity to what time we had left to have an open discussion about our opportunities for better collaboration. We come to an agreement and a mutual understanding of needs. This conversation flags effort level and team level fixes we need to implement asap. I thank them for their time.
9:53 a.m. My junior designer asks to check in with me. I await his call. He takes a little too long, so I use the bathroom in the interim. As I walk to my desk, he’s calling me and we catch up. While on the call, I get an invite for a meeting later today after my 1:1. There’s no agenda (there never is), just an ominous invite titled, “Questions”. People have gotten into the habit of knowing that I know the answer. It’s not a bad problem to have, and I like the person who’s requesting this: I click accept.
10 a.m. Our design organization’s weekly meeting is starting now. It’s been a while since I listened in, but right now, I don’t have the time. I always tell myself that I’ll get to it next week, but I never do. First and foremost, I need to send some communications out to several different groups of stakeholders about a range of things. Relationship management means sometimes going above and beyond to gain, maintain, and deepen someone’s trust with you. I’ve learned that often knowledge is power and currency.
10:25 a.m. A knock on our apartment door can only mean we have deliveries! I take a short break to deal and then go back to my desk. I start loosely working, but my partner is wound up with some of his packages. Eventually, I get back to work and prep for this afternoon’s meeting with my peers at four.
10:48 a.m. I’m pinged by a stakeholder, needing information about some decisions that were made. I give her an update, and somehow we end up talking about my last name, what it means, and the family story attached to it. I figured that we have to make up for social distancing somehow. I get back to prepping for my afternoon meeting.
11:18 a.m. Done prepping for the leadership meeting, and I start working on my growing list of unread emails. I don’t like it when it gets too high.
11:30 a.m. I look at my list of to-dos for this morning. I’m confident I can knock one of them out, so I get started, but I get distracted working on my blog. I think I need a break, so I sign off my computer and start my lunch break earlier than intended. Others know to give me a call if I can’t be reached digitally.
1:07 p.m. I head back to work and prep for my meeting with my boss. I hope to get this done, so I can get back on track with the day.
1:59 p.m. My headphones are in and I’m watching the clock to turn to two so that I can dial in.
2:00 p.m. Boom game time… but he’s not on the line yet. Okay. This is fine. Wait, never mind. He’s here!
2:30 p.m. That didn’t go as well as I wanted, but no time to pout. I have the ominous “Questions” meeting to jump on. Turns out, one of our dev teams has questions, and their lead facilitates the conversation. We discuss how they should implement certain items, review expected behavior, and what are some of the system limitations they are facing. We make progress, and I help them address all their issues. We’re good. I’ve learned that because our dev teams rotate out and I don’t, I sometimes find myself explaining technical pieces to them. Whatever works, right?
2:49 p.m. The dev meeting ends early. I have a few minutes to process what happened earlier with my boss. I understand it, but it still sucks. Oh, a slack ping from one of the lead developers… (P.S. I sometimes get jealous that there’s more than one of them.) We align on tech stacks and time tables.
3:49 p.m. As I’m wrapping talking to IT up, I get an email that a file has been shared. I know the person who sent it to me, and this usually means she needs me to review this technical demo as soon as possible. I think I know what it is, and it should be quick, so before she sends me an email giving me context, I open it, review it, and ping her saying it looks great. She’s grateful I can read her mind. Easy win.
4 p.m. The meeting with the leadership team begins. In the end, it goes well. In advance to this meeting, I reworked out timelines to communicate the extent of the delays, and impact on other areas. There is no further discussion needed, and the highest person on the call jokingly thanks me for having a meeting to show how great I am. We’ll communicate this plan to the impacted teams so that they can make their adjustments.
4:30 p.m. Met with stakeholders to review what was kicked up from one of our approval processes. We had different views on how we should move forward but negotiated until we found a compromise we are all happy with. With that, design is in the clear to move forward.
4:56 p.m. I see what’s on the list for tomorrow. It’s the three items I had planned to get done today. Good thing that my entire morning is clear, which should be enough. I block it off on my calendar, and plan to be unavailable In the morning. I need dedicated work time. Easy planning. I’ll deal with the nuances tomorrow morning.
5:05 p.m. I sign off from a good day.
9:18 p.m. I get a text saying I’ll be needed all day tomorrow; I say, “Not a problem”.
