COMMUNITY
Sharing my experience
Teaching the next wave of UX Designers
COURSE INSTRUCTOR, ACADEMY XI
A common question you’ll be asked in job interviews is “What does success mean to you?” or “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”. For me, it was to be mentoring or teaching new or young designers.
I’ll let you in on a little secret - there was a selfish element to that answer. Personally, it meant I would’ve shaken off the imposter syndrome and was confident that I knew my stuff.
I was overwhelmed when the team at Academy Xi reached out to me to co-teach a UX Design short course. In fact, it was the first course in their newly established arm in Melbourne, Australia, and I jumped at the opportunity.
Along with delivering course material, my real focus was providing support to any of the 12 students as needed. Whether this was running group workshops, spending 1 on 1 time after class to provide individualised teachings or simply answering questions over Slack.
It was incredibly rewarding to see students put what they learnt to the test and see them flourish in the careers as UX designers. Not only have a few created successful design careers for themselves, but have also gone on to co-teach short courses themselves.
So, did my idea of success come true? Well, although the imposter syndrome hasn’t completely disappeared, I certainly built confidence in my own abilities.
That’s pretty successful to me.
How we had to change our culture to change our product
SDNOW SEPTEMBER 2019 MEETUP
I’d been working on REA Group’s new customer self service platform since mid-2018. Building a platform isn’t an easy feat, nor can it be done by a single team. It requires focus, stakeholder management, compromise, prioritisation and dedication from across the business. It’s a journey, and it was one that our culture wasn’t prepared for.
I remember reflecting with one of our Product Managers on the incredible journey we’d been on advocating for a change in the way we work across the business, when her passion stopped her in her tracks - “We need to do a talk on this.”
After much consideration, we took the big leap and did our first public speaking gig at the SDNow Meetup in September 2019.
We often describe culture as what it’s like to work at a place - What are the people like? Are they passionate? Can you bring in dogs? Is there free fruit? All of this is important (well, almost all…) but we often overlook at how this influences the way we think about, design and deliver products. And unsurprisingly, your culture can shine through if you know what to look for.
We shared the journey we’d been on, highlighting where our culture was, how this showed up in our products, and what we’ve slowly been changing to drive the next wave of success in REA Group’s history.