AM: To-dos, sprint planning, meetings and Sketch

9am: 

In terms of my workflow, it really depends on the sprint that we’re doing. We work according to an agile Scrum system, Basically we go through the current sprint and talk about what’s happening in the next sprint. As a Sr designer, I need to have everything prepared for the week ahead so that the developers can do their job. That’s my challenge at the moment, I have a daily meeting with the development team, This consists of a short Webex call with about twenty people who are mostly located in Prague, San Jose, and Pittsburg.

11am:

At 11am, I have a daily meeting with the development team. This consists of a short webex call with about twenty people who are mostly located in Prague, San Jose, and Pittsburg  Most of them are mainframe developers, quality assurance and test managers. So, after the daily meeting, I look at what I need to do. At the moment, I’m working in Figma, iterating on designs and pushing pixels. I’m a product designer, so my role combines both UX and UI design. I wasn’t aware of this before I took the role, but it’s really cool because I get to practice a bit of everything. The same goes for collaborating with the developers; you don’t get that in every job, and I think this is such valuable experience. 

PM: Concepting, presentations, feedback and iteration

2pm:

I spend a lot of time in and out of the telephone booth speaking with the users. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have a concepts and alignment meeting with the client. I show them new designs that I’ve come up with, walking them through it via webex screen sharing. I also have to come prepared to talk about why I made certain design decisions. The client will either say “Hey, I don’t like it” or “Oh, I love this!” Then they’ll most likely ask if we can change this or that — the design is never final! So we continuously iterate based on client and user feedback. Keeping a user centric mindset while designing here is key.

4pm:

Once a week we have a roundtable where we (remotely) join the design team in Regensburg. We give a short presentation to show what’s happening, what we’ve worked on in the past week, what challenges we came across, what we learned, any articles we’ve read — it’s all about sharing our designs, getting feedback and avoiding that lapse in communication. It’s important that we stay connected to the design team in Regensburg despite being in different locations.

6pm – Wrapping up:

By 6pm, I’m ready to start winding down. At the end of the day, I’ll look at what’s happening tomorrow and write down my to-do list for the next day. I know lots of people write their to-do list first thing in the morning, but I don’t like that. I’ve learned that it’s much less stressful if you just offload your list before you leave work. When I get in the next day, I know exactly what I need to do.