Design Manager
A good onboarding program is an often-overlooked but powerful tool for equity. The way you start out on your journey at a company sets the tone for how your entire experience will be. Regardless of the staff member's location, you don’t want an experience where it all depends on how comfortable they are with asking questions and seeking out answers for themselves. Sometimes we reward people for having an extroverted, gregarious personality, and who naturally feel comfortable asking 100 questions and pulling the information out that they need. But people with *any* personality or background should be able to come in and be successful. The keys are documentation, consistency, and iteration—so that regardless of whether someone's coming in physically to an office or connecting from their home, you can feel confident that they're having the same great onboarding experience.
I'm a Product Design Manager at Condé Nast who's very into DesignOps (and ops of any kind, really), documentation, remote-first culture, getting things organized, and supporting an entire team with the best environment I can create. With an 18-year career in tech so far including a stint as Director of Support at Tumblr, I transitioned to the design world in 2019 and have spent the last couple of years learning about and practicing DesignOps. I'm a city mouse but I enjoy taking day trips in the country, and I love history and antiques and really anything old that has a story to tell. I live in Richmond, Virginia's Church Hill neighborhood with my partner and two kids.
