My 2017 Half-time Report
What I’ve been up to in the first half of 2017
2017Half the year is over and it’s been the time of my life where I’ve felt most like an adult. I’ve stationed myself in a city for more than 6 months since university. I’ve hunted for a full-time product design job from January to July. And, I began to put down roots in different communities all around the Bay Area. As much as I miss you LA, I’ll be here for a while.
About a year ago, I came out to the Bay Area from Washington, D.C. during SF Design Week to break into the food and tech industries. That adventure is explained here. It was a great introduction to the tech + design climate in the city and gave me a sense of the skills I needed to learn to thrive out here. Fast forward to now and I’m a fully fledged product designer, I’ve attempted to launch a VR startup, I’ve broken into the food space, and I’ve settled into a number of amazing communities. Most importantly, I’ve become good friends with some incredible people who are shaking up the world.
The Product Design Job Hunt
The topic that people care about hearing the most. Breaking into tech from the social sector has probably been the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. From learning new skills + tools, the countless rejections, to the exploitation — I’ve learned an immense amount about what it takes to break into technology as a product designer. Take a look here at how I structured my time to execute the job search and keep a well-balanced life.
My takeaways
- Make sure to always get in touch with a human. When applying for a job in tech, I highly recommend going for the warm referral or cold emailing someone on the team you will potentially be working with. With cold emails, I had a high response rate because I followed up after 3–5 days if I didn’t get a response. And if it was a company I particularly liked and never heard from, I’d email another person on the team (and sometimes a bunch of people on the team). Another thing to keep in mind about this industry is that referrals will get you the interview but they don’t give you that many brownie points. You still need to kill it at the interview. This ain’t the old boy’s club. Use email search tools like: Hunter, Elucify, and Dorbell.
- Red flags for the companies that challenge you to do design work on their actual product. At the time I was doing these challenges (2 take homes and an onsite), I didn’t realize I was being exploited. One time I had this healthcare startup that had me redesign their entire product from the ground up on the whiteboard. I stood there thinking and sketching for 1.5 hours. Towards the end, I ran out of juice and they told me that my next step was to create high fidelity mockups for my white board solutions. Once you notice they are asking for real design work, speak up to tell the interviewers that their process isn’t kosher.
- What early stage startups and sexy tech companies are looking for. At early stage startups, they are looking for designers who can do all the design from: user experience, user interface, visual, communication, marketing, and collateral. It makes sense — they have limited resources and want a person who can handle all their needs. Widen your breadth of design skills if you want to work with early stage startups. And with big sexy tech companies, they want designers who are strong at both UX and UI. What they look for most in people is the ability to do both product thinking + design production exceptionally well. Be clever in your user flows and produce lots and lots of screens for your projects. Really showcase the interactions of your products and your ability to create style guides/brand experiences.
July was my last month to look for a product design role in SF as I ran out of runway. However, the right opportunity came along and now I am happily employed with Outdoorsy. Hella pumped to learn more about marketplaces as my own food startup idea is a marketplace as well!
General Updates
Things I’ve done from January to the end of June~
Collab Studio VR
In January, I participated in a Startup Weekend VR/AR/AI hackathon in Oakland. In typical Geronimo fashion, I stepped up to the plate to pitch an idea to get some public pitch practice. I pitched an idea to create an augmented reality collaboration tool where users could use digital design tools in the real world to work more effectively. Although I pitched an idea just for practice and not to really pursue the idea, I ended up with a team of 8 that I had to lead over the weekend. Leading such a diverse team (age, race, gender, skills, etc.) was an incredible experience. With technological constraints, we pivoted our product to be a VR collaboration tool instead where the feedback we got from Facebook and Unity Labs VR designers was that they’d totally buy out our product if we actually made it.
Ultimately, we ended up winning first place. Crazy. The judges were impressed with our MVP and go-to-market strategy that they approached me at the end of the hackathon. A venture capitalist put me in touch with a few investors and asked me to whip up a better pitch deck + a more fleshed out MVP. For the next few weeks I organized my team, met with VR influencers, and attempted to build out this MVP. However, trying to balance this with searching for a full-time job was incredibly difficult and resulted in 20 hour work days. Although an amazing and fun learning opportunity, I had to step out of this hustle to focus on my job hunt.
SocialImphacked Hackathon
In May I participated in a hackathon that provided engineering and design consulting work for local nonprofits. I worked with a nonprofit named Bananas that provided child care services to low income families in the Bay Area. Our team helped them create a messaging system that reminded parents to come to their re-certification appointments ready + on time. Check out the prototype here.
Food Game Strong
While I was out building my product design skills, I began to feel like I was starting to stall my growth in the food space. To challenge this I began to identify key levers to really steep myself into the food scene. Some of the things I’ve done include:
- Volunteering with CUESA. This is the nonprofit organization that runs the Ferry Building and Jack London Square farmers’ markets. What better way to get more involved than to work where all the best chefs and food entrepreneurs come to pick up fresh ingredients? I mainly contribute to CUESA by doing meal prep for their culinary program meaning I assist chefs in the meals they are presenting to an audience. Cutting up fresh produce, mixing things, cooking, and a little bit of presentation.
- Volunteering with Real Food Real Stories. This is another nonprofit organization that is run by my awesome friend Pei-Ru Kuo. She’s one of the initial people I contacted when I moved out here a year ago to get into the food game. RFRS organizes gatherings where people can learn and hear about the stories of game changing food entrepreneurs whilst of course enjoying that company’s food. Through RFRS, I’ve been able to grow closer with the Acme Bread Company, Airbnb, Sufferfest Beer, and Reem’s California.
- Attending the FoodInno Symposium in May. This event was organized by my friend Hailey that I met from my Food hackathon team in October of 2016 and a food design researcher from Stanford. Hailey and I have been tight ever since the hackathon — sharing food insights and events with each other. The event gathered food movers and shakers like Jonathan Gold, Daniel Patterson, Ali Bouzari, and Jessica Koslow to talk about the future of food innovation. It was incredible to speak with some of my food idols, learning how I can make the most impact in the space, and getting perspective on my food startup idea.
- The year I begin working on my food startup idea. So I’m beginning to flesh out and test my food startup idea. What I can tell you so far is that it is a marketplace that can allow people to offer up homecooked, cultural food experiences. In a way, it’s an Airbnb Experiences meets Feastly meets Josephine. And of course, it’s a social enterprise startup idea. Hit me up if you want to hear more and potentially collaborate!
StartingBloc Involvement
If you know me by now, I’m one of the strongest advocates of StartingBloc. This community has changed me for the better and given me the most. So I do my best to give back and pay it forward. In February I volunteered to be photographer + media lead for the LA institute. And in May, I mentored a group of new fellows for the New Orleans institute. To date, NOLA ’17 has been my favorite institute of all time.
Furthermore, we’ve been pretty successful having our SB reunions in the Bay Area. Glad to see this community spark back up on this side of the country.
Fitness Game Strong
To stay sane and healthy through the arduous job hunt these last few months — I upped my fitness game a bunch. I began working out 6 days a week and even joined a Saturday HIIT fitness crew called Bounce SF.
I learned about this fitness crew after attending a networking event at Kapor Capital in Oakland that was looking to support POC (people of color) tech entrepreneurs. If you work in Silicon Valley, I hope you are aware by now of the lack of color in your work circles. Moreover, this fitness community was designed to be inclusive and for some odd reason is mostly made up of Google employees.
Vectors Conference
Since this was my second run around SF design week, I knew how to work the design events that were worth my time and money. However, one event that I was incredibly excited about was the Vectors Conference! The event operated as a talk series that revolved around the theme of identity and diversity in tech. Many of my design heroes were there speaking like Pablo Stanley and my mentor Rafael Sergio Smith. They even had Helena Price of the techies project with a photo installation to be included on the website! This might have been one of the most amazing design events I’ve ever been to in my life.
Mentors
My seeking of mentors has slowed down a bit in 2017 but I’ve been able to create relationships with people who I now have as a personal board of advisors.
Amelia Petrovic, Principal Designer at StitchFix
I was introduced to Ameila through another mentor Jan Crisostomo. We connected immediately through our love for immigrant culture food — which was her senior thesis at Berkeley. She similarly made the pivot too from the nonprofit to the UX space. Some great advice I got from her was that agencies are great training for in-house product design roles. It teaches you how to project manage and gives you a breadth of knowledge. The downside is that you are mostly needed for visual design work. They also want you to look “designy” kind of like being suited up in Mad Men.
Diana Mounter, Design Systems Lead at Github
Diana was super helpful in giving me tips on how to be a great design leader. She highly recommended I read the book Creativity Inc. Some of these tips were:
- make people responsible for their own work or autonomous; help create ownership over functions or parts of the project
- use the scrum methodology
- don’t tell them what to do, ask them what they’re interested in doing
- celebrate small wins
She also recommended that some design systems I should really study and understand are Google’s Material Design and the Salesforce Lightning Design System.
Carmen Hernandez, UX Designer at LinkedIn
I bumped into Carmen at a Chinese New Year’s dinner I was attending in San Jose. The dinner was organized by my good product designer friend and her family. Carmen was super helpful in giving me advice on how to work my way through tech to get a solid product design job at a sexy company — nailing a job at a 2nd tier company making it much easier to get the sexy job. Makes sense. She also showed me what she looks for in portfolios when she hires people for design at LinkedIn. Both strong visuals + case studies showing product thinking. She was also awesome about considering me when her team was hiring, resulting in me being reached out by a LinkedIn design recruiter.
Oliver Blank, Senior Designer and Program Manager at Google.org
Olly has become one of my most important social design mentors. He has given me the most fruitful advice to date and is consistent with his check ins. I brought him in to Tradecraft to share his insights with designers who were interested in social impact as well. During the talk he mentioned some of the work he did on the ground for the refugee crisis — sometimes seeing people die right in front of him. His advice was that sometimes tech isn’t always the best solution. It’s about what can you do right now in the moment to make the most impact. Moreover he continues to help my friends and I with launching our ideas for social impact.
Marcin Wichary, Design lead at Medium
If you’ve read my other posts, you may have noticed by now that I’ve made my way through most of all the design leads at Medium. When I spoke with Marcin, I noticed how thoughtful and careful he was with his responses. He was writing notes down very diligently whenever I spoke. He shared his experience with me about how he started in computer science and eventually moved into design because he was so concerned about the user interfaces he was creating. He wanted to be more involved in the design process. He eventually became a typography person and began teaching others about it. He was very ecstatic and talked really fast because I could see that he thinks at a million miles a minute.
Nikolas Laufer-Edel, Product Manager at Lyft
Nik was a pretty straightforward guy. I sought out his knowledge because at the time I became much more interested in potentially becoming a product manager. My take aways from him include: figuring out what the problem is. Where does the team invest? The biggest role of a PM is prioritization. What is the problem and what should I be working on? What do I need to do to get everyone on board? The PM’s main job is to ask the better question.
Biggest lessons learned for the first half of 2017
- Job hunting is a full-time job itself. On average, I spent at least 8 hours a day working towards finding the right job. The process includes: finding the companies, emailing the right people at the company, following up with all your applications, prepping for your interviews, building/shifting your portfolio, keeping your design skills sharp, staying up to date on industry news, doing take home design exercises, etc. It’s really just a cluster fuck and requires an immense amount of focus. Shifting into product design is definitely not easy but it is so worth it. And most people in this profession now are transitioning from unrelated backgrounds as well. Stay diligent.
- While job hunting, stay involved with other activities. While job hunting is a full-time job, it’s still important to be a human being too. Stay active, enjoy your hobbies, and seek new experiences. My mentor Olly talked about how Google hires “Googley” people which translates into T-shaped people — meaning people who are generally interesting because they are good at a lot of things, but they still go super deep into one area. Continue being a multifaceted person.
- The food industry is shifting fast with technology. The food space is one of the most massive market opportunities in tech. From Soylent, to machines taking over labor, from lab grown meats, to food marketplaces, to the relentless food delivery space. Things are limitless right now for the thing that fuels the human race: food. My advice to you is to get involved now.
What are some things you’ve learned so far this year?
Tweet me at @geronimocramos!
