Where in the world are you?
Sydney, Australia.
What stage of your career are you at?
About 10 years in. I started out studying Computer Science and HCI, then got involved with startups and spent some time in the valley. After that, I moved to Sydney and joined Atlassian where I worked as a lead designer for 4 years on JIRA, the growth team, and their cloud platform. I left Atlassian in 2016 to start my own startup Dovetail which is a new product for organizing and analyzing user feedback & research.
What are you current challenges?
Transitioning from designer to founder / CEO. Traditionally I’ve always enjoyed taking on a wide range of skills, but not being an expert in any one. At Dovetail I’m looking after design, research, marketing, finance, legal, along with a fair amount of coding. A lot of these things are completely new to me, and often there are times where I’d love to delegate something to someone with much more expertise than me.
What aspect/s of UX are passionate about?
I’ve always enjoyed the day-to-day diversity of product design. It never really felt like I was doing the same thing each day. Some days I would be ‘in the zone’ creating icons or writing a blog post, other days running user testing sessions or workshops, speaking at conferences, or visiting customers on a contextual inquiry. No two days were the same. I also enjoy the challenge of intersecting design and business – lots of companies are still trying to understand the value of design. Finding tactful ways to convince business leaders that “good design is good business” is a great challenge. Don’t really have that challenge now!
Cats or dogs?
Dogs. I had a west highland white terrier called Angus growing up.
Excited to join!
.