tl;dr: I’ve just joined our DesignOps team. It’s basically a Digital Project Management position that allows me to use the full range of my experience to push different initiatives forward. Let me explain.
It’s a hard question for some, especially for those in tech.
So…what do I do? For the longest time, I had no idea. Between what I was doing and what I wanted to do, it was a difficult question to answer. My mom would ask and I could never give her a simple answer. Friends with whom I’d lost touch ask, never come away with an answer they could recite back to me. Throughout my 6(ish)-year career I’ve wafted from one technical discipline to another. I’ve been a technical writer at a legal firm, copywriter for an ad agency, engineer for a marketing agency and freelance designer, working (not always successfully) for myself.
That’s why the answer to this question has eluded me.
But I think I've found a solution. I’ve brought together all of that knowledge and experience into something I can say — pretty succinctly. I’m in Design Operations, helping designers work more efficiently every day. For those in tech, yes it’s that buzzy word that people have been talking about for a little while. Adding -ops to existing disciplines is a cool thing to do. You can slap -ops on the back of any word really and it automatically elevates that thing. It’s especially cool if it’s a discipline that’s fuzzier, or harder to measure, because it gives your job title a little more heft.
I’ve always wanted to facilitate the work that creatives do.
I’m a creative myself but in a different way. From an early age I’ve been a chameleon.
Being able to seamlessly blend into different environments gave me the opportunity to gain these really unique insights from all over and leverage them to offer up a brand new perspective.
Because of that, I consider myself as more of a vector who brings different disciplines and groups of people together to make stuff happen.
Whether that’s building a spreadsheet to get some data or designing assets for a deck, my creativity comes through the solutions I come up with.
So that’s what I'm doing right now. I’m immersing myself in the culture, in the industry and hope to come away with some experiences that prove valuable to myself, the team and the company.