Building a CD team
How do I lead?
I’m friendly, strategic, and results driven. I also try to be funny because it helps people connect. I get things done and tend to make good partnerships along the way. I try to always assume good intentions and build on what’s there. I leave my ego at the door but I bring my high standards everywhere.
My biggest strength as a leader is the ability to align and inspire groups of people to accomplish great things.
Approach
Tactically here’s where focus my efforts when building a team -
People is first, I hire and empower great folks.
Product is a close second, my role is to have a high-quality bar for product experiences and hold my people accountable.
Process is a smaller but mighty portion. I don’t like to over process, but I pull in some processes when it helps us be more efficient.
People
Building the Zendesk Content Design team during the pandemic was hard - I didn’t meet most of the people I hired because they were global and Covid barred trips. But despite that, we had a super strong team bond that led to good design culture. I also ensured that the content designers deeply understood product strategy and that they were working toward the business and the product vision. This helped with their career growth and satisfaction.
Product
Our job is to make products easier to understand, this makes them easier to use.
At Zendesk, I was able to build strategic, trusting product relationships by collaborating closely with product design and product management to build rad products with excellent content and information design.
