Being Wrong
“To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost in thought, it is also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying, but in the end […]
Tips for Hiring Designers for Remote Teams
Creating a great design team and designing great products means hiring great designers. Automattic has been hiring people around the world to work remotely for over 10 years. More recently, we’ve been scaling up and […]
Hangout Life
One huge advantage of remote environments: Face time is a scarce resource. This is a good thing. It makes you treat it as a valuable resource — something you have to be careful not to […]
It’s not about the page views
“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” ~Kurt Vonnegut Let’s face it: Blogging is hard. Writing — not to mention writing well — is challenging for […]
Designing Your Remote “Office”
Photo credit: Matteo Vistocco “So, where do your designers sit?” I was at a lunch table during a design leadership conference late last year, chatting with other leaders in the industry. This question left me…confused. I […]
The Messy Middle
“No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” ~Helmuth Graf von Moltke Ever been in this scenario?: A new project starts. Everyone’s excited to jump in and get started. Everything is possible. Only good […]
Running remote design sprints
I lead a team of designers who work on WordPress.com and other products. Last year, my team ran our first design sprint together in-person at a team meetup. It was a great way to kick […]
Travel, Design, & Beginner's Mind
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” ~Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind I’m fortunate to get to travel internationally several times a year, both for work and personal […]
Kill Your Darlings
As designers, we spend most of our time solving problems for our users by building products. How can we save a user time on a task? How can we make an experience more delightful? What […]
