Unsolicited advice from 1-year old Junior designer in Big Tech
My tips and thoughts after working in big tech for a year
Last month, I had my 1 year anniversary working as a product designer in a large tech company. Before coming to Microsoft, I worked as a graphic designer for 3 years in a small design agency and had other design jobs before, so I had some expectations about how long it would take me to get ramped up and become “good at my job”.
I am here to tell you that those expectations were all wrong. I am still gaining company knowledge and would need a lot more opportunities to grow, aka become “good at my job”. What I can say, however, is that now I feel comfortable about this ambiguous stage.
I believe getting onboarded to a company is like learning how to read a map. If you work at a smaller company, you work with a smaller map. There are limited destinations and a limited amount of paths you can take to get to point A from point B. However, working at a company like Microsoft? you get 20 maps out of hundreds to start, and good luck on figuring out how different maps comes together.
Now that I am in the process of deciphering those career paths within big tech, I collected some useful tips for myself to keep myself on track. I thought I would share them with the folks who might be starting their position at a giant company for the first time, from a smaller company, or right out of school. (For some tips, I also added challenges that are unique to Big tech related to it. Look out for them and comment below if you faced similar challenges)
I. Take stock of process mastery, not the outcome, to become a decision influencer.
As a junior designer at a giant company, your project will be small, minor, sometimes, yes, I will say it, tedious. It is just how it is going to be for a bit. Coming from a school or smaller company where you were designing a whole new app and running the project, the outcome of your work in big tech sometime will feel invisible. If you try to measure your impact by the outcome, you may make yourself sad.
I was. I felt a little lost in the beginning. However, amongst all those confusion, I tried to figure out what I could learn and gain mastery on.
When I worked as a graphic designer at my last company, the way I become “good at my job” was by becoming a master of process. I knew how long things will take, what is going to be the blocker, and who I should talk to in order to resolve those issues proactively. I honed my own design process and by doing that, I knew how to influence important decisions, cut down wasted time on unimportant things, and spend more time making my design better.
So after remembering that, I looked at the process aspect of my new company.
Challenge of Big tech on Process Mastery
Unfortunately, the first thing I noticed in a giant tech company is that… there is no one standardized process (it is not the fault of their own except for the fact that it got so big).
Any given project has so many different collaborators and the collaborators most likely invent different processes per project, which is out of your control as a junior designer. Even for part of the process that you can control, the project varies so much that the process you ‘hone in’ for one project won’t get much opportunity to replicate itself.
So how do you become a master of process in big tech when the standard process doesn’t exist?
Be the boundary-defining decision maker
I tried to understand the process of how a decision gets made. A lot of my projects so far followed the double-diamond process. In the double diamond process, the outline can be viewed as all the decision points.
How wide are we going to explore? When are we going to start converging? How fast are we converging?
These questions shape the boundary of the double diamond. What I started to do was I observed these boundary drawing moments as my projects unfolded and made notes of the ‘why and how’ this happened.
Was it a research insight? Business reasons? Was the decision get made through just one enlightening moment, one comment in the meeting? Who was involved?
I realized that it is often not the highest leadership who makes that small but boundary-defining decision, but someone who has the domain knowledge, did their homework, or is simply a great consensus gatherer. Get to know them, have them advocate for your design decisions, and study how they do it so one day you can be that someone who influences boundary-defining decisions.
If you keep honing your decision-making process, your impact will grow naturally. And when a larger project comes your way, you and your team will realize the master of the process you’ve become (because you can influence decisions and make the project progress forward).
II. Become a master communicator in the world of remote work.
I was part of the first-ever pandemic intern cohort, and yes, I struggled to make meaningful communication with my team and manager. Thankfully, I’ve overcome that since then, partially because the world opened up enough for me to meet my team in-person, but also, because I understood how to be a better communicator in this world of virtual collaboration.
How do you become a good communicator? The first step is being a person who is better communicated to. In other words, you need to be a better listener. And a heck to become a better listener in virtual discussion is to take notes. Taking effective notes should be a habit you do almost without thinking and without getting stressed out.
Some good habits of the good listener in the virtual working world.
1. PSA: minimize all your other windows and full screen the meeting window
Right now, how many windows and tabs do you have open? Yeah… a lot, I bet. In a virtual setting, it is so easy to multitask, no, in realistic terms, get distracted. For important meetings, silence the notifications, try minimizing all your other windows, and full-screen the meeting window.
2. Take notes on everything.
This doesn’t mean that you have to take note on every word, you just have to note the twist and turns of the discussion, just in a few words that you would recognize.
Practice, you will get better and it will get easier.
3. Take notes on people’s names and other context clues.
This goes back to the last rule of keeping track of how the decision gets made. Often, before a decision gets made about a project, there are seeds of those decisions you can notice. If you take note of who and how the seeds were sowed, you will have a better understanding of the project, no matter the complexity.
4. Use those notes
If it was a particularly interesting or relevant meeting, make sure to review your notes quickly right after the meeting; looking up questions and marking follow-up items. I often DM the person who talked about an issue that I didn’t understand. It is better to resolve the confusion right away in bite-size than having to embarrass myself by asking questions in a group setting when it is too late.
Share the notes with the partners and managers if you think that might be relevant and you feel comfortable doing that. Once you become a person who remembers what we talked about in the last meetings or what things have to get done, you become someone people can rely on.
Challenge of Big tech on becoming a master communicator.
After becoming a great listener and domain knowledge holder, you actually have to communicate that knowledge effectively. Now, in this step, I have to be honest, I am still learning. For me, the biggest challenge of communicating effectively as a newcomer is knowing how much context to give and knowing what each audience cares about. Working at such a giant company and also a horizontal project that involves multiple teams, I often don’t know what people’s roles and interests are when I am sharing out. This difficulty multiplies in a virtual setting. Meeting new people and presenting in a virtual space, you can’t even leverage the interest or energy of the room to gauge whether what you are presenting is resonating or even relevant to the audience.
So, how do you effectively communicate out?
So I am doing things in a slower way. If I know who I’ll be presenting to, I learn little about them. I join in other meetings with similar audiences. Do whatever you can do to learn about your audience's expertise and interest so you can cater your share-out to be most relevant to them.
Also, I try to avoid project jargon or discipline jargon. There will be urges to use them because it is convenient or it makes you sound like an expert. However, there is also power in being able to explain complexity in simple words. And when you don’t know your audience, it is safer to over-communicate than under-communicate; this involves using simple laymen’s terms.
If you keep working on the habits of becoming a good listener and learner, and you know how to cater your message to the audience, these habits will make you an impactful communicator even in this unfamiliar land of remote work.
III. For Motivation, keep looking at the bigger picture.
Challenges of Big tech on Motivation
Going back to the first point, as a junior designer, you will feel like your impact is small. More than anything, that was challenging for me coming into big tech. Upon graduation, I had big dreams of contributing to society, therefore, working on a tiny portion of such a giant ecosystem was both overwhelming and disorienting. The risk of being consistently in this state is that you can easily burn out and lose motivation or excitement for work.
How to stay motivated?
So I tried many ways to think about my impact in this vast system; telling myself that the project is actually not small, this is something that millions of people will see and experience, or that I am growing and it has a big impact on me. Your team members and managers will say similar things like that to you about your project. These are all true statements and worked to get my motivation back somewhat. But the most effective and sustainable strategy that worked for me was proactively seeking bigger purposes that are related to the work I was doing. I think this method requires some work but it also is the most important thing we all have to do as future technologists.
An example of how I did this
My first work was working on a set of illustrations for new privacy screens. It was a tightly scoped and small project. But while I was working on it, I read up on some of the news and literature around digital privacy. And turns out our world was also new to data privacy, and trying to figure it out as we jump into the era of AI, social media and ads, and hyper-personalization. Knowing this, I used the illustration as my gateway to ponder on how people think about privacy, and the metaphors around it, simplifying the complexity of data sharing and consent. I fell in love thinking about privacy in tech; my small project did not feel small to me anymore.
I asked my manager to keep me on any privacy-related work, both by directly asking her about my interest but also by showing off all the random knowledge I was acquiring by doing research on my own whenever we were in the meeting. So I got my next privacy project and this time, it was bigger and more exciting. I kept my eyes on the bigger picture, and that got me a project that could make a bigger impact.
Own your own creative whys
The great thing about grounding one’s project in the bigger societal picture is that you have control over the sources of your motivation and interest. Even though every project comes with a restrictive business goal and success metrics, you could also make your own success metrics that are rooted in the bigger picture, detached from any promotion criteria. And when the project gets challenging or even gets scoped down, you can keep your eyes on your own success metrics and motivation high, knowing that you can make progress towards shaping the bigger picture.
So these are some of my survival tips for working in a big tech; focus on the process of decision making, become a master communicator in remote work, and keep your eyes on the bigger picture. What are some of your experiences and tips? Share it with me.
I hope you not only survive but thrive in your 1st year!
