Blog by Cap Watkins
I was recently catching up with a designer I used to manage, who was consistently one of the top performers on the team throughout our time working together. We were both reflecting back on that time period in our careers, and she said: I used to worry that the other designers were mad at me. Like, I got to work on all the fun projects and redesign a bunch of stuff, while everyone else had to…
Anyone who s been reading my blog since I started managing is probably acutely aware that I ve historically seen management as a people-first endeavor. For many years managing and leading teams, I viewed my role largely as a people support role - hire well, encourage folks, make sure they have what they need and then just try my best to stay out of the way. In leadership meetings, I spent a lot of…
About two years into working at BuzzFeed, I reached a moment one summer when I looked around and realized I had very little to do. I d been working hard for the past two years stabilizing and growing the design team, hiring and training great managers, as well as building up core design infrastructure like critiques, role documentation, et al. And it had worked! Everything was going well, people…
Since starting Practical Works , I’ve spoken with a lot of folks who are at a crossroads in their career and aren’t sure which way to go. Do they become a manager, or do they continue to pursue excellence in their craft? For a lot of people, this can be a very nebulous, stressful decision. In fact, there are only a couple people I know who’ve known without a shadow of a doubt which path they…
As I ve written about in the past, I think managers should put a very high value on recruiting. Beyond just being active participants in the process, I think teams should really own their own recruiting efforts, from sourcing and outreach to the interviews themselves. Over the last three years of working with rad folks like Sabrina and Tom (who have both now fled BuzzFeed for Thailand if that…
Whenever I talk about how we (and how I) think about reviews and feedback in the BuzzFeed Tech org, I m struck by how many people outside our team and the company are surprised, with reactions ranging from "Oh that s interesting," to "OMG that seems so crazy." Since I arrived at BuzzFeed just over three years ago, I ve spent a lot of time thinking about review processes. In my first year, I…
When new managers start out, they tend to become hyper-focused on what s right in front of them: the designers they manage, the product team(s) they re responsible for helping, the way design is getting done in their product group, etc. That focus is not only necessary, it s great! New managers need that kind of scoped attention in order to get their feet, to become good at managing people and…
A little over a year into my job at Etsy, we had made a lot of changes to the design team and how we operated. We d hired a bunch of amazing product designers. We had weekly, round-robin design critiques with the entire team and had instituted separate, smaller design critiques for the designers in each product group. We were also religiously using Basecamp to document the entire process…
When I joined BuzzFeed just over a year ago, I spent the first few months of my time there setting the Product Design team up so it could scale well . I wrote a roles and responsibilities document, instituted Basecamp as the place for design work and discussion and overhauled our recruiting process. Since then, the design managers and I have set up quarterly peer reviews for the team, written our…
In the last year or so, every time I ve given a talk on collaboration or building an organization, an audience member has approached me (either privately or through Q&A) with a question about their current frustrations with their job or org. The question usually sounds something like this: What you described in your talk sounds great. I m at Company X and we don t have any of that. I ve tried to…
I was on a walk with a coworker at BuzzFeed the other day, talking about our teams and our jobs. At one point, while I was describing the changes we d made to the design team in the past year or so, she stopped me and asked "How did you know you were making the right changes? How do you know that you re doing the right thing?" Luckily this is a question I get with some regularity, particularly…
While I was at Web Directions last week, a few people brought up the topic of imposter syndrome and were asking for advice on how to overcome it. There s been a lot written about the challenge of feeling that you aren t good enough and like at any moment you ll be found out for the fraud you really are (Julie Zhuo wrote this fantastic article which you should definitely read). Particularly in…
When I was starting out as a designer, I had a pretty big chip on my shoulder about how my job was perceived. At that point in time, the design community was, seemingly as a whole, pushing back on the idea that designers just make things look good. Every other day there d be a blog post or a podcast about explaining to clients or coworkers that we have more to contribute, and that we should own…
When I worked at Etsy, our CEO, Chad Dickerson, gave a talk where he described how most companies think about management structures. To most people reading this, the following image will be a familiar concept: Conceptually, the message for how decisions get made is pretty straightforward: The CEO tells the VPs what to do, the VPs tell the Directors what to do, the Directors tell the Managers and…
I ve written a lot about recruiting on this blog - how to get hired , how to do the hiring and how hard it is to hire . However, I haven t really touched on what happens after that process. You ve found a great designer, hired them and they just started today! Hooray! Now what? Well, first you have to lie to them. Don t worry, it s not a big lie. You see, there are two things that are (probably)…
Over the years, I ve noticed a lot of my (and others ) frustrations at work come from feeling like the problems I m solving shouldn t be problems, or that the problems I m facing are outside of my control. As I ve settled more into my management responsibilities, I ve found that the biggest bang for my buck has been to focus on helping folks start solving the right problems and stop worrying about…
There have been quite a few people over the last few months who ve asked for advice on how to start writing. They usually say something like "I don t know how to start" or "I m not sure what I d write about" or the dreaded "I m just not a good writer." So, to all of you out there dealing with those feels, here are a few thoughts on writing and how to make it a part of your craft. First, why write…
What makes a great product? We all spend time thinking about this. Whether you re a manager or not, striving to build the best thing we can is the force that drives most of us to come to work every day. We look at products we admire and we wonder: how do they do it? Was it amazing leadership? Are the people that work there just all insanely talented? While both of those things may be true, they…
Recruiting, like many managerial activities, is somewhere between an art and a science. Getting people in the door is a numbers game in a lot of ways (lots of emails, phone screens and second phone screens that don t work out). But the interview loop and determining whether or not to hire people is, in my experience so far, a lot more difficult. A few things stand out to me, though, as things you…
Not long ago, I met with a designer I previously managed at Etsy to catch up and talk about her new role (she stepped into a management position shortly after I left). We were talking about some of the challenges she s facing currently, and inevitably starting talking about some of the decisions I d made while we worked together. You know , she said, I really didn t get why you were making those…