Kathy Zheng - How to get promoted to staff designer (Dive Club Ep. 59)

This week’s episode is with Kathy Zheng (https://x.com/pifafu) who is currently the Head of design at a Web3 protocol called Optimism. But before that she was the first designer at Patreon and went on to spend over 6 years at Github. So the goal of this conversation is to look at how Kathy grew as a designer while at Github and identify the specific milestones on her journey to reaching senior and eventually staff designer. We get into the weeds about: How the role of staff and senior designers differ The traits shared by the best designers at Github How to give your ideas a chance to become memes How to avoid conversational spinout on your project How to identify opportunities using systems thinking How Kathy is growing as a design leader at Optimism Specific techniques for storytelling and presenting ideas Some of the people mentioned in this episode: Max Schoening - https://x.com/mschoening?lang=en (former Head of design at Github) Brian Lovin - https://x.com/brian_lovin (bookmarking repo project) Kat Fikui - https://x.com/katfukui (coworker at Github whose .readme we mentioned) Connor Sears - https://x.com/connors (old manager at Github) Jack Conte - https://x.com/jackconte (Cofounder of Patreon) Chapters 0:00 Raycast 0:34 Intro 1:48 Joining Github 4:03 Combatting conversational spin out 6:16 Getting promoted to senior designer 10:01 Getting momentum on an unstable idea 19:55 How to break out of the execution box 24:41 Different mediums to communicate ideas 28:21 Meming your ideas 31:39 Kathy's transition to web3 36:41 What makes designing for web3 unique 40:45 Advice for Kathy's younger self 45:08 How Kathy wants to grow as a leader Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿 🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪 #productdesign #podcast #design