EarthShift Global: Leadership, Project Management, Digital Design, and Mentorship

Reflections on my first full-time job as a designer (and leader, project manager, etc.).

In May of 2022, I was hired by EarthShift Global (ESG) as a User Experience Designer. In May of 2023, I was promoted to Design & Project Lead.

I worked with EarthShift Global previously as an intern, which I reflected on here. That work was led and documented by my friend and colleague Teja Chatty, in her dissertation, and in a forthcoming paper of which I’m a co-author.

Summary:

• Novel Skill Development: Project management within a high-ambiguity context, driving equity-focused systems change in a corporate context.

• Continued Skill Development: Design research, synthesis, creative process facilitation, design project management, digital design technical skills, technical documentation

• Professional Development: Managers-In-Training Cohort, Service Design, Teaching Design at an LCA Conference

• Unexpected Highlight: The opportunity to mentor and be mentored.

Note: The following is a little short on concrete project details because my NDA prohibits me from sharing them.

Reflection:

I was a "first" for ESG in many ways: their first in-house designer, one of their first employees with substantial software experience, and their first openly genderqueer employee. Being unusual in my skills and background led to both challenges and opportunities.

Hiring a Team

As one of their first employees with substantial software experience, I reported directly to our CEO, Lise Lauren. My first task was to build an in-house software team - something neither I nor anyone else at ESG, had ever done before. After discussing our objectives and the company’s typical hiring strategies with Lise, I began developing a hiring process for the software team. I developed the process to align with business objectives, technical needs, Lise's style, and my values. After all, I had just been through a long job search, so the typical applicant experience was fresh in my mind, and I was determined to create a better one. This led to the need for me to discuss some tricky and sensitive topics with Lise quite early in our relationship: the ethics of different systems for determining salary, “affirmative action hiring,” etc. - it was a great opportunity to practice having challenging conversations in a way that grows a relationship rather than threatens it. I'm grateful for the wealth of leadership and hiring knowledge that she shared with me through this experience, and for being open to my ideas. In the end, we persevered through the ambiguity and hard practical-ethical dilemmas and did make a series of successful hires together in a manner that I could feel proud of.

Project Management & Design Skill Development

With the initial team built, I shifted focus to my primary role as a UX Designer of a large web platform. This is a high-complexity project, involving several stakeholder groups, and requiring the development of new concepts, ways to organize information, and ways for users to interact with their models. The scale and complexity mean that once again, I’m working through a lot of ambiguity. Sometimes ambiguity is uncomfortable, even painful, or anxiety-producing. I believe that it’s important to recognize these feelings, but not let them stop us. As a designer, I sometimes think of my role as working to reduce ambiguity incrementally (related to the design concept of de-risking): I conduct countless interviews, synthesize learnings, define terms, facilitate creative processes, develop prototypes, and collect feedback, all in an iterative way. As a project manager, I work around ambiguity and prevent it from creating problems: I track high-level risks and opportunities, prioritize tasks to avoid blockage, and create documentation to support the alignment of stakeholder priorities with the designs and the developer's specifications. When I start thinking of my job as an opportunity to incrementally reduce ambiguity, while working around it strategically, it begins to represent a puzzle I’m excited to work on, allowing me to set aside some of the anxious feelings and use ambiguity as a motivator.

Mentorship & Teaching Design Skills

Although the design processes I implement daily are my bread and butter, the opportunity to share them with a colleague has brought new wonder and joy to the experience. One of my teammates is responsible for our graphics, color palette, and company aesthetic, and told me she wanted to learn design methods. I've had the pleasure of being in a mentor role, and sharing my knowledge of design processes and principles with her. Through this collaboration, she has been able to effectively take on the role of UI designer: she now maintains our UI component library and leverages her aesthetic sensibilities to improve upon the interfaces.

I love teaching design, and watching it empower others as it has empowered me.

More recently, I had the opportunity to teach design more formally, presenting to ~50 people at the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment conference. Several audience members shared an appreciation for the new ways of thinking and doing that I’m working to make accessible to the field. I wrote up a short version of the content as a resources page for attendees of the conference and other interested LCA people, now public on the company website.

In April of 2023, I hired Ismael Velasco, now our Director of Engineering. He is a fantastic mentor and friend. He has helped me spread my wings, supporting the ongoing development of my project management skills, and my move in May of 2023 into a new role as Design & Project Lead.

Leadership

For me, leadership is the service of facilitation, done in a way that enables a group to create in alignment with its values and to achieve what it would not otherwise. As a leader, I focus on the experiences of my teammates and stakeholders, their values and motivations, and do my best to facilitate good collective design of that experience. This has meant not only knowing one another’s values and motivations, but intentionally aligning our measured performance indicators to them, and building our project management and technical review processes around them. We’re still early in the development of these processes, I’ll write more as more insights arise.

DEI & Culture Survey

Ever since joining ESG, I’ve been one of the most vocally equity-focused people in the company. I’ve advocated at various points for policy change and raised discourse that has been new to my colleagues. I suppose it comes with the territory of being the first genderqueer person in a small company. Recently, I led the development of a new company culture survey, covering employee engagement, equity issues, belonging, work-domain self-efficacy, and the tricky feelings sustainability professionals sometimes have when their clients are among the most polluting entities in the world. With the results in, I’m now leading the facilitation preparation, with support from some colleagues. I’m so excited about the conversations we’re going to be able to start with this data during our first 1.25h facilitation next week, and even more excited about the collective change I hope they’ll cause through follow-up workshops I hope to co-lead later in the year. More on this to come…

Service Design

This year, I had the opportunity to do some professional development in Service Design - the application of design thinking methodology to the scope of a complex service, rather than a product. The service design mindset resonates with me and my systems-oriented brain, which has never truly focused only on a single product at all, but always looked at the product in its system and service context. This year, I took classes on Service Design with the Interaction Design Foundation and IDEO U. Since then, I’ve built a service blueprint of EarthShift Global’s consulting service, which is ready to support the thoughtful growth of our company and service offerings in the next year. More on this to come…

Management Training

I’m grateful to be a part of a discussion group of four managers-in-training, led by our CEO, Lise. We meet every other week to discuss management theory and how to handle management challenges coming up in the company. For example, when Lise and I were working on hiring our software team, we had several discussions about it with this group. Recently, after Lise fired an employee, she shared what she was thinking about as a manager through that process and even shared doubts about how she’d handled aspects of the situation. We were able to discuss alternative ways a manager could have acted, and the pros and cons of each. We’ve also discussed parental leave policy, company culture, and other topics.

There is no ending to this reflection because I'm still here, working and learning at ESG! To be continued...