I loved chatting to Kara back in August, excited to finally get this episode out to your ears!
Kara started her career as an instructional designer, eventually working her way to leading user experience design through experience at (amongst others) top-flight companies in sport (the Super Bowl), Film (Oscars) and politics, both as senior advisor to 18F and as Biden's Director of UX during Obama's cancer moonshot. She was also one of the first Presidential Innovation Fellows.
We talked about Instructional design, meeting Obama, pale males, career progression of a person vs a professional and where you can use existing skills in new ways and readjust your career to suit the things you’re good at AND the things you love.
We also covered attempting to cure cancer, doing user-centred design in government, being a good sponsor and our mutual love of the West Wing.
Show links
Obama announcing the cancer moonshot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W2Fl_X_6I4
Kara's article on how to care and feed a team: https://medium.com/@karadefrias/the-product-managers-guide-to-the-care-and-feeding-of-humans-ee2854bc5944
Find Kara on the web at https://www.karadefrias.com/, and on twitter at https://twitter.com/karadefrias.
Who else should we be speaking to?
We have a fantastic set of interviews already recorded so we're sorted for getting into your ear-holes for this year, but we're looking for guests for 2020 episodes, so if you or someone you know is doing great work, let us know! Even better if it's someone who might not be regulars on other podcasts or stages.
Just email podcast@progressionapp.com and tell us more.
Our lovely sponsor: Deliveroo!
Our wonderful sponsor Deliveroo is looking for loads of designers, researchers, writers as well as leaders and managers. It really is an exciting and fun place to work (I should know as an alumni).
Go check out the team, blog and open roles at deliveroo.design or follow them on twitter: https://twitter.com/deliveroodesign
#29 Jackie Bavaro (Asana, Google) on having impact as a Product Manager
#28 Steve Bianchi (Beamery, Unilever) on the rise of the people-focused COO and a capability-based future
#27 Lucas Coelho (Roam Digital) on building an academy, leadership lessons and how to run a happy team
#26 Brian Lovin (Github, Spectrum, Design Details) on the rise of the senior IC
#25 Sarah Clatterbuck (Yahoo, LinkedIn, Google) on frameworks for startups vs large orgs and avoiding anti-patterns
#24: Jessie Hayes (Whereby, Box) on treating people like a product and keeping frameworks light
#23: Gonçalo Silva (CTO, Doist) on building progression frameworks for a distributed team
#22: Inside Progression Ep2 — Jonny and Neil catch-up
Progression anti-racism statement
#21 Cap Watkins (Primary, Buzzfeed) on helping new managers and the problem with taking other people's career ladders
#20: Irene Au (Khosla Ventures, Google) on scaling design teams and practices, scaling yourself and finding your why
#19: Ryan Carson (CEO, Treehouse) on a winding journey to training 100,000 new software engineers
#18 Anne-Laure Le Cunff on mindfulness, burnout, writing every day and building a business
#16 Dave Malouf on Design Ops and the power of speaking on stage
#15: Inside Progression with Jonny and Neil – teamwork, a new feature and biscuit reviews
#14: Todd Zaki Warfel (Leadership coach, Design Career Index report) on frameworks and job satisfaction
#13: Sana Rao (Twitter, Deliveroo) on life changes, sponsorship and scaling design teams through change
#12: Peter Merholz (Adaptive Path, Org Design for Design Orgs) on org design and ethics
#11: Braden Kowitz (Google Ventures, Range) on co-creating the Design Sprint, becoming a founder and his design journey
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