Kathy Zheng - How to make the jump to staff designer

This week’s episode is with Kathy Zheng 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 (former Head of design at Github)
• Brian Lovin (bookmarking repo project)
• Kat Fikui (coworker at Github whose .readme we mentioned)
• Connor Sears (old manager at Github)
• Jack Conte (Cofounder of Patreon)