How to influence and lead as a staff designer

Plus how customer service can benefit from Ai (hint: not chatbots)

Author

Ted Goas
February 12, 2025

🔖 What I’ve been reading

Many people are still figuring out how Ai can help them. My day job involves designing software for customer service departments, and a few themes have started to emerge beyond “Ai chatbots”:

  1. Knowledge curation: Curate the knowledge your Ai uses to answer questions.

  2. Workforce management: Create weekly schedules for agents based on call volume.

  3. Performance management: Automated coaching to improve the team.

We have learned that [Generative AI] excels at a number of tasks beyond just having conversations, [such as] synthesis and summarization of key points from large-scale unstructured data.

Customer service departments generate mountains of data every day. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an Ai sitting on top of it all that can cut through the data?

That’s what my team is working on, and we’re hiring!

When a senior designer asks “What do I need to do to get to staff designer?”, it’s sometimes hard for me to articulate. Thankfully Catt Small has some wise words on the topic in her interview with Ridd on Dive Club.

Some excerpts:

It’s all about working with people

The more that you reach out to people and people see you as an ally, they’ll trust you more and that’s where you can start to build the influence you’re looking for. The scale just increases, you see more of the system and talk to more people, and suddenly it just makes sense that you should work on this really big problem cause you know the right people already, you already have the right context, and that’s how it happens.

My take: Being a staff designer isn’t about working on larger or harder or more projects. Execution skills might be what got you to senior, but it won’t get you to staff on its own. Staff design is about working with people and building their trust.

She goes on later to say:

A big component of a staff designer is to inspire people to think bigger, to push people in directions that they hadn’t initially considered.

This won’t happen until people trust you.

Meeting with PMs

When I scheduled 1:1’s with my PM, that was the time when we could have more strategic conversations and I could learn about their challenge. Designers can be really good resources for reducing risk, which is huge for a PM. If you can angle yourself as somebody who can help a PM make good decisions, that’s huge.

My take: Your PM should be your partner in crime. The best designers I know have great relationships with their PM and speak with them often, not just when you have a question or want feedback. They plan the future together.

The full episode is well worth your time.

Ok maybe that’s not exactly what this podcast suggests. I’m not a fan of design → engineering handoffs, it’s not how I prefer to work since I believe designer need to be closer to the actual product (Figma is just a picture of the product, sorry not sorry).

I was delighted to hear how other teams are thriving in cultures where design and engineering work in parallel. Where designers aren’t pressured to get everything perfect before engineering begins. Where design and engineering design together as they go, and everyone knows the intent behind each design decision. Where it’s ok for product teams throw away code.

Because that’s the cost of doing good work.

Last issue I mentioned that I might quit social media and others, even those who’ve built substantial followings on these sites, are also questioning whether they should continue their presence there. Some even think it’s a trap.

How a web developer accidentally coined the term “hero section” while working on a Wordpress theme in 2013.

We knew climate policies in the US would get worse once Trump took power and boy he did not disappoint đŸ˜˘ I mean… yikes.

Yes, US politics are terrible right now and it’s hard to feel proud to be American. However as Mike Montiero points out in How to survive being online, just because a bunch of sociopathic narcissists are in charge doesn’t mean we have to pay attention to them.

The first four years of Donald Trump was a continuous panic attack. I’m not going through that again. You don’t have to either. They’re on stage, but you don’t have to be their audience.

In 2013, the ESA's Gaia mission launched to map the Milky Way's history. Over 11 years, it made three trillion observations of two billion objects, mainly stars, creating a 3D map that charts the Milky Way’s history and movement.

Gaia showed us that our galaxy's disk, the dark brown horizontal spanning from one side to the other, has a bit of a wave to it. Gaia also showed us that the Milky Way has more than two spiral arms and that they aren't as pronounced as we thought. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

🏛️ From the Archives

A favorite I periodically re-read.

It’s ok to be embarrassed about what your product doesn’t have. We don’t want to put something half-baked into our product so we have a V1. Because people will get used to it and it will become hard to remove.

❝ One Good Quote

Most times, talking about roles and responsibilities when teamwork is hard is the wrong move. When you’re outcome-driven, people can set aside their egos and collaborate. When it’s turf-driven, the best ideas can’t surface because people have to stay in their lanes.

— Sarah Drasner (@sarahedo.bsky.social)2025-01-17T15:04:15.074Z

Thanks for reading ✌️
- Ted (@tedgoas)