Design x Harrison Wheeler
UX Design Manager at LinkedIn
Illustration by Bonnie Kate Wolf
Interview conducted by Tasnim Merlin on May 22, 2020.
Tell us a little bit about your journey of becoming a designer.
My name is Harrison Wheeler, and I’m a Design Manager at LinkedIn. I was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, about 90 miles north of Chicago.
Throughout my life, I’ve always been interested in the intersectionality of design and technology. At the age of 12, my interest grew as I began designing websites. In my first job, my mom hired me to be a webmaster at her elementary school. I was fortunate enough to continue this interest through design and engineering classes throughout my middle and high school. At that point, things began to click.
As I began college, I knew that I wanted to pursue a future in design. I started out in graphic design, then went back to my coding base, and eventually merged the two together. This was a huge lightbulb moment for me. During this time, I began to see how my design impacted people’s experiences.
When the iPhone came out, apps became lucrative businesses, and we started hearing more about user experience design. With this paradigm shift, I pivoted from a very freelance, web-centric type of work to an in-house design role at a startup company.
Things move fast in startups. You wear many hats. I started out managing a smaller team, and then I had interest in managing a team at scale. LinkedIn provides a ton of opportunities—the app itself has almost 700 million users. Growing at scale can go in various ways, from scaling your team culture to designing processes for a growing user base.
It sounds like you started when user experience was starting to emerge and more people were understanding what it is.
There really wasn’t a ton of curriculum around user experience. I don’t even think CSS was a fully adopted thing when I started coding. From an industry perspective, I found myself moving more and more in that direction, without a full understanding of what that meant. I had a huge learning curve to overcome.
I had the design skills to apply and do the work, but in terms of having conversations with an engineering team or thinking about the product development lifecycle and user research concepts, I was still learning. Research, workshops, reading, and making mistakes were a big part of my growth. As I started to progress in my career, I started to meet more people in the industry and I got to learn more.
Can you tell us more about your management style as UX Design Manager at LinkedIn?
I don’t think there’s much difference in your “work personality” and your “personal life personality.” You bring what you own into the office. That’s how you show up. More recently, with everything going on, I’ve felt that it’s very important for me to approach my management style like this because it allows me to connect with folks that I work with. As a manager, there’s a level of vulnerability I should always have because it creates room for feedback and growth.
When getting to know my team, it’s important for me to understand their goals and how I can help them achieve them. My priority for my team is not only for them to succeed in their roles but also to see them grow both personally and professionally. This is the type of culture I would like to build. Not only would it create a better environment for teamwork, but it also encourages my team to aim for limitless success.
Empathy is also another trait that I try to stand by. Not everybody is going to feel great everyday. We’re human. A level of understanding and compassion is necessary to be an effective manager. As a designer, you’re a connector.
You connect with people, sell ideas and concepts, pitch solutions, interview participants, and give design critiques. There’s a lot of different communication touch points. Because of this, providing a safe space for feedback is crucial to the design process. Over time, this open culture of feedback and empathy will add up and allow a more effective way to approach work.
How would you describe your design teams process right now?
Right now, I manage seven designers, all across the country, across three offices. Most of us are remote. Besides adjusting our schedules to each other’s time zones, logistically, the transition was surprisingly not difficult. We can’t normalize events around COVID, the BLM social movement, amongst the many other things going on, so we’re doing our best to support each other during these challenging times.
In terms of our process, I don’t think the design process is necessarily different from working in a small agency, a startup, or a large corporation. I think the scale of what we do is the biggest difference, and understanding how to manage that, given we are all remotely connected.
Fundamentally, we really want to understand what problems we’re solving for our users. We do so through the means of various methods of research. It’s important to understand that scale does not limit impact. As a designer, there will always be some sort of constraints, whether it’s time, budget, or amount of engineers. You’ll likely encounter many of the same types of trade-offs, so it’s going to be important for you as a designer to strive for a good experience while understanding the effect it can have on the members and business as well. Having this in mind will empower designers to have meaningful conversations when working with other product stakeholders.
What would you say leads to good communication across different teams, like the product, or engineering?
That’s a great question. I would probably say transparency. Over time we’ve found that the waterfall approach—handing off the project from one team to another—is not efficient. Working simultaneously with your engineers, product partners, and researchers creates a more cohesive pace and allows a more efficient alignment.
Being highly communicative is also important. Especially nowadays, with the tools we can easily access, there’s no excuse to not communicate. Let’s break down these invisible walls. Let’s work together more often. Design should have an input on product strategy, and engineering should also have some impact on design, in terms of feedback and having their voice. Everyone should be empowered in the design process and product development lifecycle. All in all, we want our products to be successful. I think that’s a great place to start.
In this industry, it’s common to hear about the importance of communicating ideas effectively, to convince others of design ideas. What is it that influences people and gets them in line with our ideas?
I can’t speak for every process, every organization, or every product, but I think it’s really important to understand who you’re delivering your message to. You might be pitching an idea to a CEO, an engineer, an accountant, or a sales rep. Guess what? They’re all going to be coming to the table with a different lens. Speaking in design jargon won’t will anyone over—you’re most likely to lose them. This is where it’s important to hone in on your storytelling skills.
It’s not only knowing how to design, but also knowing how to communicate your idea. A huge part of that is reading the room and understanding what the audience values. It doesn’t matter what industry you work in, as long the story resonates.
Take the time to do your research, understand the market, and figure out who the different characters in that story are. There’s usually a beginning, a middle, and an end to that story. There’s usually some sort of pain and friction that hopefully someone can overcome.
Identify the business opportunity or value that you’ll bring to your users, something that’s going to be contextual with the challenge that you’re working with. It might be to get more subscribers. Or, if you have a nonprofit, it might be to get more volunteers or more donations. Understand how that story is going to play into the end goal that you’re looking for. Before you know it after you’re practicing, and being open to feedback, you’re gonna get better and more effective at doing it over time.
Storytelling all about human interaction. It shares context, paints a picture, and shares the value of your idea, so it’s vital to practice and nail down how you can tell a better story as a designer.
How do you think remote life is going to be for this industry?
We’ve seen a number of businesses stating that they’re going to be remote until 2021 or even further. There’s a lot of people that have been looking forward to something like this for quite some time.
We’ll see how the next six months will be. I think it’s here to stay, in some instances. InVision is a company that is completely remote, so we’ve seen some of these smaller mid-sized companies do it well.
Timing-wise, it’s really interesting, especially for online collaboration and online learning apps. I feel like these tools are important to the progression of design, enabling teams to work cross-functionally in a distributed fashion.
What advice do you have for people looking to become designers?
There’s a lot of folks in the job market, whether they’re laid off or in the graduating class that’s transitioning into the market. There’s a lot of anxiety and uncertainty.
One of the things that’s going to be really important for everybody is to just take a moment and write a plan. Where do you want to be in one or two years? Why do you want to be a designer? What types of companies? Which industry are you most interested in? Start reverse engineering it, to see what it’s going to take you to get there.
Is there anything else you would like to share?
I recently started my Technically Speaking podcast series. It’s something I’d wanted to do for years, and with COVID-19, it accelerated. It’s the process of wanting to learn something new. For me, it’s to run webinars or podcasts.
It’s fun! I get to see the analytics and run email campaigns. It’s a learning process for me. It’s really fun to inspire designers globally, and it makes me feel awesome if people can walk away with at least one or two new things. I wanted to be able to convey subjects and topics I never got the time around for.
