Design x Jonathon Colman
Senior Design Manager at Intercom
Illustration by Bonnie Kate Wolf
Interview conducted by Michelle Berois on June 17, 2020
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m Jon. I manage a product design team at Intercom in Dublin, Ireland. A year and a half ago, my wife, my now-12-year-old Rottweiler, and I moved here from Seattle, where I worked on content strategy at Facebook. Prior to that, I was at REI, several nonprofits, and volunteered with the Peace Corps in West Africa.
Cycling and walking have been my longtime hobbies, but I also love traveling. My wife and I are looking forward to going somewhere new if things ever get back to normal. We always say that “our eyes are hungry.”
What prompted you to volunteer for the Peace Corps?
My parents instilled in me the idea that there’s a larger world out there, that I was privileged, and that I should always try to help people.
International development can be problematic though, because its history is riddled with white saviors who built lots of things that didn’t last. A good example are custom-designed water pumps that can’t be repaired locally because their parts are made far away. These pumps would break soon after volunteers leave, but not before the people in the village become dependent on them, so they’re actually left in a worse state than when they began.
I didn’t learn that history until I was part of the Peace Corps, which actually has strong fundamentals in sustainable development. It’s no longer about volunteers building things and leaving them behind. It’s more about skill- and capacity-building, helping people set their own priorities, build their own capacity, do their own development, and identify ways to speed that up. It was a great learning experience that continues to influence how I work with people on a daily basis.
How did your experience with the Peace Corps shape you as a designer?
The first thing was relationships. You don’t land in a village and instantly start changing things. I spent a year meeting people, and then learning and listening. What is the system, and how does it work? Who influences each other? Are people aligned on the problems and their priority? Do they have resources locally for solutions? These are all questions we ask in design as well. International development is somewhat of a design problem. It’s not the same thing as digital product design, but the way of thinking is not too far removed.
Tell us about your journey to becoming a designer.
I had the luck of going to school when the World Wide Web was really taking off. I built my first web page in 1994 as a college student, and I worked my way through school and paid off loans and bills by just doing web design for local businesses, university departments, and friends. I was privileged with access to computers and lab software, and I learned HTML and JavaScript.
But then the career I originally landed in, technical writing, wasn’t a great match for me. It had made sense that I would get a technical writing job after studying for a technical writing degree. And so when I joined IBM, I did pretty hardcore technical writing for software manuals, like their TCP/IP products and their AS/400 server. Technical writing is necessary and an honorable field of work, but the bottom line is that I was never going to be great at it. I found myself dreaming about doing just about anything else.
So I left for the Peace Corps in West Africa. And when I came home, I started working for environmental nonprofits. Those were exciting because they’re mission-driven, and they were organizations I supported. Nonprofits, even the big ones, are places where there’s never enough budget to do everything they want to do. That’s intentional because they want to spend the budget on their programs and things that accelerate their mission. But what happens is that they often end up being what I call ‘intrapreneurial’ organizations. If you can do something at no cost that moves the mission forward, they’re happy for you to do that thing, even if it’s not technically within your job definition.
Or at least those were the kinds of places I was lucky enough to find and got to take advantage of. When I started at the Nature Conservancy, I did front-end development—no design, just strictly HTML, JavaScript, CSS. By the time I left, I was an Associate Director of Marketing, because I was willing to try new things that didn’t cost anything but built my skills and moved the organization forward. That included social media marketing, analytics, and server administration. I’ve been really lucky to have been given lots of opportunities, but I think I got into design just by constantly asking people, “How can I help? What needs doing, what problems need solving, and what are the constraints we’re working against?”
How did you end up moving from nonprofits to a big tech company like Facebook?
For a while, I was working for all membership-based organizations. The Nature Conservancy was a great example of that. From there, I went to REI, another great membership organization. They’re the largest consumer cooperative in the States, fundamentally built to serve their members. Facebook was an extension of that. What got me into tech was actually a low-tech idea—the idea of organizations serving people.
“What got me into tech was actually a low-tech idea—the idea of organizations serving people.”
Did you move around different departments at Facebook, or were you solely focused on content design?
During my five and a half years there, especially in the early days, I was working on more than ten different products at a time, trying to write all these highly nuanced interfaces between meetings, early in the morning, or late at night. To be direct: I did a terrible job, especially my first year. Some of the mistakes I made ended up becoming household-known things, like, “Oh, did you hear about that thing Facebook just did?” It was definitely my fault, but it was partly because I was stretched thin across so many different things that required time and knowledge that I needed but didn’t have.
But, to answer your question, I did work on many different things at Facebook, from their developer platform to Oculus to payment products, to location-based products. When I left, I was part of the leadership team for Facebook Marketplace.
And from Facebook, you went right into Intercom?
My wife and I had always wanted to live abroad. We married in New Zealand and always schemed to go back. Ireland is similar, being a rainy green island off of a larger island off of a continent. That was a big part of the impetus of moving here.
About Intercom in particular, I wanted to come to a place that was serious about design and product. As I talked with Intercom, I became confident that I could learn and be supported, that I would be given opportunities to grow as a designer, a design manager, and a product professional. Those are rare opportunities and I’m grateful that Intercom grows people in these areas from within.
I’m now a Senior Design Manager here. When I started at Intercom, I managed our content design team, but now I manage our group of platform product designers. Our team works on our developer platform, our ecosystem of apps, and our reporting products. We help teams speed up work, land in a better place of quality, grow in their careers, disambiguate complex things through simpler UI, and hopefully have fun at the same time.
I actually discovered you through the article you’d written to take the guesswork out of how Intercom hires designers. What prompted you to write that?
Have you ever had a job interview where you felt you knew exactly what was going on before you got into it, were totally prepared and had high confidence during the conversations, and thought it was a great fit? Well, I’ve never had an interview like that.
I’m a terrible mind-reader, so I always lean towards making things super open and explicit. You don’t have to read what’s on my mind, especially in a stressful and anxiety-inducing conversation like a job interview. It just adds more pressure to something that’s already hard. We decided that we could help our candidates prepare better by being open and direct about what we look for. We talk about not only design skills but also the entire process, so candidates know what to expect, going into each stage. Candidates now come to us with much better preparation.
Candidates should also be interviewing the companies. If companies are open and explicit enough during the interview, the candidates will have a chance to figure out if these companies just aren’t right for them. It’s a perfectly good outcome to have from an interview. It’s much better than joining the company and only finding out much later that there’s a conflict in values or anything else.
I read some of your articles about content design and product design. What are some of the differences between these two roles at Intercom?
At Intercom, there is no difference between content designers and product designers. There used to be, when our content designers were stretched across many unrelated products, writing the interface on the surface, in a system like the one I experienced at Facebook. They’d switch between multiple products every half hour, which is difficult and draining. We wanted to give content designers more opportunities to develop while avoiding burnout, so we decided to essentially blur the lines between content design and product design.
We published our expectations for these two roles on intercom.design, and you’ll notice that they’re almost exactly the same. Both roles need to set goals, maximize opportunities, contribute to product vision, build product knowledge, collaborate well, and reflect our core values in their work. We couldn’t imagine anyone in a design role not doing these.
There are only slight differences between our expectations for content and product designers: our product designers do a bit more interaction design, visual design, and prototyping, whereas content designers do more information architecture and UX writing. But both roles have to be proficient in all these areas. This sets up both roles for success, since they’re no longer working against each other or simply passing things off to each other. They both have equal stake, and they both bring unique perspectives and additional stability to a product team.
When content designers work on just one product at a time, they can also work more deeply. They can attend all team meetings, from stand-ups, to retros, to planning, to roadmapping, to goal-setting. They’re seen as a member of the team, so the rest of the team can understand how their content designer works and why their work matters. It’s no longer a vague, mysterious role, but a more effective, highly impactful one. The team is also more efficient now that content designers have the full context, so they don’t have to constantly ask questions and can work in clearly identifiable ways on every aspect of the double diamond process.
Do you think that framework is something more and more companies will adopt?
I’d love to see more companies do this. I’m actively influencing more companies to work this way. The de facto standard in tech is assigning the same designer to ten different teams. We just think there’s a better way of working that yields better outcomes and more impact, which are what tech companies always say they want. We found a way to do that, so I’ve been shouting about it from the rooftops.
What would you say are some of the biggest challenges or struggles that you have at Intercom?
I moved from content design to product design, so I’ve had to learn a lot and level up. It’s hard when you’re concurrently managing the team and working on the product. I’m lucky to be supported by our design director and other leaders, and to be at a place that does really good design. I get to work with and learn from my colleagues all the time.
I also try to invest time in reading and attending conferences and book clubs. All these virtual events that have been created during the ‘Covid-19 Era’ are really low-cost compared to when they were in-person and required paying for travel and lodging. So there are a lot more opportunities than there used to be. For me, the challenge is just coming up with a strong opinion on what I need to learn now, and how I should best go about that.
In light of everything that’s happening right now, with a pandemic and the protests, what do you think a designer’s role is in all of that?
We have to increase our awareness and understand the problems if we want to make things better, but that doesn’t mean swinging in with solutions—you’ll remember that we talked about white-saviorism earlier. We can make things better by building our awareness, listening to and learning from others, applying that knowledge within our organizations, finding places where that listening and learning isn’t happening, and striving to make things more equitable.
Our organizations are made up of people who have the privilege and capacity to drive equity and make positive changes. But oftentimes, we’re afraid to do that or to speak up. We feel like we’re not smart enough or educated enough. But if we hold onto our privilege and do nothing, we’re actively causing harm.
“But if we hold onto our privilege and do nothing, we’re actively causing harm.”
That’s a key thing that everyone who looks like me is learning right now. White men in leadership positions face the least risk in giving people space, listening to them, and helping them start these conversations. Amplifying the voices of people who are not as privileged as we are can help them stand out, claim space, and drive more equity.
The things I’ve done are tiny, and are not enough, especially compared to others, but I’m trying to listen and learn and I intend to do more.
Are there any people in your life that have really influenced you?
Ella Mei Yon Harris was the first person I hired at Facebook for content strategy. We later determined that we had an opportunity to switch roles, so she became my manager, and I became an individual contributor and reported to her. We worked together as a mini-team for the next four years, and I learned heaps from her. I’m a far better content strategist, a better designer, and a better manager because of her. I mention her in my talk at SofaConf, and I mentioned her in my previous talk about gender equity as well.
That’s an example of moving aside to make space for someone else in leadership. She herself has also moved into product design and is now the head of design for Facebook Assistant. I look to her for inspiration.
That’s awesome. For people who want to break into product design, what advice would you give them?
Make something. Solve a problem. Ideally, a problem that you really care about, or a problem that affects someone that you care about. There’s really no better teacher. There are things you just can’t learn from going to a class or reading a book, or even studying someone else’s work. Opportunities to do design work are everywhere.
“Opportunities to do design work are everywhere.”
You don’t have to wait to be hired for a company or to be asked to do a thing. You can just go ahead and do the thing. It’s okay if it’s not great. You’re going to learn from it, and you’ll learn a lot faster than you would from reading a book.
Rapid Fire Questions:
What’s your favorite thing to do in your free time?
It’s a three-way tie between reading comic books (which I still do), walking my dog, and sleeping. (I adore napping. This is life in your mid-40s. No one tells you this, but it’s true.)
Do you have a favorite podcast?
Code Switch on NPR is my perennial favorite, especially the episodes where they break down language and taxonomy. I’d love to see a content design or content strategy conference that invites Shereen Marisol Meraji and Gene Demby (the hosts of Code Switch) to do a keynote, because they talk more about content strategy, content design, taxonomy, and information architecture than any other design podcast I listen to. They just do it at the level of society and politics, which I think is really important. So by far, it’s my favorite.
There’s also a science fiction podcast called DUST, season 2 of which is just short stories with a light layer of linkage between them. Most episodes are 15–20 minutes long, so I like to listen to it when I’m shaving or walking my dog. It’s like going on a little story adventure, and it’s good fun. Or “good craic” as we say in Ireland.
