Portia O'Callaghan, UX
A technologist and a researcher bundled into a designer package
Hello, could you please introduce yourself 🙂
Hi, I am Portia and I’m working with the design system team. I started out my career as an engineer. After getting a master's in electrical engineering, I pretty quickly found out about the wonderful world of user research where I can think and help people to interact with technology. Fast forward, many years later I am a UX designer. I feel like I identify more as a generalist, a designer / researcher. I've also spent some of my career as a people manager.
What was the moment where things clicked for you? When you decided to stay on the IC track?
I would say the moment was when I was a manager. After working in the UX field for 10 years or so, I decided to become a manager, and I did that for 4 years. One day, it was actually a personal light bulb kind of came on because I didn’t love spending the whole day in meetings. On top of it, I noticed I wasn’t contributing anything tangible. I contributed a lot to conversations and helping people with their careers, but I want to contribute more intentionally, something more tangible. So, as much as I did love being a manager in some ways, I love those connections with people in day to day conversations, but I also felt like I got much more introverted when I got older. And so I was like, I really want to sit at a desk by myself and do work.
Another personal moment I would like to share is changing my career from engineering to design. I don't even know if I should say I went into design because I didn't really think of it so much as design at the time. I thought of it more as UX and I was more focused on research. I reflected on this a few years ago and thought a lot about my decision. And I think actually, there were probably 2 things that drove me from engineering into the UX world.
One was just really appreciating that there's a lot of great technology in the world. And a lot of people can't use it easily. I'm watching my parents’ generation try to use computers. It was really eye opening. And I thought, well, I feel like I'm the kind of person who understands people and what people need and I also understand technology and what technology can do. And I wanted to bring those two things together.
There was another piece of it that's really about imposter syndrome and being a young female engineer. I had this expectation that I would hit the ground running and really know what I was doing and be able to deliver really cool things in the world of engineering quickly. Everybody starts out their career as a beginner, and they ramp up to delivering cool things as they go. But I think my expectations were different.
Looking back on it now, you know, I think if I had had more mentorship, I might've stayed in a technical role. I don't regret my choice or feel unhappy with where I am. But I think it might've been different if I had had different mentors at that time.
Your career transition is an important part of your story. I am wondering “if there is a time that you realized I should stop coding and spend more time learning more user experience design”?
Yeah. I wouldn't say I stopped coding and thought “I don't want to do this anymore”. It wasn't quite like that. When I worked at Eastman Kodak, it used to be a film company and then it became more about digital photography. The company has a new grads program and allowed people to do different rotations in various parts of the company to see what they liked and where they wanted to fit in. One of the things I saw early on in my career was there was a group of people - I'm not sure what they're called, like image quality judges or image quality specialists? Their job is to look at photos and assess those photos on different attributes, different qualities, blurriness, sharpness and brightness all sorts of things. They were really looking at the human perception of photo technology. And I thought that that was really cool. I was really inspired by that.
During the time, I did not see that what I was doing day to day was going to benefit people. I wanted to feel like I was making a difference in people's lives. And so I wanted to explore different ways that I could make a difference with the work that I did. I'm kind of obsessed with learning new things. I always like to practice self-reflection and see if there's something else out there that would be a better fit.
Do you have a framework for deciding that something is interesting enough to continue developing in your career?
I am very much into learning mechanisms, taking classes. Years ago, I would even take classes at a university to learn something new. I like taking online classes, reading books. I enjoy feeling the back to school kind of mentality. I'm not as much of a doer. I'm more of a learner. I prefer to be in a space of learning something, as opposed to some people who will just do something or build something right away. I'm more like “I'm going to take a class, I'm going to follow the instruction.” If I feel I am in a learning environment, then okay, I have dedicated time for it. Because I have kids so my time is not super flexible. I don't have a ton of extra time outside of work. One thing that I've tried to do is to find new things that are slightly adjacent to my work. So I can do double duty — I'm working on an assignment, but I'm also learning a new thing. If you can find something that's pretty close, for example, if you're a technical person and you want to learn about design, I think those are pretty close.
I guess I also have a game that I play with myself. For example, this month I pretend I’m getting my PhD in something strange, like folklore, or fairy tales. I looked up which universities have the PhD in folklore? Who are the professors teaching the class? What do their careers look like? What textbooks are they using? I know I wasn't really going to study this domain knowledge. But I like to discover and do a bunch of research about what it looks like in the folklore field. In my head, learning new knowledge is like a game.
Seems like you are a journalist. You are curious about everything around you, but you don’t tend to go super deep into it. Because there are so many things to explore. Is that a correct statement?
Yeah, I think so. I think curiosity is important. I feel like one of my super powers is understanding how everything is stitched together and understanding a little bit about everything. I'll try to understand a little bit about an API and how the code is structured, so that I understand how that API is going to impact my design decisions. That mentality allows me to learn the context well, and I believe that's a must-have skill as a designer.
In your own words, how would you describe a principal designer?
This is a very good question because I think at least where I work right now a lot of us at the principal level are asking this question, what should we be doing? What should this role look like? And we're kind of writing history for this organization. In my opinion, there are a few different things. One thing is that you are considered an expert in your field. Whether you like it or not, people are going to look at you and ask you a lot of questions, e.g. career, process improvement questions, how do I do X, Y, and Z? I also think the principal has the role of looking across a larger domain. So as a junior or senior designer, you're kind of taking care of a piece of experience, and that piece is getting bigger and bigger as you grow in your career. As a principal, I think you need to understand how all the pieces are working together. I think that's what the principal role is about. It's about being able to look over your whole org and also beyond it.
I have seen principal designers where their superpower is not only to identify the problems but to also articulate the issues and summarize it to the leadership level. Would you agree with this observation? If yes, any examples?
I agree with that. First of all, I think even at senior level to some extent, you need to be able to raise issues to leadership. Two Amazon Leadership Principals I like, one is Bias for action, another one is Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit. These two things really go together. As a principal, you have to practice not being afraid of saying difficult things to a group of important people or a VP.
Another thing important to me in my career is not to pretend you know things you don't know. I really like when people say, “I don't know the answer, but I'll get back to you.” Sometimes, you might say to the leadership, “I don't think we should do it this way.” And then they ask why not? What's your suggestion to do it differently? It's okay to say, “I don't know, but I will go try to figure it out.” I believe it is important to be able to speak the truth. And it’s also okay to say if you don't know something and take actions to follow up. That definitely needs experience and courage in front of powerful people. I've only ever had good things happen from saying something unpopular in a room. One of my mentors always said “What's the worst that could happen if you are being honest?”
I used this mindset when I worked at a company as a UX specialist. I felt like the team didn't really want to listen to UX experts, and didn’t have enough data from user research. At one point I decided to write a very carefully worded email to talk about my frustrations and expectations. I talked about the facts — the product team should not have a designer because they are not in the place to use that design support and expertise. Even if we bring a new designer in, it's kind of a waste of their time. I was so scared to send this email because I was still very junior in my career. And then, it worked! The manager transferred me to another team. And I think to this day that still doesn't have a designer in the team because they are more tech-focused. Good things will happen. You just need to give it a try.
This is very encouraging to hear, especially for some Taiwanese folks because people sometimes are too afraid of speaking up in the work environment. To continue on the IC topic, I am curious what are the most important hard and soft skills that you would recommend for people to grow in?
My answer is that you need to be able to say, NO. As a principal, everybody is going to want you to do a lot of things. And everybody's going to think all the things that they need you to do are important. So saying no is about prioritization. Some things you're going to be able to complete, and some things you don't have time to do. You also can identify some things that are more important than others. Say no nicely, and share your prioritization, and put your focus, your talents where they are most needed. Be straightforward and don't apologize about your decision. If your personality allows for it, you can have some humor about it when you reject some work. I think humor definitely is a powerful skill, to sprinkle on top of a conversation. People appreciate when you express yourself, your personality.
Even though individual contributors don’t formally manage a team, you still have to offer guidance. How do you balance your time between just wanting to design components and providing mentorship to your team members?
Yeah, I think I have an easy way to do that because most of the people that I work with are in a very different time zone (9 hours away). It means that much of my day, they're not even awake. So I think the time difference helps to make a nice boundary between working alone vs when I am with my team and coaching some junior designers. And sometimes it's not coaching! Like I mentioned, I like to learn new things. My colleagues are teaching me as well.
I think in general at work, having boundaries is a good thing. I believe in having strong boundaries like between work and personal life. Like your hands-on work and your meetings, you know, you have to make boundaries for yourself because basically nobody will create boundaries for you. Most companies, you could work 20 hours a day if you felt like it, because nobody is going to stop you. It will probably be great for your career, but bad for your personal life. So it's up to you to define those priorities and boundaries everyday.
How do you see yourself in the next five years in your career?
In the next five years, I want to bring back some of that technology component of my day to day work. There is a job at Amazon called design technologist, which is sometimes called UX prototyper or UX engineer at other companies. You will still be a UX designer, focusing on design, but you also create prototypes and write code at the same time. The design technologist doesn't necessarily write production code, but she writes code to show proof of concepts or she helps the engineering team to do research on something. The importance of the role is bridging the gap between design and technology. So for my career trajectory, I would like to grow in that direction. Still staying at the principal level, but kind of growing in the technical way, which is kind of going back to my earlier career as an engineer.
Last question, what advice would you give to a senior designer who is trying to decide between the IC track and management track?
The first thing is to tell your manager that you're interested in exploring lead / manager track. And I think most managers are desperate for more people managers. So they will let you try out this lead role, and have 1-2 people report to you before you have a bigger group. I have seen a number of people become managers that way. And I have seen a number of people decide they don't want to become managers after trying the lead role. If your company doesn't have like a specific track like that, I think using mentorship to exercise those muscles and see if you like the interaction with more junior designer or new students.
