10 years designing at LinkedIn
In October 2010, I came across LinkedIn Career Explorer, a new product to help students chart a career path. Career Explorer was visually quirky — it looked like the Life board game — and I was intrigued. Up to this time, I had been using LinkedIn mostly as my online resume. I started to think about all the possible ways LinkedIn could help people discover career options and make changes like I did when I transitioned from Brand and Visual design to User Experience Design a few years earlier. A month later, I received an InMail from a LinkedIn recruiter about a Design position…and my story begins.
It’s been 10 years since I started working at LinkedIn, and what a journey it’s been! My first day was January 3rd, 2011, just 5 months before LinkedIn became a public company. I started as a UX Designer on the Core (Consumer) team, exploring a new resume feature for Profile, then moved to the Core Growth team where I stepped up to lead design for an ambitions project to reach 200 million members by the end of 2012. I’m happy to share that we achieved that goal and more. I worked around the clock for 21 days straight on the 200M project, and it’s still one of my fondest memories of incredible teamwork with truly amazing people across Product, Engineering, Design, and Program Management. It’s a testament to what a group of people can achieve when they work together with such clarity, camaraderie and passion.
Later in 2012, I moved into a new role at LinkedIn — Design Management. I started by leading 7 amazing UX Designers across Profile, Search and Growth products. Together we launched a smarter search experience, a new LinkedIn contacts app for desktop and iPhone, a redesigned Profile with multiple new features, including integration with Connected HQ, bringing relationship management features to every profile.
One of the most effective ways to grow your leadership skills is to immerse yourself in very different parts of the business, lead new people and take on new strategic product challenges. In 2013, I embraced the opportunity to do that when I stepped into the role leading Enterprise Design — 12 incredible UX Designers working across all of our monetized products at the time: LTS (Talent Solutions), LMS (Marketing Solutions) and Premium Subscriptions and Online Payments. Together we designed and launched a new standalone Jobs mobile app and Recruiter mobile app, a refreshed Recruiter Search experience, a new Ad Campaign Manager experience, showcase pages for companies, new Premium features and more. As I continued grow the design team, the need to add Design Management also grew. I asked 2 of my most experienced Senior Designers if they were interested in management, and the answer was yes! This started to shape the org into what it is today, with Design Managers dedicated not only to each business, but to specific products within each business.
Over the next several years, LSS (Sales Solutions), Enterprise Platform and Careers teams were all born from the amazing work of so many people on the Enterprise R&D team, including my ever growing UX team of Designers and Design Managers. We continued to expand through a series of product and talent acquisitions including Bright, Bizo, Fliptop, PointDrive and Connectifier. Working to seamlessly integrate people, products and processes through acquisitions was like a master class in diplomacy and brought incredible insight, challenge and learning. We continued to evolve the quality and value of our products with the launch of Profinder, Salary Insights, Referrals, a Student app, Lookup app for connecting with coworkers, and a new talent analytics product called LinkedIn Talent Insights. In 2016, LinkedIn became part of the Microsoft family and my Design team worked collaboratively on partnership projects such as LinkedIn Resume Assistant in Word.
The Enterprise Design team also had a lot of fun together, doing the first ever pecha kucha (now a LinkedIn Design tradition to get to know new hires), book clubs, go cart racing, and board games, lots of board games, Telestrations being one of our favorites to this day.
In 2017, our Enterprise teams and product suites grew to a size that merited truly standalone teams. I chose to continue leading design for our largest Enterprise business, LinkedIn Talent Solutions, and the Careers team. Together these teams create the LinkedIn hiring ecosystem that connects job seekers to hiring companies. In addition, I lead the LinkedIn Learning team for over a year, and today, I lead a 50+ person Design team for LinkedIn Talent Solutions, Careers, Trust, and LinkedIn China. I’ve had the opportunity to design and lead design for so many LinkedIn products over the years, but my passion for these products really resonates with my personal values of empowering people. When you can be part of helping someone get a job on a trusted, global platform, you positively impact not only the individual, but their families, communities and beyond.
One of my greatest joys as a Design leader has been helping people grow in their careers, both as individual contributors and managers. I’m so proud of everything they’ve achieved and feel especially fulfilled when people I’ve mentored become my peers. I’ve also enjoyed sharing my Design and leadership experience with students and professionals at Product School, SF Design Week, Designers+Geeks, AIGA, WeCode at Harvard, Grace Hopper, LinkedIn Student Open House, LinkedIn Coaches and more. It’s been inspiring to partner with so many talented people across so many functions here, but I have to share that User Research is especially close to my heart. User Research is invaluable to deeply understanding user needs and building quality products that meet and exceed those needs.
When I tell people how long I’ve worked at LinkedIn, the first response I usually get is, “Wow, that’s a while! What’s kept you there so long?” It’s the passion that everyone shares for manifesting LinkedIn’s mission and vision. It’s the fact that integrity has been priority one from day one, and that commitment to integrity has expanded to prioritize equity, accessibility, and reach to serve every member of the global workforce. I’m grateful to be a part of launching and integrating so many new products and businesses serving millions of members and customers, to mentor and be mentored by so many wonderful people, and to continue creating positivity in the world with this inspiring team and company. Thank you all.
