When I was a little girl, my mother designed and hand-stitched my clothes. She asked me what I liked and listened as my imagination emerged, my dreams became concepts, and she then crafted something magical. While I waited patiently for her to finish the stitches, her ability to translate my thoughts into finished clothing awakened in me a fascination with design and problem-solving.

Today, I design by innovating experiences, empowering teams, building communities, and fostering a compassionate culture.

I am a Silent Leader.
Through trust, empathy, and coaching, I enable my team to achieve self-empowerment. I expand the team's skills instead of telling, doing, speaking, or writing on their behalf. As a leader, I set my team up for success by creating, evolving, and sustaining frameworks for strategy, environment, and goals.

Guiding Principle: The Four P’s

People who have a purpose and process will innovate products. 

• People: Who are you? What is your passion? Do you have the skills? What is your path? Why are you doing what you do? 

• Purpose: What is your intention? Do you understand where we’re going and why it’s important?

• Process: Do you have a framework? 

• Product: What is the ultimate goal? What will you be saying when the problem is solved?

Values

Diversity
A diversified team enables deeper empathy, multifaceted thinking; different and fresh perspectives which leads to innovative solutions. The compassion for diversity comes from my own experiences. For example, as an ESL individual, I advocate from first-hand experience that localization and internationalization are built-in requirements. 

Learning
In an ever-evolving world of new technology, my appetite for learning never stops. I am part of various design and technology groups to stay ahead of the curve and to contribute to the community with my resources and mentorship. 

Humanity
Above everything else, we are, first, human. I expect myself and others to hold and extend basic humanity—respect, courage, humility, resilience, and empathy—to our peers and teams.

Empowerment
Just as I empower myself, I empower my team by identifying their strengths and interests by enabling them to take on relevant initiatives and own the outcomes. 

Transparency
I foster an environment of transparency and trust. By sharing knowledge and information to remove communication barriers, I build trust and empower the teams to have open communication. 

Ethics 
I model and promote ethical conduct. I respect everyone, practice equity, mitigate stress, and communicate openly. My ethical behavior impacts the team, business, and customers. It boosts team morale, increases positivity in collaboration, and develops team loyalty. All of those impacts will result in better products and the best customer experiences. 

Where I stand on…

Culture
Shared and agreed values are the team’s culture. I promote a culture of diversity, learning, and transparency. I design an environment and structure that:

• Enables the team’s best work 

• Echos the user’s voice 

• Drives the company’s Objectives and Key Results (OKR) 

Career Development
I have informed and contributed to career ladders and developed clear paths for my team’s success. Ultimately, career development is a partnership. I guide you on the path you drive to the destination. My framework for career development is to work back from the ultimate vision. A career trajectory that will establish the current level and develop skills to get to the ideal destination to the level.  

• Foundation: What are your values, vision, goals, and expectations? 

• Recognize: What is your current state, gap analysis, and ideal state? 

• Assessment: What are your strengths, challenges, and opportunities? What are you a subject matter expert of? What do you need to learn? 

• Architecture: What is your plan for design leadership, design systems, portfolios, product design…?

• Goals: What are your short and long term goals? 

• Design:  What are your plans for Performance, Exposure, and Image? 

Performance Feedback
I provide consistent, clear, and on-going feedback to my team. My positive and constructive feedback throughout the year is intended to ensure expanding the team’s skills, and goal achievement. We have one-on-ones to ensure you are on track and get the support you need. The year-end review feedback discussions won’t have any surprises. 

Recognition: I appreciate you.
Fierce designers should be encouraged, recognized, and celebrated. When you do your best for the team, business, and customers. I express my genuine appreciation to show you my gratitude. Recognizing good work and team work is valued. 

Mentorship
Sam Senn’s mentorship has helped me to develop a clear framework for myself when I was early on in my career. Over time, I have established my own mentor map and framework where I establish the connection among my peers, team, and partners. I mentor my team and designers in the community on 

• Own my influence: the qualities of effective leadership

• Assess my current situation: understand the dynamics at play

• Begin with empathy: understand the needs and goals of the business, research, engineering, product, and design partners

• Set intentions: approaches to reduce ambiguity and increase transparency

• Invite participation: techniques to gain alignment around vision, process, and outcome

• Practice partnership: best practices for working together and leading

• Anchor design reviews: in business value and user goals

• Use storytelling and persuasion to sell design vision and get buy-in

• Increase transparency throughout the design process

• Partner with data throughout user goals

• Smart goals: establish goals with clarity 

• Lead my career path: driving goals and stretch the goals 

• Removing communication roadblocks: empowerment, clarity, and accountability 

• Able to teach, mentor, and guide: What are your contribution skills? 

• Understand the foundation: What are your learning skills?  

• Skills roadmap: What skills you will need to learn?

Goals
I believe in goal development and goal achievement. We will have open communication around your goals and performance on an on-going basis. This process will keep your goals on track and remove surprises. 

One-on-ones
I have developed a framework for my one-on-one meetings. 

• What is going well? Updates? A conversation about day to day events.

• What is not going well? A conversation about things that are not going well but they are under control. Are there opportunities for skill development? 

• What is at risk? Help? This is where you are asking me for help. I will step in to support you, negotiate a conflict, manage risk or an escalation. 

• What are your goals? We have a weekly conversation around your immediate and long term goals. 

Health
I practice mindfulness, yoga, and daily exercises. Consistent yoga has helped me to develop calmness, clarity, and resilience. I facilitate an optional weekly yoga practice for my team to bring awareness and priority to physical and mental health. I expect that you prioritize your health and family. 

Open communication
As a leader, I model open, clear, and effective communication. I encourage myself and my team to challenge the status quo, disagree, pushback, listen, learn, grow, and solve the biggest UX problems. I am mindful of these entering into meetings: 

• Psychological safety is an important part of a team’s communication practices. 

• Communication can be awkward, and uncomfortable at times. Respect, values, listening, and empathy are the tools to remove any barriers.

• Everyone has an equal voice and power to contribute. Thoughtfulness and making room to ensure hearing both introverted and extroverted voices is important. 

• There is no room for monopolizing, bullying, or making negative comments about other’s work or behavior. These behaviors result in a toxic work environment. 

Work/Life Balance
I plan and schedule for a 40 hour week. I don’t promote a workstyle that will result in burn out. I expect you to manage your schedule. There are exceptions during a product launch.

Holidays & PTO
Take your vacation and recharge! Don’t hoard vacation hours. Provide advance communication with the team to ensure your projects stay in green health upon your absence.

Decision Making
Decision making is not a solo activity. I partner with my team, partners, and leadership to drive the best business decision for the team, organization, and product. I include the right people, remove cognitive biases, apply situational strategies, and move forward with plans and actions. 

Cross-Group Collaboration
As a cross-functional unit, we are responsible for business alignment, delivering results and innovating solutions. This requires us to work together, communicate effectively, negotiate on priorities, challenge each other and collaborate on the project(s). We will measure our success on project output and cross pillar collaboration through retrospectives and feedback loops. 

Meetings
I meet for informational, problem-solving, and motivational proposes. My goals are to: 

• Ensure team’s alignment and cohesion

• Define intention, expectations, and deliverables

• Strengthen partnership and positive collaboration: exchange feedback on projects, ideas, and thought leadership 

• Share/gain information and encourage open discussions 

• Showcase support 

• Avoid meetings that lack agenda 

Work Hours 
I manage my core business hours, priorities, and commitments according to business priorities and personal needs. I manage teams in multiple time zones and expect the team to manage their working hours, personal appointments and communication. Please use your judgment, for example 

• We will need a conversation on permanent changes to your core business hours to support your personal needs such as childcare, family, or health.  

• There is no permission needed for situational ask, such appointments, taking care of errands…

What I expect from designers  

Leadership 
I expect you to practice leadership through establishing, driving, and articulating design visions; cross-pillar communication; and educating, guiding, and championing user-focused practices. 

Curiosity
Curiosity triggers - “why”, “how”, “what” and “when”. These questions then lead to learning, growth, and openness. Peel back the onion at all times, gain knowledge, become an SME, stay excited, and challenge the status quo. 

Design reviews
Design reviews (co-design, peer review, design quality reviews) are frameworks for you to share your designs (at any stage), get feedback, and make informed design decisions. Design reviews are judgment-free zones. 

Fail, “fail fast”, fail often
Fail fast philosophy results in radical innovation. By learning, iterative experiments, and feedback loops; you learn “what doesn’t work” and are able to develop intuition, point of view, and skills.

What designers can expect from me 

Model
I model, mentor, and coach. I do the right by my team, product, and users. I mentor and coach you to do the same. 

Red tape
I remove red tape. I remove ambiguity and expect you to do your job. I develop a space for you to access your empowerment.

Cloud 
I protect my team from fire drills, unrealistic timelines, negative feedback, burnout, and other demands. I have your back and you own your voice to do your best work. 

Equity 
The right people do the right thing. I treat my team with respect and fairness. I practice equity in recruiting, hiring, interviewing, work, reward, promotion, time, recognition, etc. 

Personalities
Clifton Strengthsfinder 2.0. My Top 5 Strength Themes according to Tom Rath's Strengths Finder 2.0 are:

• Responsibility

• Focus

• Competition

• Analytical

• Learner

Letter
This letter was mentored by my manager Feridoon “Doon” Malekzadeh, and challenged by my team Sara Hubbard, Poppy Reid, Dilip Jagadeesh, and Jon Sandler.

Date
March 2021