Becoming a better designer: learnings from a 14–week internship
What I learned from my internship at Duo Security.
So last Friday, Aug. 21, was the last day of my internship at Duo Security, and it was exactly my first anniversary of arriving in the U.S. Had I known I would finish my internship at such a wonderful company on the same day one year ago, I would have felt a lot more relieved.
Today, I will be sharing how it’s like to work at Duo and what I learned from the internship at Duo.
Working at Duo
One of the best about working at Duo is its culture. Duo prides itself on one the four core values — “Be kinder than necessary” and Duo people mean it. The spirit is embodied in countless working details, which provides an extra benefit: Psychological Safety.
Let’s see what Harvard Business Review has summarized for us about Psychology Safety from different studies:
- Human evolutionary adaptions have been successfully relied on the fright-or-fight response, which can be associated with a negatively competitive work environment or a provocative superior (Edmondson, A., 1999).
- However, nowadays, we need the mechanism of broaden-and-build to solve complicated problems.
- Positive emotions like trust, confidence and curiosity can broaden the mind. We are more open-minded and resilient when we feel safe (Fredrickson, B. L., 2001).
With sufficient Psychological Safety, I feel comfortable to be honest with my weakness and speak up if I see rooms for improvements. At the same time, everyone is also encouraged to keep “ Learning together” by having workshop, Lunch and Learn, book fundings, and sharing information openly. This learning culture helps us stay hungry for knowledge and always be ready for becoming better.
One thing special is that since Duo Security is a part of Cisco now, Duo people also have access to numerous resources while maintaining a startup-ish open culture, which I found really valuable. This open culture and one-big-family vibe nourish me as an aspiring designer to become bolder for ideas and more innovate for experiments.
Duo People: why I love my internship
People are every company’s most valuable asset, and this can’t be more correct at Duo. When asked about what I like most about the internship, I will certainly say Duonauts (what we call Duo people)! Of course, I love my projects and I feel so lucky to work at a company whose business remains strong given the COVID situation. However, what makes a company great is definitely the people behind it. It is the people that I can learn most from.
Everyone at Duo is so kind, literally. Although we interact completely through the screen during the whole summer, I don’t feel the kindness and welcome are any less.
Interning at a company specializing in security is not easy, at least for someone who doesn’t have a strong technology background. I usually have tons of questions when facing numerous technical terms and concepts. However, the warmth of people at Duo makes me feel comfortable to ask questions. Combining with their smartness, it creates a trusting culture and sense of efficacy that we can rely on each other to achieve goals.
What I learned from Duo
Communicate with stakeholders
A majority of designers’ work is communication, especially for a large organization. In the internship, I need to work with four stakeholders for one of my projects. As the project moved forward, I gradually learned how to manage a design project while working with stakeholders.
Here is my high-level learning: include stakeholders at the beginning of projects, lean in to lead the discussion, and inform stakeholders of progress concisely.
Educate others about your projects
I am easy to get nervous when presenting work, which is heavily reflected by my stammering and awkward intonation. So, there were times when I felt reserved about sharing my projects or design progress with others. However, from numerous coffee chats with different designers and managers, I learned that one of the key differentiators of a great designer is the ability to educate others of your design.
Here is my high-level learning: think about what information to share with the team, how we can educate others about our projects, what kind of findings we can share.
Stay aware to collect feedback earlier
Remember how I preached wabi-sabi in my other article Rethinking the design mindset? Yes, it’s important to show an early-phase imperfect work, but I am honest with myself here that I found I prioritized other tasks over “asking for feedback” when facing a totally new and difficult project.
We know the concept of getting feedback early to iterate on ideas fast and effectively. However, according to G.I. Joe Fallacy, knowing is merely halfway as putting something into practice. Looking back now, I just realized how different it is to consciously practice “getting feedback” at work.
Although I did include as many others as possible to get feedback, in the end, I wish I had included others earlier in the development stage. In reflection, I realized getting feedback wasn’t primed in my mind when I started design projects at Duo. Instead, I was occupied to get to know the product, the technical knowledge and the working culture there.
Here is my high-level learning: don’t be afraid of asking for feedback and try to remind ourselves to get out there for a fresh perspective.
Learn to be comfortable with the technical details
As someone receiving education from Liberal Arts and truly loving it, I wasn’t born with the gene of quickly getting the hang of technical knowledge. However, I am a diligent learner and I pride myself in my ambition to learn.
Thanks to my habits of taking notes throughout self-teaching, I applied the strategy to my process of understanding the technical side of the product I need to design too. Even more, my managers encouraged me to diagram what I learned, which turned out to be a fascinating method to visually share the process and enhance conversation within the team.
The other difficulty with technical knowledge is how far the research should go. I sometimes hit the rocks when I wasn’t sure how deep I should dive in the enormous sea of information before I can compile the findings into a design direction. So here is what I found: there can’t be perfect timing to call the shots, so in my situation where I am an intern with limited time on this project, I prioritized feasibility — I stopped my quest for spec when I have gathered adequate doable findings to generate design concepts. Undoubtedly, I got my managers have my back and I could always go to them to ask for advice!
Here is my high-level learning: learn to live with the ambiguity of design, try to be comfortable with the fact that we (at least I) can’t reach the expert level of the domain technology, but I am still contributing my part to improve users’ overall experience, ask for feedback!
Strategic product mindset
The last learning from my internship is about strategy and product roadmap. At school, we learn design thinking methodologies and user-centered design techniques. However, in a school context, we don’t have that many exposures of strategizing product-market fit, in which product design also plays a huge part. In this internship, I had the chance to step outside of design and think from a holistic perspective, especially it’s my first time working in the U.S. I get to see where design plays its part in shaping the product’s vision and how the market sculpts our products in return. This strategic thinking in product design is one of the most valuable experiences I obtained in the internship.
Here is my high-level learning: spend some time digging into the product marketing documents, chat with PMs and Marketing Managers about the product to earn diverse input into the design process.
Summary of my learning
To summarize my main takeaways from the internship, I basically realize I need to improve more on staying mindful about the timing of collecting feedback, while I have experienced working with stakeholders and advanced my communication skillsets including giving presentation. I have also stepped out of my naive design bubble and faced my two weaknesses of product design: product strategy and technical specifics.
For me, this internship is a battlefield where I encountered my weak spots and could finally take a good look into them! Thus, I could find ways to pass those challenges and get over them.
Reference
Delizonna, L. (2017). High-performing teams need psychological safety. Here’s how to create It. Harvard Business Review, 8, 1–5.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative science quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American psychologist, 56(3), 218.
