Setting career goals and working towards them
Interview with Fabio Sasso about the balancing act of leading and managing, side projects, and setting goals for yourself.
Leading with Craft is a limited series of articles where we shed a light on stories of designers with successful careers as individual contributors.
Curating and publishing hundreds of articles every month at the UX Collective, we have noticed an abundance of resources for designers switching careers to management, but a gap for those who want to continue to focus on their craft.
This series highlights professionals that never let their seniority move them away from their practice and their passion for what made them great in the first place, such as Fabio Sasso.
Fabio Sasso is a designer based in Oakland, California currently leading the Android Automotive OS UX team at Google. Since joining the company in 2011, he has had the chance to work on initiatives for Google Ventures, Google Doodles, Google Shopping Express, and lead major products and the vision for Google Search, Android Pay, and Google Play Music and Games.
Fabio is also the founder of Abduzeedo, an incredibly popular design blog focused on design inspiration and tutorials, helping designers around the world learn about tools and get inspired. More recently, Fabio designed and launched Calmaria, a mobile app focused on breathing techniques for mental health and balance.
Not having to prove yourself to other designers
[UXC] Fabio, so great to have you on this series. Tell us a bit about your career so far. You’ve been a designer for more than 20 years, which is quite an impressive mark. What motivates you to continue being a designer?
[Fabio] It’s kind of crazy, to be honest, to think I’ve been designing for more than 20 years. I still remember my first internship at a print shop, then my first job designing interfaces for software for courthouses in Porto Alegre, Brazil back in 1998. For some reason, I feel like I am still starting out my career. Every new project I feel that shiver in the back of my spine, even though I have probably gone through the same thing so many times. I think that is what motivates me, the fact that I don’t feel comfortable just yet. On top of that, I am quite curious about how things are made, which explains my eternal struggle with programming.
Have your motivations changed throughout the years? In what way?
Some definitely have changed. For example, when I was starting out, and even when I was a bit more experienced, I still had this feeling that I needed to show other designers I was a good designer. As time passed my motivations became more on how to streamline the process of delivering great products to our audience. That means focusing more on close collaboration with all the functions that make it possible (engineers, product managers, marketing..) as well as clear alignment of business goals and strategy. If we can make the process and the team collaboration great, the chances of getting a great product, in the end, are much higher.
How about your principles?
That’s a good question and I think it aligns with my change of motivation. I do believe that good design is not just good for the user, but rational and optimal from the production point of view. In other words, empathy, or trying to understand the different points of view when there are multiple people from different areas working towards the same end goal.
From the pure design process point of view, ideation and prototyping are at the top of my list. It’s an essential part of my workflow and nowadays it has become much easier to quickly preview what you want to achieve with intricate interactions. As with everything in life, it’s important to understand the role of doing that, the higher fidelity and fancier the prototype, the more attached you get to that which makes it hard to throw away and that is dangerous from the ideation and innovation point of view.
Let’s talk a bit about your current role. What does it mean to be a Sr. Staff Designer at Google? How would you describe your responsibilities in terms of designing, leading projects, and managing people?
It’s a long title hah! Jokes aside, the title just translates to the amount of scope and responsibility. Instead of focusing on a feature, the goals are to work on the strategy of how all these features and products fit together and how that translates to a short, medium, and long-term roadmap. It also gives me the chance to work with amazing designers that really execute on that. My role is more to make sure we are all heading towards the same compass point.
That sounds exciting. Was there a point in your career where you realized you didn’t want to become a full-time manager?
I have been an IC (individual contributor) for most of my career; in the past 6 years, I’ve also been managing. The reasons for that could be summarized in the opportunity to learn something new (getting out of my comfort zone) and plain curiosity. I still do a lot of IC work, but it’s about translating business goals, engineering constraints, and other variables into a design strategy and how to execute it. I also dedicate a big part of my time to make sure the designers have the space they need to do their best work.
Perhaps, selfishly, I try to be the manager I always wanted to have. It’s a naive goal and made me realize that it’s probably an unachievable task, plus it gives me much more appreciation and respect for all the great managers I had in the past.
There’s nothing more gratifying than seeing someone using something you and your team designed, a problem you solved.
Using side projects to continuously improve your craft
Couldn’t agree more: it feels really special to see people use a product you designed. Is that one of the reasons why you created the Calmaria app in the first place?
It definitely does! But to be honest, it was not the first goal in mind when I started Calmaria. I started it because I wanted a simple and — I dare say — beautiful app for my breathing exercise on Android. In other words, it was created to help me cope with anxiety, which got amplified by the pandemic. My goal was to create an experience as straightforward as a calculator, just open and use it. Sounds simple, but there are tons of temptations to add things. It’s an exercise of self-control.
I knew Android development so I thought it would be a nice weekend side project (with family and a full-time job, if I cannot finish something in a weekend, it probably won’t be finished ever). I created the first version very quickly and then decided to launch it. But then I thought to myself if I’m going to launch it, let’s at least make it look a bit professional. So I needed a story, a brand, a website, simple marketing material… It was a very humbling experience of doing everything, from idea, to design, to code, to deal with submitting the app to the stores, copy, marketing. It became the best opportunity to understand how hard every single step of the process is and appreciate even more having the chance to work with these different functions in my full-time job.
Calmaria also gave me the motivation to learn SwiftUI, which alone is hard to ignore the importance of learning something new.
Speaking of side projects. You’ve been running Abduzeedo for impressive 15 years, and it continues to be extremely relevant in the design community. What’s your secret sauce?
Abduzeedo is definitely part of my life now. It’s a hobby. A few times I thought about shutting it down. From the financial point of view, it doesn’t justify the time I spend. But back to what I mentioned before, it helps me to become a better designer by simply doing the exercise of checking other designers’ work to see what I like and would share on the blog. It also gives me an opportunity to keep practicing, improving, and learning new technical skills from CSS, JS to the SwiftUIfor the new app that I just launched. As long as I feel that I am learning, I will be posting, even if it’s just for me, as it was when it started back in 2006.
The importance of setting your own goals
What advice would you give to designers who are at a senior/lead level and want to keep focused on their craft and not necessarily move to a management position?
For me, the most important thing is to understand exactly what your goals are. You don’t have to become a manager to progress, you need to be motivated and happy to do so. If you want to become an expert at visual design, for example, focus your energy on that. Set the expectations and work towards your goal. If you don’t know what your goals are, try different things to better understand what drives you. As Jeff Bezos famously says most decisions we make are 2-way doors, you can always go back.
What’s the one thing you have realized about design career paths that you don’t think a lot of people have?
I literally don’t know, I am all about trial and error, which translates into taking much longer to progress I think. So I believe most people have realized things before me.
What are you obsessed with right now?
I love audiobooks, I don’t listen to music, just audiobooks when I am running, exercising, driving, or cleaning the house. I decided to read less news, social media, and articles, in general, to focus more on books. It is definitely a target to fight my anxiety. I have this feeling that everything is moving so fast in this connected world that it is hard to have a sense of closure. Books give me that.
If you’re looking for design inspiration, make sure to subscribe to Abduzeedo, and to follow Fabio on Twitter.
More about this series on craft.uxdesign.cc
