Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. In this episode, Jason sits down with product designer and author Kat Small to explore what it really means to grow your impact without becoming a manager. They unpack the mindset shift from craft to influence, the power of invisible work, and how senior designers can lead through communication, clarity, and confidence. Enjoy the show.
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers, and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, Senior Manager for Content Production and User Testing. Joining us today as host is Jason Giles, User Testing's Vice President of Design. Welcome back, Jason.
Hello, everyone, and hello, Nathan. It's nice to be back.
And today's guest is Kat Small. Kat is a staff product designer, game maker, and author of the recently published book, The Staff Designer.
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Chapter 2: How can staff designers grow their impact without becoming managers?
She spent her career shaping impactful digital experiences at companies like SoundCloud, Asana, and Etsy. And she's here to share how individual contributors can lead, influence, and drive change without becoming managers. Welcome to the show, Kat.
Hey, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Kat, I was really looking forward to this conversation. It's actually very timely because I've been having career conversations with my own team. So this is great. Before we begin, you've actually had a really fascinating career. Etsy to Asana, a bunch of cool stuff in between, even some game design.
Just to kind of ground us, can you walk us through your journey and kind of how those experiences shaped your perspective?
Yeah, I think that it's been a really fun career to have. I honestly got into design and technology at a pretty young age, so I have been playing games my whole life.
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Chapter 3: What does it mean to build influence as a designer?
And around the age of 10, really weird to say, this must've been like 2000, oh no, 1999. Oh my God. I remember like, I learned, I taught myself how to essentially like make these dress up dolls because I was a huge fan of anime like Sailor Moon. And I just wanted to experiment with fashion.
And I found out that, you know, if you essentially like program these dolls, you could like change their clothes and you could have your own original characters. And I was like, wow, technology is magical.
These are physical dolls?
It was digital. It was all like a digital drop the doll kind of thing. Yeah. So it was like a really good, wholesome period of time. And yeah, you know, me being like a 10 year old, I was like obsessed. You know, you could literally like illustrate as many clothes as you wanted to. And I just felt like that showed me the power of what technology could be.
And so then fast forward a couple of years, I was in high school and I ended up taking like, I went to this high school that was focused on like the visual arts, performing arts, like different kinds of creativity. And I was an art student there. So I specifically was focused on mostly fine arts. But then there was this one class that was called I think it was computer graphics.
And then I learned, oh, graphic design's a thing.
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Chapter 4: How does invisible work affect a staff designer's impact?
Like, what's that? And so then I ended up diving really deep into that. But that was also around the same time that blogging was getting pretty big. And so I had always been learning about visual art and technology at the same time. So like I was learning the fundamentals of design, but also how to program. And so I was like, okay, cool. Like I like both of these things.
I don't know how these are going to combine in the future. And then fast forward to college. Then I did actually go to school for graphic design, but then I noticed while I was there that a lot of the other students weren't like the greatest at understanding interaction design. So I was like, okay, I think I'm going to go for that.
And then I was also doing volunteer work with some friends of mine to make art for their games, kind of like flexing that other kind of creative part of myself. And so there's always again, it's been this like intersection. So by the time that I was out of college, I did actually have a. junior web design position lined up. And then I also had a lot of understanding of how games worked.
Chapter 5: Why is communication important for design leadership?
And then essentially as I built my career in design, I've also been building like a partial career in the gaming industry. So I've done a bunch of things on the gaming side. I've made my own games that have been shown in different museums. and at different shows. I've also taught people to make games.
I currently organize a conference that actually celebrates the creativity of game developers of color in particular. That's been running for like 10 years. And then yeah, I have my 16 year career as a digital product designer at this point. And yeah, it's really been fun to kind of balance all of those things.
There's so much diversity and experiences and influences on that. Are there some specific aspects, whether it's the game design or your writing ability that you feel like has really kind of shaped what is uniquely you about your perspective?
Oh, that's so wonderful. Thank you. I do think that, I mean, I guess underpinning all of it is I'm just so fascinated by people and like, how they think and how they work. And so a lot of, I mean, even the book itself is something that I wrote because I wanted to understand, you know, how everybody kind of thinks about this role.
And I think a lot of my work, my games are definitely like a reflection of
um kind of my own lived experience and a lot of the things that i write on my blog are very much that as well so i think i'm you know i'm often putting myself out there to kind of see you know what resonates with other people how do other people think about this and i just want to have a conversation with everybody so um yeah that's why i also really like public speaking i think that you know you kind of put a signal out there and then kind of see
you know who who is drawn in and maybe is interested in having more conversation about some of these topics I am I really love I love the bravery of inviting the conversation and I you mentioned the book so you know let's get right to that the book is called the staff designer and it explores this role that actually often flies under the radar or as lots of kind of kind of mysticism around it.
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Chapter 6: How can designers navigate workplace politics with integrity?
But it's super critical, I know, to my team and every team that I've run. But what I think is unique about this is that, like, I guess my first question is what first made you realize that there was this kind of gap in understanding around how we talk about both defining but then also supporting this senior level individual contributor, particularly within in design?
Yeah, I remember feeling like there might be a gap while I was working at Etsy. I saw a couple of people in this position and I really admired their work. I want to call out specifically my now friend, Jessica Harley. She was the first staff designer that I met that I felt like, oh, maybe I could do what she does one day. Yeah. I feel like we think really similarly about the work.
She's also a prolific blogger, and I definitely recommend checking out her writing. And for a little bit, she was a mentor of sorts when I was working with her at Etsy. And I would just ask her, what made you not want to go into management and to take this level up? And yeah, just getting to pick her brain on things a little bit opened up
The idea that maybe I don't have to become a manager to progress in my career. And at that point, I had actually tried management and found it. There were parts of it that I really liked, but then there were parts of it where I just felt like I was really struggling on the HR side. And I'm very, very empathetic, which can be really good. But
I think that to be an effective manager, sometimes you have to learn how to create a little bit of distance. And so I think I really struggled. But I wanted to figure out what career progression would look like for me. And so while I was at Etsy, I started advocating for myself to potentially be put into that kind of staff position. But I think the language at the time was really unclear.
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Chapter 7: What strategies can designers use to manage their energy effectively?
And I think that basically like I think managers knew what influence was to them, but I didn't know what it meant. And it was hard to explain those kinds of terms. And so they would say, you know, you have to build your influence skills like you have to build these certain kind of mushy skills. And I just really literally didn't understand what they meant.
And that's when I realized, OK, something is here.
and nobody's really like there was a book called like the staff engineer but there wasn't anything for design there was the making of a manager but like that's about management so i was just like okay i'm going to keep this in the back of my head and then eventually um i did actually so basically about a year passed and i was like okay i don't know what's going on here but i'm going to kind of start looking around for a new job and then i did get a staff position at asana and so then i was like okay now i've got the role
And it was very quickly apparent what my manager meant by influence. And so I was like, OK, now I can understand in a little more detail what they were saying now that I'm experiencing it. So I'm gonna take notes. And then if nobody else has written a book on this in a couple of years, then I will contribute that because I do think that this is something that's missing.
So it's honestly like my lived experience of struggling and not really finding very many resources. There was a period in 2021 where Brian Loven, who did write the forward for my book, He had been interviewing people for his website staff.design and that was a lifeline for me, but that was the only resource that I'd had at any point that actually talked about staff design.
When I saw the title of the book, I was two reactions. One, I was like, awesome, finally. And then, oh, thank you. Because even as a leader who is trying to help somebody through these transitions, you know, we're describing it to your point, right, when we talk about influence, impact, those concepts. you know, it's kind of tough.
And even as leaders, sometimes we don't have the language to really articulate in a way that, you know, someone will understand. So I'm really excited about that. One of the concepts that you introduce in the book is this idea of invisible work and I mean, it's just so timely because I literally had this conversation today.
Can you talk a little bit more about what that is and how somebody who's moving into this role might think about that or come to terms with it?
Absolutely. Yeah. I think a lot about the concept of like these, the different types of work that we do, essentially. I think when I initially started trying to build influence while I was still a senior designer, I was taking on a lot of team culture work, which is really valuable and critical work.
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Chapter 8: How is AI transforming the role of designers in the industry?
But that tends to fall into the category of what Tanya Riley called glue work, where you're kind of like filling in the gaps. But if you are doing things that are outside of the realm of what's defined in the career ladder as valuable, then you can end up in a situation where You are making an impact, but it's not the kind that will actually get you promoted or be seen as particularly valuable.
And so a lot of the things that I reflect on in the book do touch on how you prioritize your energy to actually put in the kind of work that will result in building that influence and to actually result in the kind of impact that you want to make, so being more intentional. And what that does look like is relationship building. It's a lot of understanding the fears and the
concerns of your teammates, of your leaders, and being able to essentially angle your communications to adapt to what those people are prioritizing while still delivering the message that you intend to get across. And that is the kind of stuff that I think that we tend to
Right now or before this book, I think a lot of senior designers didn't really have a resource to understand how much of the transition is communication based and based on mindset. So one of the other things that you have to do, for example, is to kind of transition from being told what to do to essentially diagnosing what is important.
And that was something that I partially struggled with myself because I had viewed my manager as kind of, you know, someone above me. But then when I became a staff designer, actually, my manager is kind of my partner. And, you know, now I kind of I approach the conversation more around, like, how do I give you the information that you need to make good decisions?
And, you know, I want to propose things and kind of have you be a thought partner instead of having kind of potentially an adversarial work relationship. So I think that's like a lot of the effort. I meet with a lot of people from across the company to kind of stay aware of what's going on. And then you kind of never know when that is going to come in handy.
For example, you know, like semi recently at my current employer, I was I was talking with this brand designer and, you know, she happened to mention like, oh, hey, you know, we're kind of working on this one project in particular. And then I was in a design crit with several other people on a completely different team.
And they mentioned, you know, oh, like our colors are a little bit discordant in this particular way. And I could be like, oh, hey, I actually know that there's conversation about these things right now, and I can connect you with those people. And the design director who's running that crit saw that. And those are the little things.
So I think there's essentially an investment of sorts in relationships so that you have the information from across the company, and then you can utilize that at certain points in time.
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