Land Your Dream Design Job
I wrote a comprehensive job search guide for Product Designers and UX Designers: uncover your superpowers, build your portfolio, ace design interviews, and negotiate your final offer.
Truth #1I catalyze big bets
2 big bets at Instacart
At Instacart I pitched and got funding for two projects—Landing Page System and Growth Platform. One helped us create 50,000+ SEO pages, the other redesigned our organization to help the company save estimated 100s of millions from projected marketing spend. Image below—offsite for the Growth Platform team that has grown from 2 people jamming on this idea (me and a PM) to a team of 70+ across several orgs.
Elevating a beloved membership at DoorDash
Led multiple sprints to reimagine how DashPass shows up at the forefront and educates customers about their benefits. Tactically this led us to refresh the brand from teal to purple, but more importantly it shifted the organization's mindset that attribution matters.
Truth #2I turn chaos into structure
Design leadership without authority
Across my time at DoorDash and Instacart, I've stepped in multiple times to mentor, grow and support my team when Design Management was absent. I helped organize the work we should be doing, ran crits, bridged gaps with cross-functional partners and mentored designers on how to promote and present their work in broader forums.
Playing product manager
When one of my PMs left the team I stepped in to organize brainstorms and pulled in cross-functional domain experts to inform our roadmap. For one of the big-bet projects I helped pitch, I stepped in to organize the work, ran standups with engineering to keep it on track and resolve issues.
Truth #3I help 10x others
Mentorship at scale
Throughout the last decade+ of my tenure I ran crits and workshops, teaching design tools and methods to cross-functional stakeholders. I've mentored several designers along the way to help them fine-tune their work and how they show up.
Supporting new designers in the industry
Outside of work I keynoted the Boston UXPA in May 2021 to 100 attendees, and spoke at Andi Galpern's Career Design Network event. I've written books to help designers put their best foot forward when it comes to landing that dream design job.
Teaching a grad school course
In 2021 taught a remote Design Portfolio Course to 9 grad school students at University of Maryland. 15 hours, 6 weeks.
DoorDash
Feb 2024–Present
Staff Product Designer
- Revitalized a stalled rebrand effort, shipped features leading to subscriber growth through craft
- Unlocked new subscriber growth via 2 new benefits outside of traditional savings levers
- Led DashPass Architecture sprint across finance, product, and design to envision the future of our program 5 years out, resulting in 4 launched experiments in 2026
- Created an internal tool to monitor member health and look for new growth opportunities
- Shipped two new partnerships, HBO Max and Lyft, and established a playbook to bring on new partners
Instacart
May 2018–Jan 2024
Staff Product Designer
- Pitched Growth Platform and led its design as it grew from 2 people to a 70+ person effort across several orgs, became a top 10 CEO priority, and saved an estimated $700M in marketing spend
- Secured funding for and led design of the Landing Page System, creating 50,000+ SEO pages
- Launched Instacart Pickup and SNAP benefits from 0 to 1; designed projects adding up to $4B in GTV
- Two patents granted for household accounts and customer staples
- Redesigned order status, ratings, and issue reporting, increasing shopper tips and order quality
University of Maryland
Jan 2021–Mar 2021
Adjunct Professor
- Taught a 15-hour graduate portfolio course to 9 students
- Students learned how to write case studies, design their portfolio, promote and market their skills to stand out as a candidate
Various tech startups
Aug 2016–Mar 2018
Product Designer
- Carlypso (YC startup, later acquired by Carvana): Sole designer, redesigned the consumer e-commerce web app, created future mobile app concepts to aid in selling the company
- Augmedix: design lead for the Google Glass app to help doctors transcribe patient visits. Launched new features and improved product connectivity
- Junior.io (agency): presented work to major consumer brands like eBay and enterprise clients
CMU
Aug 2015–Aug 2016
Student
- Went back to school at Carnegie Mellon University to learn design the proper way by getting a Master’s in Human Computer Interaction
- Variety of courses in design, research, cs plus capstone project
- Capstone: conversational banking app for Bank of America · Inventor on 9 Bank of America patents
Cigna
Jan 2010–Aug 2015
UX Designer
- Sole designer on a benefits enrollment product across consumer and admin experiences
- Spearheaded a practice of user research by synthesizing data from contextual inquiry, web analytics, customer feedback and usability studies
- Built the business case for a consumer site redesign by triangulating web sessions, customer profiles, and call data, showing a 7% increase in ROI through call-volume reduction
- Founded a design community, culminating in a 2-day intensive training for nearly 100 IT associates
UX Design Interview Exercises
Combines time tested knowledge of how to ace UX Design exercises such as whiteboards, app crits, and take home assignments.
I taught Figma to Content Designers—here’s the feedback
Thank you so much for developing a comprehensive 2 hour Content Design-friendly Figma training for our Team Jam. It was a pleasure working with you—all I had to do was give you some prompts and you really ran with it. I hope you heard all the “ooohs” and “awwws” from the team and their delight in discovering all sorts of tricks and things to uplevel their Figma fluency.
Jennifer Yin
Former head of Content Design at Instacart