Friday Finishers! A moment of thanks and gratitude leads to growth!

Foreign Happy Friday. So, so, so glad to be here today to talk to you a little bit about what I've been up to for the last six months and kind of just really bring it down to. It's a magical moment to thank a certain individual and kind of go through the entire like kind of evolution of what's been going on and like what I've been working on and what have been focusing on. And I think this is a great moment just on Friday because, you know, Friday's a great day to like finish things, to knock things off your list. But it's also a magical day to be thankful and to give gratitude to your team, to the people that helped you get to where you are at and, and to just kind of lead in to the weekend in a really good energy, good vibe. Something that our team does at Growth Day, which is every Friday. We are doing like our Friday shout outs. So after our team stand up, we do a typical, you know, who do we want to shout out? What were we grateful for this week and what was something big, a big rock that we moved or was a big milestone. But what I want to do is go outside of that window and talk a bit, little, little bit about someone who helped me during a time where I was running my own business and I was learning a lot of new things and I needed a little bit of support, but I also needed somebody that I could bounce things off of, somebody that I could be sharing a lot of research and a lot of details with. And through that time, you know, you never know where something is going to lead, but if you have a vision, you have a destination of where you want to take it, you know, if you're staying focused on those things day in and day out, you can get to that point. And I'm going to share a little bit about that today. So kind of rewind, like rewind. Many, many years back, I started this UX series called Practical UX Weekly. And if you haven't seen Practical UX Weekly or if you haven't heard it or watched it, it's essentially two seasons of episodes where I teach something from about 5 to 15 minute time span. And we dive deep into a practical tactic that I've learned or that has really helped me proceed in my career in user experience design. Some of these are when I'm working with engineers, some of these are when I'm working with product designers, product managers, and some are about relationships, some are about remote collaboration, some are about building design systems, and some are just me sharing case Studies of things that worked really well and me just trying to share why they worked well and what I learned from those experiences. Because I believe that sharing your knowledge and sharing things that you learn is just an important part of life. And I really love doing that. And that's where Practical UX Weekly came. During that time, I was lead product designer@LinkedIn and lynda.com and it was just a really great opportunity because I was in the mode of learning, in the mode of growing, in the mode of sharing things and building a new platform. So it was a great time to be able to write, disseminate those learnings and share them back to you. Then I went and worked over at InVision and when I was at Envision, I was on a design transformation team and I got to really evolve the way I was thinking about how to help people at scale. So it wasn't just helping all the people learn in a learning and development platform like Lynda.com or LinkedIn Learning. It was about going out and helping the teams, helping the practitioners in product design and engineering build better teams collectively together. And that was kind of like our mission over at the Design Transformation Team over at Envision. But then I really started missing team camaraderie of building products and working, you know, on something like 3, 6, 9, 12 months and working on the same thing and really diving deep into that content. So then I jumped over into Facebook and I was at Facebook for 18 months, built 3,0 to 1 products there and I focused on performance products. So things that helped the internal Facebookers become better Facebookers and there are so many talented people there. And it was just about working inside that ecosystem. And then I realized that Next Level ux, which was a company that I founded, was really where my calling was at. I wanted to teach people, I wanted to do curriculum based learning programs that help people learn very, very tactical and very high impact skills around design. Some of those included Mapping to Learn, which is a program to help people learn how to break down all the chaos and all the complexity in your life or in whatever it is you're building and simplify it in a way where you can go and start building products from it. So just go through multiple mapping experiences and that's currently available on Next Level ux. Then there was Action Planning. So Action Planning is a similar program, but it is a four week program that allows you to get clarity, set goals, learn how, what the breakdown is. And the breakdown to me is like breaking down all the big milestones and goals and things that you're trying to do and then create an action plan on how to accomplish it and execute it. And the week four is just learning how to practice, how to practice, how to mix those things into your daily, weekly and monthly regimen and your routines and your rhythm to really start flowing through and having a great experience when you're showing up every day and how you're going to show up for your team. That was the two big programs that I launched for Next level ux. But on the side of that I've been coaching and helping people learn how to develop and grow in these sorts of methods. So the 12 week program that I developed is called Career Accelerator. And Career Accelerator is for UX practitioners from the highest levels down to the IC levels, entry level, to lead principal, senior director. And what this is doing is it's capitalizing on these 12 career defining topics and themes inside of the UX industry and product industry and really focusing in on how to drive more clarity to your projects, how to understand how to have more design energy, how to have more design clarity for your teams, how to understand the tools, the tactics and all the practices around all the things that we have access to now because it's a very fragmented industry, we have so many different options to do things. So how do you take all that knowledge and really channel it in a way that you can be most effective for your teams, for yourself, for your family, for your life? And I take a lot more holistic approach to that and I like to teach that and that's called Career Accelerator. So I've been putting people through those programs and doing all those things. And then it, it comes back to like feeling, you know, the sense of why I ended up having the opportunity to work on Growth Day. And Growth Day is a personal development app. It's focused on helping people around having the tools, the community and the coaching for their personal growth and development and having a one stop shop to be able to do those things, to be able to learn, to be able to plan, to be able to have these tools like challenges and life scoring and other elements inside of one app. You know, and then it, and it circles back to like this whole moment of gratitude and thank you for what I wanted to share today. And that goes back to my mother in law, Marcia Berger, who is a PhD and she's out of Louisville, Kentucky area. And previously before even joining Facebook I was out in, living in Indiana, in Kentucky area. We're building a connection around user experience design and how we could bring user experience design to the Seventh grade class and helping this class understand the fundamentals of user experience design and how it can drive a huge, huge amount of impact for solving problems and being very strategic with that and working through things in a more intentional way. So every week we had a class, an assignment, and we worked through that together. Through that time, we also were doing a lot of research, and research is Marcia's background, and she was just absolutely crushing it. And then once I started Next Level ux, I leaned on her a ton to be able to help bring in more additional research to help inform the programs that we were creating for nextlevel UX and how they could be a lot more strategic and effective if we just put that rigor and that research back into our programs. So this is a huge, huge, huge shout out to Marsha for all the effort and support that I needed when I was, you know, by myself in my studio here, working on this, this new venture and not realizing where it was going to end up and not realizing how it was going to just truly impact my life. But I just wanted to thank, you know, public thank you for that and just to realize that throughout our careers, we're going to have mentors, we're going to have partners, we're going to have history, we're going to have coaches, we're going to have, you know, friends that we meet throughout each of our companies and each of our products and our experiences. And the most important part is about respecting and honoring those relationships, building on those relationships. Because the people that you're working with now, it might not seem like you'll. You'll cross paths with them again, or it might not seem, but you absolutely will. Like, the industry is not as ginormous as we feel like the world is, and we cross paths and it's totally okay. You know, if you work with somebody one year and then they end up transitioning to another team or to another role because their passion changed and they wanted to go work and focus on something else, I think that's a beautiful thing. And I think realizing that there's going to be moments where people come and they go, but to honor those friendships, those relationships, and the people that helped you grow and develop and just transition, that is the magic part of what we do. And that's the magic part of what I just want to say I'm so thankful and honored to just be able to design, to be able to teach, and to be able to build products that help people grow and develop and learn. And, yeah, I just wanted to give a big shout out to all the people out there that are building products and services directly. Really help build better lives for people. So big thank you, the community, and also big thank you to Marsha for this absolute heroic jump in and helping me achieve one of my dreams of building this platform, of building next level UX and now getting to focus and be a lead design leader for Growth Day. So thank you so much. That's all I got today and I just want to wish you all an amazing weekend and I'll see you next time. All right, bye.