Charting my path to designing diversity

A Creative at Heart

I am not your traditional designer. I do push pixels but I came to it later in life. I was always creative with words and pictures. It was my way of expressing myself. But, when I entered the world of technology as a project manager I was led to believe that my role and main contribution lie solely in creation of schedules and budgets. The minutia of the project. Important for sure, but certainly not as important as the work itself — or so I was led to believe. A PM was never invited to comment on creative. There was a Creative Director for that. Just make sure the shit is done on time and on budget and if we’re being honest… preferably under budget.
Later, I moved into product management which, ironically, held a small modicum of creativity for me. I unearthed it like a possible from tedious documentation but, ultimately shaping a product was creative for me. I knew, however that I had more you offer. I knew I was creative at heart but could never find the way to express this within the heavily silo’d world of agency life. It was time to move on.

Putting it all together

It wasn’t until I started my own company that things began to gel. I was able to infuse my own creativity into every project that came through the door. As CEO, I focused on business development and day to day operations. But, as owner and founder, I was involved in every aspect of the business. I was largely responsible for the culture of the organization. I set the tone for how we ran the business, ran projects and solved our clients’ unique challenges. I set the company culture. And it was creative. I started out by thinking that I would manage projects as I had at prior agencies but I quickly found out that this wouldn’t work. A small company, in many ways, moves faster that a larger agency. The faster pace meant that a cohesive approach to issues was important. Everyone needed to move as a team — and quickly.  This is where design and creativity became even more important.
When hiring new help I looked for engineers with a creative flair, who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty in PhotoShop. In fact, every engineer at KM sliced their own PSDs for the first few years of business.  I never hired an engineer that never wanted to push pixels, too. Development was a collaborative event with every team member getting multiple iterations of every build to provide feedback at every stage of development. Later, when I transitioned to Sketch for designs, the agency transitioned along with me. So, my team members all got copies of my book and we are now a Sketch dev shop.
I was able to see first hand, how design can influence an organization for the better. It brought out latent creativity across the entire company. Everyone’s comments were valid and encouraged — even if they weren’t designers per se. This is why I firmly believe that design and creativity has a huge role to play within every startup and can ultimately affect and influence diversity and inclusion across the entire organization. I’ve seen it happen in my own company. In the coming weeks, I’ll expand more on this as it is the foundation for my next book: “Designing Diversity“