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AMA: I'm Cap Watkins, Product Design Manager at Etsy

9 years ago from Cap Watkins, VP of Design @ BuzzFeed

  • Matt AchariamMatt Achariam, 9 years ago

    Hello Cap, thank you for taking the time to join us. Your writing on design and management is often insightful and has proven valuable to the community. I’d like to kick things off with a few questions.

    1. Given the myriad of design problems to solve at any given time, how do you and your team at Etsy decide what to focus on?
    2. Being a designer in a managerial role, how do you reconcile not being able to practice your craft? Do you have any other creative outlets?
    3. What do you think is the most underserved field in design today?
    7 points
    • Cap WatkinsCap Watkins, 9 years ago

      Hi Matt! Thanks for those softball questions (I kid, I could write entire blog posts on all of those).

      1. At Etsy we take some time at the end of each year to evaluate what we're going to continue/start working on next year (we're actually in the middle of that right now). It's a bottoms-up process that has product teams (PMs, engineers and designers) getting together and brainstorming/strategizing together. We can't work on everything, but the teams are great at figuring out what will be most impactful.

      2. I find management to be a lot like being a designer (more UX, really). I do find time on the weekends to work on side projects, but mostly I just really enjoy helping and enabling great designers do great work. I'm comfortable having hired people way better than I am at design and just being the person that unblocks them and helps them when they need a whiteboarding partner or a second pair of eyes.

      3. User Research. Any time a company experiences it they can't get enough. Yet every company isn't fully dedicating resources to expanding those teams. Etsy's research team is amazing and expanding and giving us pretty awesome data to work from. Come on, people. It's about the users. Let's talk to them all the time as much as possible forever.

      4 points