As the first design manager hire at Slack, I had the opportunity to work across our Enterprise, Mobile, and Core Experience product areas where my team released many new features that you're likely familiar with today. During my time at Slack, I managed upwards of 9 designers, revamped our hiring practices and product development processes among many other initiatives.
I’m currently the Sr. Product Design Manager for the core experience of Slack, so I’m not doing the design work, rather I guide my team through challenges and design problems. I work closely with my designers, as well as my peers — the Director of Product and Director of Engineering — to deliver good product across desktop and mobile clients.
As I mentioned, my team was responsible for many different features over the last couple of years, some of which, I'm certainly going to forget to mention. With that said, here are some of the features released by my team: Threads for files, new app icons, Highlights, notification settings redesign, custom status, external shared channels, unified user display, guest expiration, name tagging, internationalization (de, fr, es, and jp), numerous accessibility improvements, iPhone X support, mobile workspace rearranging, and a number of features in the works.
As a design manager, I wasn't doing the design work that was released, instead I provided guidance on the design work through working sessions, design critiques, etc. Nonetheless, the amazing work that my team has done is the output of some pretty great designers: Wayne Fan, Shannon Tinkley, Cory Bujnowicz, Matthew Hodgins, and Hubert Florin.
As a design manager, your work is pretty broad at times, especially in a company that is growing so rapidly. Some of the things I worked on or did while at Slack included: stable design assignments, lead a few design sprints, introduced a discovery process into our product development process, conducted research to identify mobile use cases, developed mobile design principles to guide our organizations thinking around mobile, revamped our hiring process for product design introducing evaluation facets and design exercises, created a goal framework for all of design, and promoted two designers.