The 4 Trends That Will Define the Year Ahead

I spoke on a panel of industry experts on the data behind key trends across design, product and marketing that emerged in 2021 and how they’ll impact teams in 2022. The panel was moderated by InVision’s Senior Director of Design Education Elijah Woolery.

Results:

  • More than 1200 people pre-registered for the session

  •  Over 300 people joined to watch it live 

  • Post the session, it was viewed more than 1000 times just in the first week alone

My top cited quote from the event:

"It's really important to have ingrained collaboration crits that work remotely and in-person, to make sure you have the practice of sharing work, having the ability to push work and making sure that everyone has exposure to that work and can get that kind of information. It's how you create psychological safety."

– Christina Goldschmidt, Head of Product Design, Etsy

Presentable Podcast: #114: Is Neurodiversity a Design Superpower?

Honored to have a great dialogue with design industry leader Jeffrey Veen on the Presentable podcast. We covered a lot of ground from the connections between 'anthropology and product design' and 'Should designers get an MBA?' But the episode focused on neurodiversity and it as a potential superpower in design. Learn about definitions and the expansion of the term to now cover mental health issues as well. And how we can consider recruiting neuroatypical employees for the better of our products and company culture.

August 17th, 2021 · 35 minutes

Episode Description: Special guest and Etsy’s head of product design Christina Goldschmidt joins the program to discuss how embracing representation in neurodiversity across our teams can lead to better designed products.

Mental Health Awareness Month: Breathwork Exercise

May was mental health awareness month and as a co-founder and co-chair of Etsy’s Mental Health Employee Resource Group I have a personal mission to help stop the stigma of mental health in the workplace. One of the ways I wanted to do that was to give Etsy employees tools by bring my practice of breathwork to them and also sharing part of my practice on our social media. I recorded a simple technique to that Etsy shared across social media channels to bring awareness to mental health.

Check out a sample post on LinkedIn here:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6803724363251220480/

Watch the video of the breathwork exercise here:

Employees say these 4 things can ease the transition back to the office

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As the world starts to reopen, not all companies are taking an employee-first approach to how they are going back to the offie. Fast Company was looking for companies who were doing a good job of helping employees ease back into going back to the office. They interviewed me for how Etsy is advocating for employee’s mental health and all that we are doing with our new Mental Health Employee Resource Group.

SUPPORTING EMPLOYEE FINANCES AND MENTAL HEALTH

Online marketplace Etsy made working at home a little easier with a $100-per-month stipend to help employees offset the costs of working from home. The company also subsidized ergonomically correct home office furniture to help ensure that working from home was more comfortable. “I can open up a help desk ticket, and have someone consult with me about the ergonomics of my home office setup,” says Christina Goldschmidt, head of product design.

Now that employees are heading back to the office, the company is focusing on employees’ mental health. Goldschmidt helped co-found the employee resource group for mental health needs. “Etsy has always had all these amazing employee resource groups, bringing about a whole bunch of different affinities,” she says. When employees were surveyed, it was clear that they needed mental health support, she says.

Goldshmidt says she was “vocal” about the need and the company supported creating a support structure, “and a place where we can actually create content and programming and a safe space for people to have dialogue and support and actually have executive team sponsorship for mental health,” she says. She feels it’s going to be an important resource as employees head back to the office this fall. The resource group is also tackling burnout and advocated for an additional day off on the July 4 holiday to give employees more of a break.

Dublin Tech Summit: Celebrating Experimentation - Developing, Trialing and Evolving Innovative Products

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At Etsy, we believe that experimentation plays a crucial role in the development of technical outputs. That’s why I was so excited to discuss this topic at @Dublin Tech Summit on June 17th. I was on a panel with fellow Etsy leaders Marc Murray, John Davies, Becca Hare, Raymond Flournoy and and we shared stories of fruitful and not-so-successful projects alike, plus the unique and vital contributions that each of our disciplines play in the development process.

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Learn more about the Dublin Tech Summit here:

https://bit.ly/3fHGPrO

What the panel discussion here:

Intersecting Business Value and Customer Needs with Christina Goldschmidt, Etsy on Better Product Podcast

Design solutions happen at the intersection of business value and customer needs. If we want our teams to be able to create these solutions, we need to empower them with the information they need to understand business performance and strategy.

That’s what Etsy’s Head of Product Design, Christina Goldschmidt, joins us to discuss.

We talk through practical steps to invite designers into conversations that show them where their work fits in the big-picture user experience, product, and business strategy. Christina also shares how she’s focusing on agency and transparency with her team and why experimentation is so important to confidently building new things.

Takeaways:

  • Design solutions find the intersection of business value and customer needs.

  • Encourage conversation around business metrics and strategy to help your design team contextualize their work.

  • Focus on preserving and strengthening your team’s culture during transition.

  • Find and create new opportunities for professional development while working remotely.

  • Experimentation provides confidence in the initiatives you launch.

Things to Listen For:

[03:30] Why people matter most in product design

[04:30] Design as a “lifestyle career”

[05:00] Intersecting business value and customer needs to create design solutions

[05:45] How Christina helps her design team understand the business

[07:00] Encouraging dialogue around business metrics and strategy with designers

[11:15] Accelerated growth of e-commerce in the pandemic

[15:00] Focusing on team culture during uncertain times

[17:45] Reflecting on changes over the past year and a half

[18:30] Giving teams agency through the squad model

[20:00] Building in “breather moments” for remote teams

[21:15] Finding alternative options for professional development for remote teams

[22:45] Etsy’s experimentation culture and why experimentation matters

[28:15] Reflecting on Christina’s perspective on design at Etsy

[30:20] Etsy Product Design Manager Mike Hardy’s take on design as a lifestyle career

[32:00] Preserving and strengthening design culture

[34:30] Communication as a form of design

The Minute: Christina Goldschmidt

Better Product often has to leave part of the conversations on the cutting room floor. As they were sweeping up, they stumbled upon this clip between Christian and Christina Goldschmidt for The Minute.

While today she’s the Head of Product Design, that’s not how she started and as you’ll soon hear, her unconventional career experience has been an invaluable asset as a leader for Etsy.

(Hear me discuss my background in business and how it helps me be a better design leader.)

Brining Your Whole Self to Work: Embracing Visible & Invisible Disabilities

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On National Accessibility Day I joined speakers from Gray Scalable, Understood and The Bazaar on embracing both visible and invisible disabilities in the workplace. The focus of the discuss was how to create a more thoughtful, equitable and rewarding company culture for ALL employees.

You can watch a video of the panel here:

How to use this report – Perspective from the field

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InVisions’s Design Leadership Forum, it’s networking and community group for design leaders, published it’s first report on leadership salaries. I was one of the contributors to the over all report. And though it was not possible to lend my actual name to the piece, I was able to consult on the postscript on how to think about using the salary survey and putting it into action. I really appreciate that InVision still moved forward with including my content even though I was not able to lend my name to the piece.

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Experimentation 101 Course on InVision Learn Platform

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InVision launched a learning platform that includes self-paced video content. They invited me to create a seven-part course that is an introduction to experimentation for designers. It coverers the basics of experimentation, details on A/B testing, common terms, what makes a good A/B test, tips for getting started and an overview how experimentation reduces uncertainty and fear.

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Now you can watch the course here:

Disability & Tech: Barriers and Opportunities

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The 2021 SXSW Conference went online due to COVID 19, providing a rare opportunity to share recordings of session from this iconic conference. I was able to participate virtually on a great and important panel addressing the lesser addressed topic in diversity and inclusion – disability. I and my fellow panelist talk about disability in the world of tech, work and even the positive and negative effects of quarantine on the disabled community.

2021 SXSW Disability & Tech Pannel

2021 SXSW Disability & Tech Pannel

Learn more on the SXSW Panel Page: Disability & Tech: Barriers and Opportunities

See my SXSW Profile Page: Christina’s SXSW Profile

Healing Trauma with Design Thinking

My talk from HR Transform 2022 (#HRTransform #HRT2022) was part of the "Human First" track and called Healing Trauma with Design Thinking. This was a very vulnerable moment and I’m honored that the conference organizers saw how important it was to share my story. My goal in sharing was that we can work to remove the stigma on mental health, build awareness and empathy for PTSD, encourage treatment, and remind everyone that it's possible to create trauma-informed work environments where survivors can thrive.

Session Description: Design thinking has emerged as an ubiquitous, repeatable and reliable process for driving innovation in a modern business context. One of the ways this is possible is through intentional and controlled induction of stress states on the body to drive innovation ideation. Through learning to harness stress, turn it on and off, and leverage it for problem solving, survivors are able to gain a new relationship with their trauma and foster positive self image and healing. Pulling from my own career experience as a top design thinking educator and innovation consultant and navigating my own personal healing journeying as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I will explore the positive linkage between these methods and how other survivors can harness the body’s defense against trauma for their own self-healing.

As in all things, representation matters. It is still pretty rare to hear business leaders talk about deeply personal struggles with serious mental health issues like PTSD. That makes it even harder for anyone struggling with PTSD to even think they can still achieve heights in their career. Not to mention that the term PTSD has lost a lot of it's meaning as it is being used colloquially in ways that minimize the severity of the experience of someone suffering from actual PTSD. But the reality is that a staggering 15 million adults suffer from PTSD at any given time in the US and at least 6% of the total US population will develop PTSD at some point in their lives – that's actually more that the total number of Asian Americans in the US. I am someone who suffers from cPTSD and anxiety disorder related to trauma from my childhood and I feel that if I speak opening about my struggles and journey, bring awareness to statistics about PTSD and explain how it works and what the symptoms are like, it will help anyone who might be suffering feel understood and bring awareness and empathy to the work world. Thanks for being kind enough to listen to my story and taking the time to understand a little bit what it is like to experience PTSD. And if you know someone who has PTSD but thinks there isn't any hope out there, I want them to know that there is! There are a variety of treatments that they can try and career fields and work environments where they can not only thrive but be a real asset!

NYU Stern Tech MBA - Big Tech Case Study

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NYU Stern’s New Tech MBA helps students understand the ins and outs of the tech industry by having case studies with different types of companies. I was invited to demystify what it is like to work at a large company in tech. Walking the students though a case study, our company’s culture and how decisions get made and prioritized. I recruited a great Product Manager partner to present with me.

 

Download my slides from NYU here:

Big Tech: Etsy

Experience Design Team All Hands - The Power of Craft

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The Capital One Experience Design Team invited me to speak to at their annual All Hands meeting and inspire their more than 650 designers, research, strategists, writers and front end developers about the power of craft. I shared with them one of my core tenants of my design practice which is that as designers not only can we use our powers of empathy for designers for our customers but also to become really great partners and to understand our stakeholders. I find that designers often forget that our design skills can be applied more broadly to solve so many problems!

 
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Download my slides from All Hands here:

The Power of Craft

Virtual Innovation, Design Thinking & Experience Design Workshops

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This year I had to seriously adapt my annual two-part workshop at NYU Stern to our new virtual world. The first part was easy as it consisted of a presentation overview of UX and innovation techniques, but the second part required some extra ingenuity as it is normally hands-on, providing students a chance to practice deriving insights from user research and developing innovative experiences with those insights.. I turned to InVision’s Freehand to build interactive spaces for the 2nd hands on workshop and it ended up working well. I think that it could be a way to keep offering the workshops at scale going forward. The students were engaged. However it was hard to keep their attention for the full 3 hours as it was the same day that Joe Biden’s election was announced and was also unseasonably warm and everyone wanted to take to the streets.

 
Systematic brainstorming exercise

Systematic brainstorming exercise

 
Ideation sketching

Ideation sketching

Improving Marketplace Design Quality though Experimentation

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Experimentation is core to the practice of product design at Etsy. I shared tips at the 2020 Ecom Design Summit. Here is the abstract for my talk:

A challenge for designers in the ecommerce space is the fast pace of experimentation through A/B and multivariate testing. However, when you provide designers with the right baseline knowledge and a framework of principles, experimentation can be a driver of better user experience and a means to empower designers with their cross-functional product and analytics partners. In this talk I will explore how we are empowering designers to be savvy experimentators and changing A/B testing to be a tool for design and not a hindrance to great experience.

 

Download my slides from The Ecom Design Summit here:

Improving Marketplace Design Quality Through Experimentation

 
Econ Design Summit Speaker Bio

Econ Design Summit Speaker Bio

Learn more about at the conference’s website:

https://ecommercedesignsummit.com/new-york/schedule/

What design leadership means to Accenture’s Christina Goldschmidt

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The InVision Inside Design Blog is a staple read for the product design community. One of the reasons why is that they constantly profile interesting and unique design leaders and bring fresh prospectives to the field and share their expert advice. I was honored to be profiled and share my thoughts on leadership and my unique design career in management consulting.

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Boom - Leadership Advice

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I’m honored to be quotes on the SheSays Boom site with my best career advice:

“You don’t need somebody else’s permission to have the career you actually want. Everything that you do has transferrable skills to the job that you probably want to do later on. You don’t need to be the person who says, “Oh, I only have 20% of those skills so I’m not going to apply.” It’s really about saying how can I make sure that I am I casting myself in the right light in order to go after that next job - be it within your current organization with the sponsorship of someone or be it outside because you actually have those skills. Some of them you will learn on the job, and that’s ok. You can do it.”
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Visit the SheSays Boom site for more great advice from amazing women:

https://shesaysboom.com

How Insurtech Helps Build Customer Trust in an Age of Uncertainty

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I was recently quoted in the Bolt blog on how insurtechs help build trust with customers through technology.

Image courtesy of Bolt

Image courtesy of Bolt

“To improve customer trust relationships, insurers could learn from the application of ecommerce tools in the retail sector. By using tech tools like a SaaS platform to establish consistent workflows, enable customization, build a more interactive marketing approach and protect customer information within a de-siloed company, insurers can make it easier to provide trustworthy service and to gather trustworthy data.”