United States

Charlie Weston

Senior Product Designer

Understanding factors that lead to a motivated team - recognition, communication and more.

Keeping team members motivated

Understand the process of training, motivating and directing your team members.

Managing people

How to create a positive workplace culture that drives collaboration and productivity?

Fostering a good team culture

Steps to building and maintaining a strong, cohesive and effective team.

Building an effective team

Learn the tips to successfully manage a team in a remote environment.

Managing a remote team

Making remote and globally distributed teams work for you and your needs.

Working remotely

Learn essential burnout prevention techniques and replenish physical and emotional energy.

Managing burnout

Talk to people who have learned to manage their imposter syndrome.

Dealing with imposter syndrome

Talk to other immigrants about the nuances and challenges of working in the tech industry.

Being an immigrant in tech

Keeping your sanity, career growth and job satisfaction.

Surviving a merger or acquisition

Navigating micro-aggression, getting paid what you are worth and finding a community.

Being a woman in tech

Strategies for maximizing your design internship or co-op program.

Getting the most out of my internship

Tips for transitioning into a new role or company.

Changing roles

How to successfully prepare and position yourself for a job promotion?

How to get promoted

How to ask for a promotion and negotiate for salary raise?

Negotiating a job offer

How to think about design career paths and what progression looks like for designers?

Design career path

Learn the career path and progression for product managers.

Product management career path

Get actionable feedback on your resume or portfolio.

Resume and portfolio review

Learn the best ways to answer technical interview questions with frameworks

Acing technical interview questions

How to set up the team for success by defining and measuring team's performance.

Choosing metrics and team goals

Best practices for running productive design critiques.

Running effective design critiques

How to define and execute a successful launch and managing stakeholders expectations. (eg. MVP)

Launching new products or features

Methods of prototyping and solution validation. When to use which kind of prototype (eg. Webflow, Notion, etc)

Prototyping methods and tips

Manage team expectations and get the most out of your meetings.

Running effective meetings

Identify and define potential product problems and generating possible solutions.

Identifying problems vs solutions

Learn how to properly present your work and share ideas and opinions.

Presenting your work with impact

Tips on how to work and collaborate with designers.

Working with designers

How to work with team members with different skill sets but towards a common goal?

Working cross-functionally

Methods and models of exploring, deciding and delivering design.

Building a design process

Managing being the only designer at your company and working with non-designers.

Being the only designer

Explore different generative and evaluative research techniques. User research synthesis and presentation.

Conducting good user research

Ways and resources to improve your design skills.

Improving design skills

Navigating the working relationship with PM's and engineers as a designer.

Working with product and engineering

How to set up product analytics and metrics to track success?

Leveraging Product Analytics

How to create personas, and leverage them in design.

Creating and leveraging user personas

Ways to provide constructive feedback to team members.

Giving effective feedback

How to define an ambitious product vision and how to best communicate it to stakeholders?

Creating a product vision

Tips on how to work and collaborate with engineers and developers.

Working with engineers

What is a successful user onboarding flow and how to achieve it?

Onboarding new users

Best practices for documenting projects, epics, and stories

Writing product requirement documents

How to conduct interviews, what to ask, and how to analyze your results? (eg. user interview)

Conducting effective customer interviews

What are design systems and how to work with them?

Building successful design systems

Atlassian empowers customers to confidently migrate to the Cloud.

I led a design team focused on the Cloud migration experience for customers hosted on Server & Data Center deployments.

» Design lead focused on creating customer monetization opportunities across Atlassian’s product ecosystem, increased upgrade rates by 14% through personalized targeting.

» Working with cross-functional teams to build + implement standards for personalization.

» Worked directly with product and engineering teams across Northern Trust's Hedge Fund Service platform, ultimately managing stakeholders and requests across 9 workstreams.

» Onboard teams to agile research and scrum frameworks to improve communication and collaboration during sprints.

» Re-built Northern Trust's Hedge Fund Services platform experience and architecture.

» Maintained team velocity, deliverables, and moral during COVID-19.

» Drove redesign of a data-set focused product, built within MS Excel’s third-party plugin ecosystem, to support clients aggregating large data sets.

» Led design for cohesion’s 'intelligent building' platform, which could act as a building's 'digital twin, ' launching across Web + Mobile + Android + iOS.

» “Most Intelligent Office Building” Realcomm Digie Award (2020)

» Drove the design of a client-facing point of sale tool. Responsible for design strategy, research, and implementation. Led cross-functional teams through various workshops for alignment.

» Managed a $500k budget to build an enterprise level design system, containing 27 components (sketch + react), with supporting documentation on governance and components. 
» ‘JLL da Vinci Innovation’ Award (2018)

- Worked directly with JLL product teams, to create a strategy, information architecture, and usability testing protocols for an end-to-end broker admin platform, which upon launch improved internal efficiency by 2400%. 

- This initiative turned a 6-week consultancy turn into a 9-month retainer, with me ultimately leaving to work directly with JLL.

The 1st IC strategy hire for Omobono's U.S. Headquarters in Chicago, a B2B consulting & marketing firm that The Marketing Practice bought in 2021.

⚒ I would routinely:
- lead research studies from set-up to facilitation, analysis, synthesis, & shareout
- facilitate client presentations, brainstorms, & workshops
- create user-experience artifacts like journey maps, wireframes, prototypes, & service blueprints
- provide recommendations on brand strategy, message houses, & channel strategies
- write thought leadership on new trends technologies clients & new business
- collaborate with internal teams to accurately build out project timelines against client expectations

💪 I strengthen these skills...
- crafting concise, memorable, & actionable strategic direction via decks
- projecting intent & action in advance to keep all involved parties not only informed but bought in
- collaborating with conflicting stakeholders to deliver complex tasks & result with sometimes limited data or direction
- facilitating research studies to uncover unique insights, connecting lose threads across data points, and providing recommendations at multiple levels of feasibility

Hooks is a real-time notification application that pushes customized alerts to mobile devices. Worked with founders and developers to identify opportunities for improving the overall mobile experience. Created wireframes and content maps to showcase points for optimization, including a chat feature.

- Led content strategy for two consumer-facing products (Sexual Health and STD Test Express) and 150+ supporting submarket microsites. 

- Created messaging frameworks for our products and social media. Used A/B tests, analytics, user research, and usability tests to refine messaging strategies.

▶ Defined opportunities to increase brand loyalty across driver and rider groups as Uber expanded market reach through the Midwest.

▶ Analyzed trends in user data to make recommendations for a better experience for both riders and driver partners

▶ GradLaddr is an SaaS platform poised to create the next iteration of job search tools, employer-applicant matching system, and a comprehensive employment software suite.

▶ Worked with founders and developers to create user stories, wireframes, and prototypes outlining how employers and students would interact with the platform.

▶ Helped develop marketing strategy recommendations.

▶ GraddLaddr was a candidate for Y-Combinator’s Summer 2015 Incubator program.

▶ Researched and presented consumer, market, and social trends.

▶ Produced creative briefs, POV recommendations, and competitive analysis decks for CPG & B2B clients. 

▶ Conducted and analyzed results from a +500-person survey, in addition to other consumer // market research on cheese.

Clients: CDW, BP, and Sargento.

Charlie Weston🇺🇸

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