United States

Product Design

Graphic Design

UX Design

UI/ Visual Design

Design Operations

Customer Experience (CX)

Generalist Product Management

Interaction Design

UX Research

Bachelor of Arts

Michael Nix

Senior Product Design Manager

Usability Testing

Typography

Product strategy

Empathy

Leadership

Accessibility

AI/ML

Conversational AI

Design systems

User research

Product roadmap

React

Trello

UserTesting

Airtable

Asana

ChatGPT

Figma

GitHub

HTML

Jira

Miro

Adobe Creative Suite

Google Analytics

UserZoom

Mural

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

Get actionable feedback on your resume or portfolio.

Resume and portfolio review

Practice HR, technical and behavioural interviews with mentors.

Practice mock interviews

Talk to people who've broken into the tech industry and learn their stories.

Breaking into tech

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

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

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

Presenting your work with impact

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 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 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

I'm a design leader for three cloud architecture services at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the Containers space (Elastic Container Service - ECS, Elastic Kubernetes Service - EKS, and Elastic Container Registry - ECR). I drive operational planning and strategy of both north star and visionary products as well as MVP feature delivery for a distributed UX and product design team across the US. I'm a participative "player coach" having been a Principal Designer in the past, driving my designers to learn and be curious while also insisting on the highest standards in design and product development.

I led a team of international designers spanning North America, Europe and South America. We focused on next generation software development for Oracle NetSuite, a cloud-based SaaS, built upon discovery, ideation, prototyping, and delivery. Everything we did was based on a solid Design Thinking framework and a world renowned design system, Redwood. I managed two teams, one being my UX group and the other, a UI Components team of product, architecture, and design professionals.

I managed a team of UX, UI, product design, user research and content professionals. My focus was on leading a Covid-19 (coronavirus) digital response team. We helped medical patients find doctors, hospitals, and testing facilities. Solutions included transparent cost estimations, co-pay and similar e-commerce solutions to help patients better understand expected pricing. 

At the enterprise level, my design leadership covered:
- MVP and ideal state, full stack product design approach
- Design thinking workshops including Design Sprints
- Typography and color user interface (UI) focus
- Research based design decisions
- User story mapping, journey maps, affinity maps, personas, and archetypes
- Behavior based UX
- Rapid prototyping mixed with high fidelity user testing
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and all things Agile

I managed and art directed a team of designers and creative leads for the highest ranking online brokerage firm, having won the #1 spot for "platforms and tools" by Barrons and StockBrokers.com. I directed day-to-day operations within our "Experience Design Group," ensuring UI and UX excellence and consistency as well as brand adherence. I worked regularly with product owners, business leads, and web development teams as both a creative liaison and cross functional partner within a forward thinking organization of over 5,000 employees.

Art direction and UX/UI design for patented iOS mapping and real estate app.

Senior UX & UI lead for Advertising and Brand Management in the Creative Studio group. I did interaction design with a group of designers and product owners focusing on user interface, UX, and simple, clean design. Systems include the retail trading platform, Trade Architect, style guides, and pattern libraries.

I was a principal designer who drove digital art direction for a Fortune 500 company, building their first design system.

Freelance projects ranging from product design, SaaS user experience and UI, to branding, typography and print work. Clients included TD Ameritrade, The Washington Post, Harvard University, Hewlett-Packard, The Ritz Carlton, and many others.

• Led design on 4 open source CMS web applications, specializing in accessibility, usability analysis, UX and UI, online branding, pitches, and client tutorial
• Delivered interaction design as tasked with projects ranging from user experience tasks like wireframing, user flows, user research and prototyping to finalized visual designs and testing. Included front-end coding support in HTML, CSS and jQuery

Consultant and web instructor for graduate Medill School of Journalism

One of my first jobs as a designer, I helped redesign their massive international site in 8 languages. I drove the early vision and strategy for accessibility for this global non-profit focused on Polio eradication, clean water, and outreach to less developed nations.

My first job, data entry and IT consulting for the billing and customer care department.

Michael Nix🇺🇸

About Michael Nix

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