Catriona Shedd

Design Leadership Approach

Leading By Multiplying

Multipliers are leaders who access and revitalize the intelligence of the people around them. As a design leader, I follow this approach by leading through questioning, creating impactful design environments, leveraging each designer’s native genius, encouraging debates, and instilling accountability.

Creative Partnership

I am a strong proponent of collaborating closely with Product, Engineering, and other disciplines throughout the entire product design and development process to identify problems and come up with solutions. Designers shouldn’t exclusively “own” the creative process and its outputs.

Design Systems

I have a unique design systems background, having gained expertise by working with one of the largest and most well renowned design systems in the world, followed by learning from hundreds of design system teams to lead the design of a platform that supports design system creation, distribution, and governance.

InVision Design System Manager

Product Design Director for InVision DSM, a platform for teams to build, maintain, and govern design systems.

Design System Maturity Framework

Created a framework for evaluating the state of a design system to help teams identify steps to help it evolve and mature.

Salesforce Design System Ambassador

Lead Design System Ambassador at Salesforce, enabling cross-functional teams to effectively work with the Salesforce Lightning Design System.

Design Direction

As a Design Director, I have several key areas of responsibility that help lead our design initiatives

Understanding our customer and championing their needs in product planning and decision making
Connecting with business leaders and understanding how our business strategy impacts our design efforts
Evaluating the impact changes have across the entire experience, and identifying areas of overlap across projects

Framing problems and questions in new ways to encourage creative thinking
Evolving and refining our product’s design system, and enabling designers to use it effectively
Creating and instilling design team principles to guide team collaboration

Leadership and Management

I am focused on efforts to lead our design team’s growth and development

Hiring, motivating, and retaining design talent on our team

Prioritizing and resourcing design efforts and balancing roadmap development with product iteration

Leading through questions, as opposed to giving answers

Optimizing designer velocity and skills by providing mentoring, training, and other learning opportunities

Guiding, coaching, supporting, and challenging my team to do their best work

Fostering both a comfortable and intense design environment to facilitate growth

Helping the team learn from mistakes and failures, instead of dwelling on what went wrong

Experience

Design Tooling Platform
2018 – Present
Director of Product Design

Large Enterprise Platform
2014 – 2018
Director of User Experience

Startup (Acquired)
2013 – 2014
Lead Product Designer

Interactive Marketing Agency
2009 – 2013
Senior UX Strategist

Large Financial Company
2007 – 2009
Information Architect

Design Philosophy

Design's Purpose

Design, in the end, is about creating better things for people. The challenge is in understanding people's needs, their aspirations, and then meeting them.

Practical Creativity

Designers should maintain a balance of being creative, innovative, practical, rational, and analytic. Creative solutions that don't solve problems are art, not design.

Collaboration

Designers should not wall themselves off from the rest of the organization. Teamwork and collaboration of an entire product team makes great user experiences possible.

User Engagement

User Experience should aim to both meet direct user needs & to surprise and delight users by solving problems that they didn't even know they had.

Continuous Learning

It's better to learn something new than to be right. Products should always be evaluated after shipping to see how they're performing and to inform future iterations.

Business Impact

Design is a competitive advantage and differentiator for businesses and should drive strategic decision making across an organization.

Director of Product Design

I am a Product Design and Design Systems leader with over 13 years of experience in creating digital user experiences. I specialize in building and scaling design systems, fostering creative partnerships across organizations, and crafting product experience vision and strategy.