Things moved slowly in week one, but that's to be expected. I spent most of the time settling in and getting acquainted with other members of the design team, scheduling one-on-one calls with them just to share some knowledge and get to know them a bit better.
I also attended a few company-wide meetings. The town hall was where the CEO announced some big changes within the organisation and the direction going forward. I sat in on a design critique too, where a few design team members presented what they're currently working on and asked for feedback, which was really informative to see what that process looks like within an organisation. I also joined a Slice of Dev call, which was more focused on the development side of things, how engineering is currently working, and where design fits into that. It was really cool to see designs actually shipping and becoming reality.
I didn't take on a huge workload, but I was given some small research tasks around scaling the brand into a new area. This involved putting together a few user personas and a fact file.
I also had a few chats with Rick, who's my mentor and the head of design at Slice. He's been super helpful so far. I was buddied up with Emma and Jasmin too, two other designers based in Belfast, who've helped me along the way as well. Everyone's been super receptive and I was genuinely surprised by how nice everyone is. It's not always like that everywhere I've worked so I'm really grateful for it. There's definitely some momentum building and I'm hoping it can carry into week two.
I was given a product design career framework, basically a set of criteria to aim for by the end of my placement. The idea is that it should equip me to be ready for a fully fledged product design role by the time I'm done.
Alongside that, a rough roadmap has been sketched out for the placement, roughly 12 weeks or three months. The plan is to bounce around different areas early on to absorb as much as possible and build up skills, then settle somewhere I'm confident I want to build on further.
Next week will be spent getting acquainted with the design system. It's such a good transferable skill to be able to work well with one. It's not something I've touched on before, since university work doesn't really involve a design system, but I think I'll settle in nicely with it.