Jens Nikolaus designs software in Colorado, USA
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Currently, I am Head of Design at pganalyze leading research and design efforts
Often I get hired to help with anything research and design, sometimes I will move into a product management role or create a pull request on GitHub. At the end of the day I'm a designer. You can read my resume to learn how I ended up here, but this is what I am doing now.
- Leading and setting up research and design processes
- Interviewing and working with customers using Jobs to be Done
- Understanding how a business earns and spends money
- Translating and communicating customer problems
- Facilitating cross-functional collaboration
- Mentoring and connecting people
- Producing high-fidelity prototypes to validate concepts
- Ship software and repeat
I push for inclusion, a healthy work/life balance, sustainability, slowness, and I am trying my best to weave these values into my day-to-day work. Let's chat about this sometime!
What I'm learning right now
For the last month or so I started learning how to eat better, and Noom is driving the change. Noom uses cognitive behavioral therapy to reduce stress and anxiety.
The biggest and probably not surprising takeaway so far is that change is difficult, and that being a student relieves me from a lot of stress. I don't own the process, and that feels great. I enjoy losing weight, but the biggest plus is that my energy levels considerably improved since I began this journey.
I also started practicing yoga recently.
Let us work together in a Design Sprint
What I like about Design Sprints is that they are no-bullshit. You are working cross-collaboratively prepared with customer data, set a target, make something and test it. It's an inclusive process that gives every participant an opportunity to contribute.
My job as facilitator is to lead everyone towards a common goal. For the most part, I adapted AJ&Smart's remote version, and had great success with it. It's extremely low risk and can be the beginning of something big, or not: That's the point, stop wasting months and years to answer questions, do it over a couple of days instead.