6: Generalists and Specialists with Brad Frost

Join Jason and Mark as they share a coffee with award-winning design executive, Aditi Sharma, and discuss what makes a successful design team.

Join Jason and Mark as they share a coffee with Pete Yeomans, UX Research Manager. This episode looks at the role of our lived experiences in shaping our approach to storytelling. Pete shares how he became a researcher and storyteller, guided by his career as an educator and discovery that he is autistic.

Join Jason and Mark as they share a coffee with Julian Smida. In this episode, Julian, a senior UX designer over at Meta, shares his perspective on design ethics.

In this episode, Jason and Mark share coffee with a long-time friend and colleague Jess Paris. A leader in the field of design systems, Jess is sharing her thoughts on Design Tokens and their potential to radically alter the design-to-engineering relationship.

Alp Turgut, a Senior UX Designer in London has worked with the likes of Nike, Rolls-Royce, Atlassian, Salesforce, O2, Zalando, New Look, and VCCP. In this episode, Alp joins Jason and Mark over a coffee to share his perspective on consultancy and freelance design.

Join Jason and Mark as they learn how Heather Hepburn and her team are driving accessibility at scale within Skyscanner, a member of the Valuable 500. You can follow Heather on Twitter (@heatherehepburn)

If design is a team sport, then design ops is our coach.  As design teams scale, the opportunity of design ops is to support the orchestration of design practice by aligning our people, processes, and tools. Join Jason and Mark as they explore the role of design ops at the technology giant, Atlassian. They are sharing a coffee with Atlassian's Head of Design Ops, Dominique Ward.

For emerging designers, getting your foot in the door to the Design industry can be daunting. To explore the topic, Jason and Mark are sharing a coffee with Sunil Pithwa, a Senior UX Designer at Aviva. Like many of us, Sunil took a risk and pivoted his career to become a UX Designer. With effort and perseverance, he finally made it. He’s here to share his unconventional entrance and encourage emerging designers to lean into their core skills.

How can we improve our careers? How can we improve our lives? How can we get to be a better version of ourselves? These are the types of questions that we all have had, at one point or another. The answers are tricky and multi-faceted, but boil down to the same thing: receiving knowledge from someone else who has experienced it. This is what Felix Lee, founder of ADPList has done. Along with his talented team, he has put together one of the world's best mentor/mentee communities. This community is available for free for anyone to use, and cuts through the noise to give its users access to some of the best knowledge and experience that exists. As Felix puts it, "leveraging on someone else's 24hrs. Take 30 minutes to learn something from someone, accelerate your learning". In this episode, we talk to Felix about the background of ADPList, how he got started, and discuss the value of mentorship.

Join Brad Frost and Mark Boyes-Smith as they continue their conversation on design systems, this time focusing on the roles of generalists and specialists.