Catt Small
Catt is a Staff Product Designer at Dropbox, game maker, and developer. She has worked with companies of all sizes including Asana, Etsy, SoundCloud, and Nasdaq. She started coding around the age of 10 and designing at the age of 15. She graduated from SVA with a BFA in Graphic Design in 2011 and later received an MS in Integrated Digital Media from NYU in 2016. Catt also makes awkward video games, writes about professional development, and draws artwork of all kinds.
Profile photo: Lil Chen
Moving from Execution to Strategy as a Designer
Designers often find themselves under pressure to create beautiful outputs rather than impact and outcomes. In this talk, Catt Small will share techniques to move herself from execution to a more strategic role over 14 years of in-house work at companies spanning various industries.
You’ll learn to add perspective to subjects including product strategy, growth, and monetization — showing the value of design at every part of the product development process. Before you know it, you’ll be your PM’s best work friend!
Advocating for UX Quality in Orgs That Value Speed & Metrics
Senior and staff designers are accountable for outcomes but aren’t the final decision-makers. We sometimes find ourselves in environments where launch speed, metrics, and the needs of the business are used to dismiss usability issues and experience quality concerns. In these fast-paced organizations, teammates and leaders often frame design feedback subjectively and push for shortcuts. Teams at these companies regularly ship the first milestone of a vision and deprioritize later iterations. Over time, this creates frustration, burnout, and a sense that advocating for quality is a losing battle.
In this talk, Catt Small will share how she learned to advocate for design quality without positioning herself as an obstacle to business goals. Attendees will learn how to get engineering-and product-led organizations to understand the value of good design. Catt will cover concrete techniques she uses to elevate the quality of in-prod experiences without burning social capital.
- On the web
- https://cattsmall.com/
- On LinkedIn
- cattsmall/
- On Mastodon
- mastodon.social/@cattsmall