2023 Year in Review

Back in 2014 I published my first Year in Review. That makes this the 10th entry and marks a decade of these reviews.

First, I am grateful to all of you. Each year, after publishing these reviews, I hear from old friends and colleagues. It’s always wonderful to hear from y’all, and it truly makes this effort worthwhile. Thank you.

Had you asked me 10 years ago—when I started this—I’d have no idea what was ahead of me or whether I would stick with it. But I’m glad I did. Now I’ve got snapshots of the last 10 years to reflect on—projects I worked on, what succeeded and what failed, where I went, what I was thinking.

It has been an amazing resource.

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Reflecting on the last 10 years

And that’s how I’d like to start this review. We’ll get to this year, but I’d like to take a moment and reflect on the past decade.

2014

In 2014, I was restless. I had a job working at an ad agency in Mobile, Alabama. My title was Interactive Producer, but the work was mostly managerial—organizing the work instead of actually making things. It wasn’t satisfying.

At that time I pushed myself hard to make things. I was constantly working on projects—an online publication called Signal Tower and a community for people working in advertising, Advertisers.io. I figured that worst case, I’d improve my skills and learn something. Best case, one of the projects might take off.

A few months after publishing that review I’d leave to start a fantasy sports company called SidePrize.

2015

In March of 2015, I pulled the trigger and left the agency to work on SidePrize full-time. Later that spring, we received seed funding from the LA Dodgers and a few angel investors. We relocated the business to Los Angeles and rode the wave of interest in the fantasy sports space as Draft Kings and Fanduel took off.

That year ended comically bad for the business—two hours before Adam got on stage to pitch our business to LA investors and media, the New York Times published an article about the state outlawing daily fantasy.

The timing could not have been worse. It would take years for there to be more clarity around fantasy sports regulation. For the time being, we weren’t able to raise a Series A. We had to let go of our engineers, and I started looking for freelance work. Adam, Tareq and I would have to figure out our next steps.

2016

In early 2016 (or late 2015?), I received freelance work from a guy named David Klanac. David sublet space from us at the Atlanta Tech Village and wanted help building an NPS survey tool called Trustfuel. After spending a lot of time with customers, we realized that there was a bigger opportunity than just surveys. I built a prototype workflow tool for CSMs—they loved it.

Around April, I was still uncertain about what would happen with fantasy sports regulation. David offered me a full-time job at Trustfuel, and I decided to step away from SizePrize to focus on Customer Success workflows.

Separately, I stumbled into a position as the host of DN FM, the Designer News podcast. It was a paid position and it opened up conversations with many interesting people including Aaron Walter, Jessica Hische, Scott Belsky and more.

2017

I was off to a rocky start in 2017. Unfortunately, the pivot to workflow software came too late for Trustfuel. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if we had figured it out earlier. The business let me go early in the year and folded a few months later.

But every failure is an opportunity for something new. landed at another Atlanta startup, Salesloft, which in a few years would become a billion-dollar business.

It’s not where I thought I’d end up, but there were two things that stood out. The people were fantastic—focused, talented and enjoyable to be around. But, more importantly, customers fanatically loved the product. I heard “Salesloft changed my life” from both friends and strangers working in sales. Getting reactions like that just by mentioning the company’s name was wild.

Not long after joining, I helped ship Team Cadences, which would be a key component in scaling the business to enterprise customers.

2018

In 2018, I was still pushing myself pretty hard with side projects. At the time, I was thinking about shutting down a consumer products blog I had been working on. Traffic was low, I wasn’t happy with the design, and I dreaded writing for it.

Instead of trashing it, I decided to take what I had and do something different. I turned the blog into a consumer products forum. That slowly started gaining traction, which motivated me to keep working on it. I also built another tool, Aerodero, that aggregated flight deals.

At the time, I was still taking on freelance work. I designed the UI for Captrav, an Atlanta-based travel management company.

2019

Salesloft was gaining momentum in 2019. My role expanded beyond the workflow teams as I joined a new team called Rhythm and Blues to start building our design system. It was the first time we began designing and building standardized components for the product. This enabled our delivery teams to ship features faster and drive consistency.

That year I finished transferring my old interviews from Signal Tower to this site. I also added the podcasts I hosted for DN FM.

I purchased the domain productnotes.com, and the forum continued to grow. I started thinking about launching a new community, tentatively named Civiton.

2020

2020 was tough. My life before and after the pandemic are distinctly different. Despite remaining in good health, the year was difficult for me. I almost broke the chain and didn’t publish a review in 2020. My now fiancée, Holly, encouraged me to post something—anything. I am grateful for her encouragement.

2021

Things started ticking again in 2021. Holly left her job as a pediatric occupational therapist and launched her own practice. I created a lovely website for her. We also purchased a house and fostered two adorable puppies named Munchie and Mangia.

At Salesloft, things were well. The company rebranded and I was responsible for implementing the new brand for the product. In addition, I designed a customized set of icons to replace the mismatched sets we had been using. I was honored with the 2021 Product MVP award.

2022

Holly and I got engaged in 2022. It was a big year—we also adopted a little sheepadoodle puppy. We named him Otto.

At work, I was promoted to Staff Product Designer. I also designed a new personal logo—the first one I’ve ever been satisfied with. I started experimenting with AI tools, and in December I published a post about using AI to write and illustrate a children’s book.

On Christmas Day, we woke up to discover broken water lines in our laundry room. Fortunately, my parents kindly allowed us to stay with them for a few days until the water could be turned back on in our house. I wrote most of my 2022 review while sitting at my parents’ kitchen table.

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2023 Year in Review

And what about this year?

It began as chaotically as 2022 ended. We replaced all the water lines in the house, which left us with holes in our walls that had to be patched and painted.

While that was a pain, there were tons of great things that happened this year.

New memories with old friends

It’s not always easy to keep in touch with old friends. There are a handful from my days working in advertising that I still keep up with.

Earlier this year, my favorite copywriter, Kevin Zengel, visited Atlanta. Kevin, CRowe and I got together for dinner and a few beverages.

Kevin’s main ask was to go to 10High in the basement of Dark Horse to do karaoke. It was a Wednesday night and the place was almost empty. We had a blast nonetheless!

Birthday celebrations

Fortunately, I have many close friends here in Atlanta.

Ramsay—a close friend of mine—and his brother offered their box for a Hawks game at State Farm to celebrate. We gathered a great crew for the occasion.

Took a few trips to Port St. Joe

For years, Port St. Joe has been a favorite destination of ours—it’s where we got engaged.

The beaches are peaceful and dog-friendly, and most places are just a short walk away from the beach. Downtown is also home to a variety of great restaurants and coffee shops. What’s not to love?

This year, we made two trips back. In April, we rented a house with a few friends to show them the beach. Then, during the summer, we took another trip with Holly’s sister’s family.

Designed a new iOS app for MARTA

MARTA’s app is one of the most disappointing apps I regularly use. Simply reorganizing the views to ensure that favorite stations are not hidden behind several menus would greatly enhance usability.

Redesigning the MARTA iOS app was primarily an opportunity to explore Apple’s new iOS UI kit for Figma. Frankly, I learned much more than I anticipated. Most of my time is devoted to web applications, and even though they are responsive, native applications can present very different design patterns.

Also, I created a few cool animations. Maybe MARTA will take a few cues?

Returned to Yosemite

In August, I went to Yosemite with my dad, uncle, and brother-in-law. My dad has always been enthusiastic about taking our family to see the national parks. We have visited parks all over the country, but Yosemite is one that we keep coming back to.

The trip didn’t go as planned. We had intended to stay at Tuolumne Meadows in the high country, but several permanent buildings were damaged by heavy snow. The camp didn’t open it for the season. So we stayed at Yosemite Valley Lodge.

Nevertheless, it was great to spend time together. We went on several beautiful hikes. I managed to take some incredible photos. We got rained out one afternoon and decided to drive east to Bodie, an old ghost town maintained by the State of California.

Found the perfect wedding venue

This year, we spent a significant amount of time searching for a wedding venue. We visited several excellent options but eventually realized that we did not want a traditional one.

We wanted to get our friends and family together for a few days. Ideally, we were looking for a venue that felt like a summer camp but was more comfortable.

One of our top choices, Hawkesdene, is usually booked a year or two in advance. We were fortunate enough to reserve a weekend in early March. Plus they have a bunch of llamas and alpacas!

It’s going to be an amazing time!

Gave a talk on Generative AI and industrial design

My former boss, Lauren, invited me to speak to a group of designers and engineers at Amazon about interesting uses for AI.

It just so happened that I was experimenting with ChatGPT and Midjourney to design physical products. So, I talked about my process, walked through some live examples, and wrote a post about it.

Took the dogs on the Pooch Pontoon

One of the most entertaining experiences this year was chartering the Pooch Pontoon for Holly’s birthday. Essentially, it was a chartered boat ride for the dogs. The boat was beautifully decorated for the occasion.

We spent the afternoon on a small island in the middle of Lake Lanier where the dogs could roam freely. Afterward, there were cupcakes for both humans and dogs. What’s not to love?

Explored the beaches of South Carolina

We took one more beach trip this year before it got cold—this time to the beaches of South Carolina. We spent one afternoon on Hunting Island and another on Daufuskie.

The beaches of Hunting Island were beautiful. We arrived when the water was approaching low tide. The dogs had an enormous amount of room to run. The weather was perfect. All in all, it was a fantastic afternoon.

Daufuskie Island is an interesting place, but difficult to get to. It takes about a 45-minute boat ride from Savannah. The island is too big to travel everywhere by foot though. Once there, you’ll have to rent a golf cart. We did a ton of exploring. I had a scrap iron—the bartender described it as an Arnold Palmer with moonshine—and got to see the abandoned Melrose Resort.

What else? Oh, we stayed in Savannah not far from a fantastic brewpub—Hop Atomica. We chose it because it was walking distance and had a patio, but man, what a gem. Cool atmosphere, good beer, and some of the best pizza I’ve had.

Salesloft

My contributions were a bit different this year. I’ve spent much more time working with other designers—pairing, in 1-on-1s, and in design reviews. Salesloft is a big platform with a lot of people working on it. Coordinating to make sure everyone’s going in the right direction is critical.

That has been my focus.

Shipped Rhythm, Cadence for account executives

This August Salesloft released one of its largest and most significant features to date. Rhythm is a workflow designed for account executives. It combines the advantages of our existing business development workflow, Cadence, with added flexibility, triggers (Plays), and an AI-driven prioritizer to ensure that opportunities continue to progress.

I spent about 18 months as the design lead for the project. I was eager to discuss it during my review last year, but it was still six months away from release! It has been wild to witness Salesloft go from a specialized tool for BDRs to a process for entire sales organizations within just a few years.

Unsurprisingly, there is much to say about a project like this. It impacted nearly every aspect of the application and involved almost all of our designers. I’ll save more about it for another time.

Starlight, a new color and design system

I did an enormous amount of work on internal tools for our design team this year.

Salesloft underwent a brand update this year. It wasn’t a total overhaul, but rather an iterative improvement—and a good opportunity for us to reevaluate the product’s colors. I took the new colors and devised a new color system for the app using LCH (Lightness, Chroma, Hue). The main benefit is selecting colors with perceptually even lightness. I briefly discussed it in my first newsletter of the year.

The other major internal update was rebuilding our Figma library. Our previous library had components like “Field” which had properties for state, left icon, and right icon. There were a couple of problems with that approach. First, it didn’t align one-to-one with our code base. We have individual components for different types of fields—text, select, date, etc. Additionally, it placed a lot of work on the designer to build out various behaviors.

The new Figma library closely aligns with our code base and includes more comprehensive components.

Getting ready for a big 2024

There is obviously a lot happening in 2024. The big news is that Holly and I are getting married in early March.

We’ve reserved a retreat in North Carolina where our friends and family can relax and spend time together for a few days. It’s going to be a fantastic long weekend. We can’t wait!

Wishing y’all the best in 2024!