As a design advocate at zeroheight, I’ve been fortunate to collaborate with cross-functional teams, support our customers, and engage with the broader design system community. I love this role because it allows me to blend my professional experience and gleaned insights to form best practices, helping teams find success with their design system efforts. Here are some highlights of how I approach advocacy and some of my impacts.
Supporting Sales and Success Teams
I work closely with our Sales and Success teams as they address our customers’ complex questions about design systems. Beyond providing a quick answer and links, I aim to give additional context to my colleagues about why those questions arise, typical approaches for scenarios, and how we and our customers can reframe challenges. This perspective helps equip my colleagues with deeper insights so they can guide customers more effectively.
Many of these design system workflow and strategy questions turn into help guides supporting more customers and the broader community. Providing this assistance reduces the need for advocates to be on calls frequently and ensures our Advocate Sessions with customers are focused and meaningful.
Supporting Product Teams
Through my interactions with customers and the design community, I’ve gathered insights that contribute to shaping our product’s future. I see my role as a bridge, helping align customer needs with our product’s development in a thoughtful and user-centered way. This collaboration has led to more informed decisions and solutions that resonate better with our users.
As we release new features, I write more strategic pieces to support their adoption. For example, when we released the changelog feature, I wrote a call-to-action op-ed, “Don’t want to keep a change log? Throw away your design system.”
Advocate Sessions
As part of our enterprise plan, I lead advocate sessions to help customers navigate their design system challenges. Whether through Q&A discussions or workshops, I strive to provide clarity and guidance that teams can act on. I’ve seen teams make real progress after these sessions, which is one of the most rewarding parts of my job.
Highlighting new and diverse voices
When curating webinars and conferences, I prioritized bringing in diverse voices. Although not a core part of my role, I’ve taken the initiative to coach new speakers, helping them feel prepared and confident. Coaching new speakers is remarkably fulfilling, as it allows fresh perspectives to shine.
75% of the speakers from events I’ve curated have been women, non-binary individuals, or people of color.
Dedicating myself to ensuring diverse representation enriches our events and helps create a more inclusive community. In fact, 75% of the speakers from the conferences and webinars I’ve curated have been women, non-binary individuals, or people of color, highlighting my commitment to representation beyond the typical majority of cis-gender white men.
Extensible content
In addition to extending the work from customer and cross-functional engagements into public-facing materials, I proactively seek ways to create versatile and impactful content that we can repurpose across multiple formats. These formats include podcasts, live webinars, videos, blogs, e-books, and more. By offering something unique in each format, we can keep our community engaged and informed without falling into the trap of repetitive content.
The 2023 How We Document campaign is an excellent example of extensibility I’ll orchestrate. In addition to the report (PDF), it included a four-part live webinar (later posted on YouTube) and a five-part blog series.