Vlad
Feier

Hi, I'm Vlad Feier. Thanks for stopping by. This is where I keep my work and the occasional thought on design, teams and the things we build.

You can also find me on LinkedIn and Medium, or drop me a line using the link at the bottom of this page.

I work as a Principal Experience Designer at Thoughtworks and have spent 15 years in product design, the last six of them leading teams. Along the way I've designed for Zoom, Cisco, PepsiCo, IntraFi, Trex, Total Wine & More, a children's literacy programme and other large companies in aviation, automotive and retail — big teams and small teams, enterprise tools and consumer apps, in the office and remote.

I've built a wide variety of things, but below are some favourites:

• Keeping 31 million children learning to read when COVID shut their classrooms overnight. Kids from pre-K to second grade, many of them just learning to hold a pencil, suddenly had no teacher beside them and no classroom to go back to. I led four designers at Learning Without Tears to bring their literacy curriculum online, testing every screen with the children and teachers who would use it and making sure it worked for kids of every ability. The notes we got back from teachers and students during lockdown are still the ones I think about most.
• Leading a design systems team at Zoom in the middle of COVID, when almost overnight the whole world started living on video calls and every change was under a spotlight. We had to move fast without breaking anything. We designed how the participant tiles scale and rearrange as you resize the window. If you've been on a Zoom call since 2021, you've used it.
• Rebuilding Cisco Secure Workload from scratch with four designers across two product teams. Networks of more than 10,000 nodes became something a security team could see, segment and monitor from a laptop screen.

I've built design teams from scratch more than once, and a few things have held true every time:

• Hire curious, well-rounded people who can research, design and tell the story of their work, then give them room.
• Judge people by how good a teammate they are, not just to other designers but to engineers, product managers and everyone else they work with.
• Work to make myself unnecessary, so the team does great work whether I'm in the room or not.

Anyone who's worked with me knows I see it as my job to make sure people are enjoying the work, growing in their careers, and feeling respected and included.

When I'm not working, I'm a husband, a dad, and the human of Greg, our beagle. Whenever we can, you'll find us in the mountains: skiing in winter, hiking the rest of the year.