During summer 2023, I joined Datadog as a Product Design Intern on the Logs Management team. I worked on a total of 8 projects - 5 for logs management and 3 for sensitive data scanner. It was one of my most fruitful summers ever. I unfortunately could not share much due to NDA.
Product Design Intern
Roslyn McConnell (Manager)
Khushboo Agarwal (Mentor)
Sejal Kotak (Buddy)
2023 Summer
At Datadog, if a designer wants to get feedback from the entire design org, they’ll write a design review doc. I found this to be super helpful and have continued to write design docs for all my projects.
A lot of times, you may pump out the design in 1-2 days. But then you realize that there’s a lot of steps before it can be shipped. This includes: Talk to other product teams to see how my designs will affect them / Get approval from mentor, manager, PM, and engineering lead / Do design QA with engineer / Set up success metrics.
It’s natural to wait for others. But it’s not okay to just…wait and do nothing. You can always take other initiatives such as getting started on another project, following up with the stakeholder or document your designs for future use.
Before, my mental model of research always defaulted to user research. But, as my manager Roz said, there are so many types of research (competitive analysis, secondary research, asking PMs). And know when to use what’s already available in the company.
Always provide context / where we left off. Specify what type of feedback I want. Know your audience and tailor your delivery. Make it stupidly easy to give feedback.
My manager recommended me to do this during our 30 days check in. And it made me realize: Hey, it’s nice to pause sometime, reflect on the things I did do well, and pat myself on the back.
Below are snippest of great moments & contributions during the internship.
