Lauren 🖤 Kelly

Fearless

Combining business strategy, with user research and go to market, we help scales up retain market share and enterprise develop design and digital maturity.

Founder / CEO

Fifty

Fifty of the fiercest minds in design coming together to share value and join a support network.

Founder

Helm (formerly The Supper Club)

Member

Chief

Unreasonable

Fearless Talent

We provide quality talent, at record speed.

Fearless Community

A group of incredible people (that hit 7000+ users) that were brought together during the pandemic. We shared events, resources and content and gave each other a place to stay connected during uncertain times.

This Place

Sitting on the leadership team as a design evangelist, I manage a growing team  Experience, Service, UX, Product Designers working across all Global client accounts to help them build high-value relationships with their customers.

Experience Design Director

I was brought into EE during a merge with BT to train and support a growing team designers as over seeing the relationships across squads for cross-functional collaboration. 

With a digital transformation taking place, I played a role in running workshops and creating the ways of working, process and digital strategy as well as supporting the role out of the squad model for EE & BT's digital team.

Senior UX Design Manager

Wipro Limited

Working with global brands across many verticals, leading projects and teams up to 50 people within Wipro and for my clients design teams, through design sprints, Design Thinking Methodologies and Lean UX.

Experience Design Director (Managing Consultant)

We design solutions for people, businesses and products. Alternatively, we can help you to recruit designers. - Fearless™️

As a Designer by trade, I spent the best part of my career working with design teams in enterprise businesses around the world.

Originally rebelling against the idea of giving up my design hat, after 4 years of Fearless I’ve since learned I love being an entrepreneur with big ambitions and a lot of heart for the future.

The Fearless team specialises in quality design and can either taken projects end to end with meaningful impact and measurable results.

With a constant view of the forever changing design industry, we often team up with others to support charity initiatives and beta tests that will contribute towards designing a better world. 

We are authentically Fearless and believe in results through empowerment. 

I am a proud member of Chief, the community for Female Execs and Helm, the community for entrepreneurs. 

If you’re also a member, an entrepreneur / founder, Senior Leader, a fellow design nerd, ADHD, working single parent or just a bit curious, I’d love to hear from you. 🫶🏼🖤

Networking and finding incredible people from across the world is my passion, if thats you, let’s chat!

-

* Originally co-founded in 2019, I stepped into the CEO role in 2020 and become the sole founder of Fearless Group at the start of 2023.

CEO & Founder

Our three Design focused business combined makes us the the one stop shop for scaling culture driven design teams and solutions. 

Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

Director of Product Design

PandaDoc

Businesses trust PandaDoc’s all-in-one document automation software to streamline the process of creating, approving, and eSigning proposals, quotes, contracts, and more. I'm leading Design for their Core team.

Head of Design

Smile.io

Interim Director of Product

Smile is used by over 100k brands and millions of shoppers, I lead a small design team building the loyalty infrastructure of the internet. My role has included hiring and retaining top design talent, increasing the role of user-behaviour data and research in design decisions, and improving the collaboration between design, product, and engineering.

Senior Product Designer

TIME CO2

Provided pre-launch design direction and optimisation of onboarding and e-commerce flows.

Design Consultant

Brightfield Group

Brightfield Group provides predictive consumer and marketing intelligence for the CBD and cannabis industry. I helped create a coherent design language across a wide range of reports and data portals and improve the accessibility and efficiency of their digital products.

Data Visualization Design Consultant

Watching That

A video intelligence platform handling millions of streaming data points per day that I helped design from the ground up. The role includes research, product design, data visualisation design, establishing a scalable design system and UI development in React.

Lead Designer

WegoWise (acquired)

The largest database of multifamily utility data in the US. I was responsible for product and marketing design and for the hiring and managing of designers. Instrumental in various aspects of an evolving design process:
- Collaborated with business development to explore early-stage product concepts.
- Established and promoted a 'design first' company culture with an emphasis on validating ideas via interviews and testing.
- Implemented and oversaw a scalable, documented approach to developing front-end components.

Head Of Design

Create Today

A web to print startup and artist community (now offline). Led a diverse, distributed team building complex software to tight deadlines. I gained a wealth of experience in various aspects of agile development and project management. Helped take the business from concept through to successful acquisition.

Operations Manager

GTECH

Designed and coded the player portal area of various state lottery sites and assisted in the development of a reusable front-end framework. The work also included some ios design and usability/ accessibility analysis.

UX Design Consultant

Vida Media

Built, designed, marketed and managed various websites for small to medium size businesses. 
- Site planning, documentation and requirements analysis
- Front end design and coding
- Project management
- CMS driven sites
- Usability consultant

Freelance Designer

I lead small design teams. I love making designers lives better by providing them with the support, career growth, feedback and structure they need for success.

Dan Winer

Designers, vibe coding isn't a flex
PMs protoyping isn't the issue

If you don't understand your customers and what they're trying to achieve, then you're shooting in the dark. Using AI to shoot faster doesn't suddenly mean shooting in the dark is a good idea. 

To be clear, I do think designers should be vibe coding. It's fun; it can get you interested in coding and the underlying technology users interact with, help you create better prototypes for testing, and might let you see your designs make it into production more quickly with more attention to detail.
All good things.  

But if you want to go from Mid to Senior to Staff or leadership and beyond, it's probably not the area you need to focus on. Focusing on how efficiently you can prototype is a race to the bottom. That work is the easiest to outsource. Does that mean you can afford to be bad at it? No, definitely not. It's a skill you need; it's just not a differentiator. It's table stakes. 

What I believe product designers need to focus on more to stay relevant and grow their careers: 


• Regularly talking to customers and knowing how to ask unbiased questions to understand their needs and motivations, and not asking them to describe solutions. 

• Conducting stakeholder interviews (ie, talking to the people you work with) and knowing how to align your questions to their expertise and level of influence. 

• Analysing problems from different angles: What is the problem for the user? What's the problem for the business if we don't solve it? How do we know it's a real problem (quantify)? How will we know that we've solved it?

• Understanding leading and lagging indicators and how they relate to design. Your work should change user behaviour; that change, in aggregate, should impact product metrics, which in turn work towards business goals. Own those leading indicators, track and measure them. 

• Making people care about the problems you want to solve. Designers love to present solutions, but nobody cares about solutions until they care about the problem it solves. Communicating problems is more important than communicating solutions. 

• Creating a vision that the team can align around. Too many product designers are stuck working only on defined solutions, missing out on one of the most valuable aspects of design: aligning and motivating people around an ideal future state. 


AI can help with a lot of the things on that list, but if you're just focused on using AI to build other people's ideas more quickly, you risk turning into a delivery worker, not a knowledge worker, just one that's delivering a bit quicker than before.

8 skills that have nothing to do with Figma but will make you a better product designer:

• Stakeholder Interviews
Treat interviewing stakeholders as a necessary stage of your research. Identify key players and tailor your questions to their expertise and influence. This isn't just gathering requirements; it's building alignment before you've drawn a single screen.

• Workshop Facilitation
Your role isn't just to have good ideas, but to extract them from others. Learn to guide a room (or a FigJam board) to define problems, map journeys, and build consensus. A well-facilitated workshop saves weeks of back-and-forth.

• Data Literacy
You don't need to be a data scientist. But you need to know what questions to ask. Understand the difference between leading and lagging indicators, and become comfortable identifying which user behaviour drives business metrics.

• Problem Framing
Before you jump into a solution, can you articulate the problem clearly? A strong problem statement includes who it affects, why it's a problem for them, and why the business should care. If you can't write this down, you're not ready to design.

• Storytelling
Great work doesn't speak for itself. You have to speak for it. Structure your presentations around a simple narrative: context, problem, solution, impact. Frame your work in a way that makes people care.

• Asynchronous Communication
The most senior people are often the busiest. Learn to communicate your work clearly without needing a meeting. A short Loom video walkthrough and a well-structured pre-read are more respectful and often more effective than another calendar invite.

• Giving Constructive Feedback
Your ability to help others improve is a massive career multiplier. Move beyond subjective "I don't like blue buttons" style feedback and give your colleagues something specific, actionable, and tied to the project's goals. This builds trust and elevates the entire team.

• Value Stream Mapping
How does your company actually make money? Map out the value exchange between your business, your customers, and any third parties. Understanding this context ensures the problems you're solving are the ones that actually keep the lights on.


What would you add?

Steal this framework to avoid getting trapped turning requirements into blueprints.
Over and over again.

It's not what the role was meant to be.

I want to help you deliver knowledge and insights, not just blueprints for developers.

By doing so you broaden your role, increase your opportunities for growth and make yourself harder to replace.

Here’s how to get started:

It's a framework to capture the context, constraints, and opportunities surrounding a product problem before exploring solutions.

It helps ensure that your design work solves the right problem in a way that aligns with user needs and business strategy.


1. Problem definition 
-----
What are we solving? Frame it from the user’s point of view.
Template:
[User] is struggling with [specific obstacle], which causes [negative impact]
or: 
[User type] can’t [achieve goal] because [problem or barrier]


2. Who has this problem?
-----
Who are the affected users?
Include real user types, segments, or roles. Add context like behaviours, goals, and environment.


3. What’s the business opportunity or risk?
-----
Why does this matter?
What outcome could be unlocked, or what risk avoided, if we solve this?


4. How do we know it’s real?
-----
What evidence supports this problem?
Use both qualitative (e.g. interviews, support chats) and quantitative (e.g. dashboards, funnels) sources.


5. What’s been tried already?
-----
Partial solutions, past efforts, workarounds.
What didn’t work, and why?


6. How do competitors solve this?
-----
What ideas can we borrow, adapt, or avoid?


7. What assumptions do we have?
-----
What are we assuming about:
• Why this is happening
• What users want
• What they’ll do if we solve it
• What solution might be needed


8. Desired outcomes
-----
What behaviour change are we aiming for?
Template:
 If we solve [problem], users will [behaviour], resulting in [product or business metric].


9. How might we solve the problem?
-----
Early ideas, loosely held.
Tie each idea back to a problem from the first question.


10. Hypotheses
-----
Two kinds of hypotheses: 

Discovery hypotheses (ship to learn):
• We believe [problem or assumption] is true. We can validate this by [method]. We’ll gain confidence if we observe [signal].

Delivery hypotheses (ship for impact):
• We believe [solution] will lead to [user behaviour], which will drive [business outcome]. We’ll know we’re right when [measurable signal].


Tips
-----
↳ Encourage your team to use this collaboratively.
↳ Not everything needs to be filled in upfront. It's a gradual process.
↳ Add links to relevant docs, data, or research as you go.

I get asked for advice for junior designers breaking into the industry.
And the truth is, I struggle with that. 

I got my first design role in 2007. 
I designed in Photoshop and built sites in HTML, CSS and PHP. 
I was the only 'web designer' in my town. 
(I felt old typing that 😅)

The first websites I built, I did for free. Just to have something in my portfolio, but soon I had so many paying clients that I decided to quit my design studies instead of turning customers away. 

I learned everything a small business needed for a physical and digital design presence: print design, web design, programming, hosting, email setup, SEO, Google ads, CRMs, etc. 

It was an amazing time. Learning non-stop. Avidly consuming content from Net Magazine and Smashing Magazine (thanks Vitaly Friedman!). Designing and shipping new websites (via FTP with no version control 😵) every month, sometimes every week. Obsessing over tools and technology that would disappear a year later (RIP MooTools). 

It wasn't all fun. Spending hours trying to get things to work on IE6 and 7 was beyond frustrating. Testing and fixing email templates was a form of digital torture. 

My web design work led to offers of product design work. Companies were desperate for people who could design and code. In the first five years, I went from working for local companies in my small town in Southern Spain to working for companies in a nearby tech hub, and then to getting hired by a startup in Boston. 

When I give advice, I like to do it from real, lived experience, not theory. That's why my course is full of examples and frameworks that I've used myself at startups. So, when I look back on my experience as a junior, the environment has shifted so much that it's hard to extract practical advice. Some of the things that I think still remain constant: 

• It's better to work for free than not to work at all. Whether it's building something for yourself (easier than ever with vibe coding tools) or for a friend, it's critical to put what you've studied into practice and build something real. 

• Generalist skills have been so helpful for me. Learning every aspect of what makes a digital product successful. Graphic design, research, copywriting, coding, etc. I have been into all of it at some point. 

• Being curious and slightly obsessive but never loyal to new tools and technologies is more critical than ever. Be amazingly fast and efficient with Figma, but accept you might not open it in 12 months' time. Be on the lookout for the replacement for the tool you love.  

Whilst the market is definitely more challenging than it was for me, there is a big opportunity right now for juniors. 

Some people who have been in the industry longer are more hesitant to embrace the new ways of working that AI is enabling, while junior designers have the chance to get ahead of the curve, lead the way with AI-first design practices and teach some of the older designers how they're doing it.

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Lauren 🖤 Kelly

Dan Winer

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