08 - Andy Morales

Andy Morales is the Senior Director of Product Design at FireHydrant.

Welcome to Design People! We celebrate design people all around the world and share their inspiration, everyday essentials, and important lessons. After reading this, I hope you can learn something or at least smile 😄.

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Meet Andy

🔗 LinkedIn

Andy is currently the Senior Director of Product Design at FireHydrant. Having had the opportunity to be around her and work with her before - she’s truly amazing and inspiring. Grab some tea or coffee - I love this story!

Andy’s Journey to Design

“Growing up, I was always interested in game design because it was the clearest definition I had for design. But where I was, the only way to games was through computer science.”

✨ The lovely Andy Morales ✨

So, in high school, Andy started learning computer science and she was doing really well. But, she was the only woman.

“I remember on the last day of class, my teacher asked me to make sandwiches for the boys. And I didn’t want to be a part of it anymore.”

After that, Andy stumbled upon Communications at the University of Costa Rica - where she delved into media and focused on the storytelling part of game design. She then started her career as a filmmaker and marketer.

However, her interest in game design and interaction design stayed in her heart. She even co-founded the Interaction Design School in VERITAS University (video 👇) - in fact, it was the first school of its kind in South America. This only fortified her interest in design.

“After going too hard into the arts and media side of things, I went back to reconsider design. I missed that part of building something with constraints beyond artistic quality. And even more so, I missed having someone utilize what you’re building. So I went to grad school for Transdisciplinary Design.”

Andy is now a design leader and has contributed to so many people, teams, and companies across the tech industry.

Outside of work, she practices Muay Thai and Brazilian Jujutsu (also known as ‘the art of folding clothes when there’s still people inside’), hangs out with her puppy and cats, and is always looking for ways to learn new things. Recently, she’s started learning 3D design, taking bioengineering classes at GenSpace, and is planning to learn toy design soon.

Andy at the dojo

In case you’re wondering about where game design sits in her life - Andy still enjoys designing games on the side for fun. She’s even won an award for one!

Andy at FireHydrant

Andy is currently the senior director of product design at FireHydrant. FireHydrant is an incident management tool for developers. What’s ‘incident management’? Check out the amazing video below 👇.

When I asked Andy what her main priority at FireHydrant is, she answered with a couple of big questions:

“How do I make the developer experience of software going down - something so stressful and tangible - less stressful?”

“How do I incorporate tranquility into the practice of bringing your systems back up?”

“How might I train humans for resilience in the face of urgency, stress, and panic?”

and one more… “How do I embody resilience and tranquility as a design leader?”

Andy and her team design for stressful situations and live their customers’ experience when tackling problems - making empathy extremely important.

“There are a couple of main ways we work to build empathy. We have on-call rotations so we see and participate in the urgency of various situations. We also conduct user research and constantly talk to our customers. In the future, I want to expand this to talking to actual disaster fighters such as firefighters. There’s a lot we can learn and draw from them as inspiration.”

Andy and her design team

☀️ Q&A

Did you know you always wanted to be a leader?

I always knew I wanted to be a leader. I wanted to be at a place where I could truthfully help and uplift others - especially minorities. Growing up, I felt ignored myself as a woman and as a Latina. As a leader, I make sure I care about people holistically.

What advice do you have for someone wanting to grow their career from an individual contributor to a design leader?

This might be potentially controversial advice - but look for signs of a boss that believes in you. Because if they don’t, it emotionally and tangibly takes a lot from you.

Evaluate your managers and when asking for new opportunities, like leading a project, evaluate how your managers act.

For example, are they enthusiastic for it? Are they providing me support like gutters in bowling? Are they checking in with me? Are they exposing me to growth or networking opportunities?

Once you have a good boss, you have good checkpoints, and a good support system. The rest is on you.

How do you get executives to believe in your big picture ideas or your long-term design vision?

It’s really hard, but not impossible! You have to be open to almost taking it way too far.

If you have a vision, the best way to see it through is to create a really concrete proposal. Have your designs ready, get a PM to believe in it, find an engineer to estimate its cost, and if possible, define metrics to show the idea’s value.

This way, you avoid comments like, ‘Do I like it?’ or ‘Do I feel comfortable with it?’ It’s much more difficult to say no to something that’s ready, annotated, and costed. At that point, it becomes ‘we can’t waste this.’

And for what it’s worth, I’ve never had an idea or vision go completely to waste because so long as I’m here, I’ll find a way to bring it back 💪.

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Thanks for reading this edition of Design People! If you liked what you read, please consider sharing it with a friend 😄. If you know someone you’d like to see featured next, please let me know!

- Allison