Amber Massey, Senior Product Designer, at PowerSchool (formerly Schoology.)
Originally from Dallas, TX, Amber had an interest in Fine Arts. She attended college in Chicago, IL and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Finding it challenging to secure a career with a museum or similar institution, she explored coding and discovered how design overlaps with coding.
She continued her education with a coding BootCamp to help broaden her career opportunities. That knowledge was useful for Amber to understand how things get made from a coding/development perspective. With that added knowledge, Amber was actually getting involved in the field of UX (User Experience) Design. Amber started to provide designs to developers and now is a team leader.
At PowerSchool, Amber has a team of 20 developers. In the work Amber does as a designer, there is a lot of prototyping and concepting, which is very beneficial to the business. The design thinking process saves time and cost, as it is time consuming and expensive to hard code everything and then see what direction to go. Once a clearer direction is determined from prototyping and concepting efforts and feedback, then specs are created for the developers to code.
The process that is utilized for UX is design thinking which is a beneficial way to develop Ideas, identify and organize similar ideas and then develop concepts and direction. Part of this work is about the user and how things should work, as well as, potential problems users may run into. Feedback, from users and leaders, is beneficial to the process. Being able to parse and understand the feedback, then tactically move forward to ultimately develop the product for best use is the ultimate goal. Finding that right alchemy between what the business/organization needs and what the user experiences is the challenge for each project at PowerSchool.
The company PowerSchool is the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education in North America. PowerSchool supports over 45 million students and 12,000+ districts, schools, and other education institutions in over 90 countries.
Amber talked about the type of key skills that helps candidates in the hiring process. She discussed T Shaped Skills - think of a “T” - the top line across goes wide and has broad general knowledge, but isn't deep. The line going down is the deep knowledge in a specific "narrow" area, like your specialty or super power.
In order to develop projects, they also utilize metrics. Surveys help capture responses into a tool to assess various aspects of their project. Many questions on the surveys use a Likert Scale - (ex. Likely vs Unlikely) scoring range to help provide information they need. Data and research are powerful for their successful completion of projects.
Amber is still working remotely due to Covid. They have some tools that help with their virtual process, like Miro, a sophisticated and virtual substitute for sticky notes in a room. These types of tools have allowed Amber to continue to do her job and help their customers.
Amber referenced a book called Atomic Design, by Brad Frost, that helps to provide a nomenclature and structure (methodology) for the thoughtful creation of design systems.
Dan McElroy, President of the WV Coding Club, shared, "Amber's talent and skills have directly helped the WV Coding Club. She designed our Web Site and has been a part of our efforts since the beginning. Thank you, Amber, for your support and for helping our students see another aspect of how they can move forward in a tech career."
Amber shared final thoughts with the WV Coding Club students, “Not everyone is a developer, but it is immensely powerful to know how to code. Don’t box yourself in. You can be code adjacent. See what roles are out there. There are so many needed roles in the tech world. It is an ecosystem with multiple avenues in design and development. Keep an open mind, explore and use your super powers for good.”
Thank you Amber Massey for sharing your time, experience and providing valuable insights for our WV Coding Club students!
Keep Coding!!!!