Fact: Public speaking scares the shit out of me.
I traveled to Uber’s Amsterdam Design office to give a talk on Uber Rewards at Uber Design Night, which is a quarterly design event hosted by Uber. I initially wanted to go over case studies, but after a bit of thinking, I realized that designers could find those anywhere and everywhere. I thought it was more important to be open about the emotional side of being a product designer in a big tech company, so I rewrote 75% of the talk on the plane (!) and choose to speak about embracing change, mistakes, and uncertainty in the design process, with case studies interspersed. We held a QA session afterwards with the other speakers.
This event definitely pushed me out of my comfort zone in the most fabulous way, and I can’t wait to give more talks in the future.