Designer spotlight: Angela Fox, Staff Product Designer at Snorkel AI
Angela and I chat about her career progression pivoting from city planning to design at Microsoft as an Asian American immigrant, and now designing AI tools at Snorkel AI.
Angela is one of the most honest and clear-minded designers I know. We chat about her transition into tech from city planning, designing tools for AI, and the importance of communication skills. I’ll be splitting this interview into two parts with today’s newsletter focused on Angela’s career progression, and later this week’s on topic deep dives.
Designer profile
Name: Angela Fox
Role: Staff product designer at Snorkel AI
Motivations: public benefit, involvement in AI conversations, seeing where life takes her
Skill to swipe: Communication
You can find Angela on ADPList and LinkedIn. She’ll also be speaking at Snorkel AI’s conference, The Future of Data-Centric AI 2023 in June.
Who are you?
My name is Angela. I am a product designer at Snorkel AI. On the day-to-day at work, I oversee the design of our end-to-end machine learning development workflow. Currently, I’m focusing on foundation models and computer vision use cases.
What was your path into design?
I often struggle with the definition of design. If you think about design in a very broad sense, I got into architecture first because 18-year-old me was thinking architecture is the perfect combination of art and science. Then I went on a very windy route of from architecture to city planning. I did city planning for a bit: outputting maps, design guidelines, policy, and community engagement.
Then I went into grad school. I got an internship in a software product design role, and made that turn right there.
What did you get out of design grad school?
Maybe I don't like writing policy as an output, but what kind of output can I have? I had some vague ideas and interest in visual and communication design. What does it mean to apply that to public benefit?
It was a rather interdisciplinary cohort. We mostly studied not just HCI, but interaction design with people, programs and technology infused in it.
How did you get your first software product design role?
I got my first summer internship at Microsoft through an internal career fair.
I wasn't looking for tech companies, but I had a great conversation with a Microsoft designer and she was interested in talking more. I just went through the interview process.
The designer told me one thing I still remember to this day. She said, we can teach you craft, but we can’t teach you how to think. I was like, okay, let me explain how I think. At this point, I have been learning screen based interaction design for, what, half a year? There's no way I'm going to be amazing at it. My strength is the way I look at problems. With time, the craft will grow.
At the interview, I presented three projects, none of them were screen based. I really didn't think I was going to get the job. I was much more interested in showing them who I am as a person.
And I got a job and was like, well, holy shit.
What were your career aspirations then?
I don't think I had any career aspiration at the time.
Here's this once in a lifetime opportunity for me to work in tech and see what it's like. I just want to know what this job is like, and is this something I can do in the next five years?
What happened between then and now?
I started an internship at Microsoft. They gave me a full time offer, I accepted.
When you get a full time offer from larger companies, you normally don't get to choose which team to work in specifically. I chose by location because I wanted to move to San Francisco.
I worked there for a while. I was very lucky to have pretty solid designers I was working with, which heavily influenced the early growth of my career. Ultimately I was just not that interested in the product itself.
I also felt the career progression inertia of a larger company affecting how fast you grow. I was 28, 29 working at Microsoft for two years at that time. This was also in the middle of pandemic. I thought, I'm in the Bay Area, there are so many startups. I'm naturally a very risk averse person, but I felt like I was running out of time to try something that's more risky. All the things led me to want to move to a startup.
Why did you choose to work on AI tools?
People always ask, are you really interested in AI? Is that why you go to AI company?
No, Snorkel AI was just the first recruiting email that I got. It was also one of the best offers I got through that round of interviewing. Over time I thought, Snorkel is interesting.
AI and machine learning was so intimidating to me. It could be very interesting. I don't know if I'm going to be good at it, but why don't I just give it a try and concept validate? Everytime I switch my career, I don’t know if I’m interested in it, but I won’t know until I dig deeper.
What do you do now?
There’s a lot of talk around AI and design, and most of the time on how companies communicate AI generated results to users.
In Snorkel AI, the question is around the ethics of building the machine learning algorithm itself. That has a little bit less literature around it. I feel very lucky to have been able to catch up with the conversation that's been happening so far.
What are your career goals now?
I try to not give myself too much pressure.
When I was younger, I thought I had to find a singular career, I’m going to commit to it. I used to be the type of person who would create plan A, plan B, and plan C. Before, there was a fear of making the right decision at a juncture point. Now, I'm just going to make a decision, and that will be the best one.
Looking back, I have changed so many different areas throughout my life.I see myself bouncing around every couple of years. It's very likely that in five years I'm not going to be a product designer anymore. The knowledge I've built so far might apply to a field where I don’t even know the job titles.
What would you go back and tell your early career self?
Even though I have crafted a story and rationale landing in tech, I feel guilty. I feel like a sellout.
Wanting to continue in the field of public benefit and focusing on results that are public and, potentially, not-for-profit by nature, I find going into tech feeling very capitalistic. We live in the Bay Area, and I felt like everyone was moving into tech because they just wanted to get paid more.
But when it came to making the choice to work in public benefit, there are only five to six different opportunities, a handful of design consulting firms, consulting for the city, research institutions in Europe. Those were my dream jobs.
I tried to get those jobs and it was so hard. I gave it a run. The job market and myself were not a good fit at that time. There’s that lingering feeling where once in a while, I feel bad. Looking back I would tell myself, nah, you did your best.
What has been the proudest moment in your design journey?
The deck I made when I went into the Microsoft interview. Instead of trying to fake that I was good at UX design, I was like, I’m new to UX design but I have these skills. What do you think? That's one of the most honest moments of my career.
There's always this fear of wanting you to like me, approve of me. That moment felt like, hey, let's discuss if there is a meaningful working relationship between us. I don't always get to do that. I look back at those moments and this is how I want to communicate my skills moving forward.
What has been the hardest moment in your design journey?
It’s really hard to parse through intersectional microaggression. It could be anything, that you are very junior, have poor ideas and decision making. It could also be your gender, ethnicity, seniority.
For some folks, for me, your ability to communicate English, your accent. As an Asian female immigrant, I have an intersectional identity. That combined with natural insecurity when you’re new to your career and interfacing with counterparts with none of that intersectional identity, you start questioning yourself, am I being taken advantage of? Or am I thinking too much?
Especially in the Bay Area, in the broader case, everyone is usually smart enough to not do anything that's overly discriminatory. Things do happen in small ways and those small ways accumulate. I'm in a better position of identifying those now, but back then it was difficult to know if your career progression is slower because of these identities that you have.
What skill could you inject into another designer to immediately uplevel them?
I have been told that I have good communication skills.
There is an objective clarity of laying out the facts. There’s also the clarity around how people read the message. Even if you think that you are making this message very succinct, you can make it more succinct. You can always cut down two thirds of the words that you use. Those are the principles I give to myself.
Think about communication not just through words and emails. You have to be interested in knowing how the other side receives the message.
What’s a lesson that you're still trying to learn?
The most difficult thing is assessing the design-specific point of view and how important it is in comparison to the industry trend, the customer relationship, and company operations.
You don’t always get to make a decision that prioritizes user experience, product decision, or interaction design. What other things contributes to the business’s decision making? What is a trade off that a CEO would have made? What is a trade off that a head of go-to-market would make? The more you understand the rationale of your counterpart, the more likely that you're going to land your first recommendation sensibly. That builds trust with people. You become a designer who understands the industry and can work with tumultuous context, then you have a better opportunity to nudge.
I am interested in expanding the proportion of design considerations in decision making. I want to apply all the skills I know in how decisions are made and how to influence how decisions are made.
Bonus question. What would you do if you weren't in software design?
I'll probably be doing community engagement.
I'll design meetings or activities for public engagement, whether the city is trying to have an initiative, implement something, or hear what the communities are thinking. Those are the things I know that I can immediately do.
That concludes part one of our interview with Angela. In part two, we’ll dive deeper into
transitioning into tech from public policy work
building communication skills
designing for AI
If you’d like to hear more from Angela, tune into Snorkel AI’s conference, The Future of Data-Centric AI 2023 from June 7th-8th.