Photo by Seven Plus Studio

In a product team, how do we build and earn trust through our communication? What are the strategies to stay true to our fact-based decisions rather than giving in to pressure or power from stakeholders like supervisors, executives, and clients? How do we find our own path to be professionally acknowledged, versus being “popular”, likable or compliant (product manager’s talking here)?  

This panel kicked off the IN SYNC series that invites product designers, managers, and engineers to participate in empowering conversations to explore better communications through self-awareness, social-awareness, and working environment. We bring in people you can relate to -- women, people of color, immigrants, introverts, and others -- and ask them for strategy, tactics, and tools to help you to become a better communicator in work and life.

Our guests:

Shanfan Huang

Shanfan Huang leads the customer-centric design effort at Pivotal R+D, improving developer experience on the Cloud Foundry platform. Before joining R+D, Shanfan had been coaching enterprise clients at Pivotal on lean product design and cloud-native application development. Being a designer all her life, passionate about Open Source Software, she brought together a wide range of past experience including industrial design, web interaction design and strategic design thinking.

Shan Liu

Shan Liu is a product designer at AdvisorEngine in downtown Manhattan, designing for a wide range of touch points in financial advising. Besides that, she is leading a thought leadership workshop that teaches wealth management executives about Customer Experience. Shan has worked on a wide range of art and design projects with companies like The Jim Henson Company, Beats by Dre, National Art Museum of China, MetLife, Snarkitecture; and with artists like Pharrell Williams and Daniel Arsham. 

Jessica Mink

Jess Mink is VP of Product and Process Design at Call9.  Call9 brings the functionality of the emergency room to nursing homes allowing critical patients to be treated in place by remote doctors. Prior to joining Call9 Jess was an Engineering Manager at Chef Software, a leader in the DevOps space. She led teams ensuring continuous security and compliance checks as well as an open source project in the containers space. Jess has a strong technical background graduating with a Computer Science Degree from Carnegie Mellon, and has worked as an engineer in companies such as Amazon, Ooyala and The Naval Research Laboratory.  Outside of work she’s been volunteering in Search and Rescue since 2008.