Me (on the left) with my eventual supervisor, Zo-Ee.

A story on how attending a conference, some serendipity, and writing articles led to me interning remotely for Stampede

Hi there, I’m Brian Tan, a 4th year student from Manila here in the Philippines.

It’s been 4 days of me working as a UI/UX apprentice for Stampede, and it still feels surreal. How did a young student like me get to intern remotely for an awesome foreign company like Stampede?

Let me tell you about the crazy story of how I got this internship.

It starts with some Googling

It all started when I was randomly searching for design conferences online. I had never been to a big design conference abroad yet, so I just went searching on Google.

I eventually found the website to the UXSEA Summit, a 3-day design conference in Singapore held in November 2018.

I got excited. I wanted to see if I could land a UI/UX design job in Singapore to work in after I graduate, mainly because of the higher pay and better quality of life. The design and tech industry is also much more mature there than in Manila.

Getting a Student Discount

I saw too that the price of the conference was quite affordable compared to other international design conferences. But I thought to myself — what if they’re willing to give a discount to students?

So I went ahead and messaged the UXSEA Summit Facebook page, asking if I could be given a student discount. To my surprise, the organizers were willing to give me a 50% discount.

It gave me even more reason to go, and I told my parents about it. They were supportive of me going, with my mom offering to pay for the flight ticket using her miles. I also asked my cousin, who works in Singapore, if I could stay over at her place in the few days I’d be there, and she said I could.

Amazing, I thought. I had my flights and accommodation covered, and I got a huge discount for the conference! I didn’t care anymore about the fact that I had to miss a couple days of classes. I knew this conference could be the key to networking my way into a job there after I graduate.

Finding The Lucky Seat

Fast forward to after flying from Manila to Singapore, I arrived at the first day of the conference a few minutes late. Most of the seats had been filled up already, but I found a vacant seat next to a table in front.

I sat down on that seat, and little did I know that I’d be sitting next to my future supervisor for my internship. Beside me was Zo-Ee Chee, UX Strategist at Stampede.

Me with Zo-Ee and my fellow Filipino tablemates.

She told me about how Stampede was a Malaysian UX design and software agency, and how their founder brought their whole design team there.

I ended up spending the rest of the day talking to Zo-Ee and my tablemates, who were also from Manila surprisingly, and doing the hands-on workshops. Zo-Ee and I even designed a wallet for each other as part of the Design-A-Wallet workshop there, and we got to know each other more through the stories and ideas related to what we wanted in a wallet.

I had a lot of fun getting to know Zo-Ee and my tablemates, and Zo-Ee introduced me to Shaza Hakim, the founder of Stampede. I had no idea that I would be interning for her, and I wasn’t even searching for an internship at the time.

I have classes this semester, and I was unsure if I wanted to juggle that with an internship. I didn’t even know that interning remotely for a foreign company was an option. I was just curious about their team, and I asked Shaza a few questions.

The Power of Writing Articles

After each day of the conference though, I made sure to compile my notes from each session/talk for the day. I knew that I could write articles doing a recap of the Summit, so that’s what I did. I ended up writing one article for each day of the UXSEA Summit, and posted them on Medium and LinkedIn.

My article on UX Collective.

Suddenly, I got a comment from Shaza on my LinkedIn post about the article:

I was so pleasantly surprised. Wow, she’s offering me an internship? But before deciding if I wanted to do this, I did my research first about Stampede.

I ended up being really impressed looking through their website and social media. Stampede has a long list of clients from all over the world, and they have numerous case studies of their work on their site. They’ve also already been around since 2006, and their team works fully remotely, which impressed me.

They also have a blog where they’re so open about their culture and team. I was also impressed reading about Shaza, who is a local leader for the Interaction Design Foundation, and her open posts about Stampede, such as this slideset about how she manages to make remote working great for Stampede.

Landing the Job

I thought to myself that this is a one-of-a-kind company, and I’d be stupid not to try interning for them. So I decided to message Shaza, telling her how I was really interested to intern for Stampede and sent them my UI/UX portfolio.

I also told her though that I could spend only 15 hours a week working remotely for them, since I still would have classes during the internship. Shaza was okay with this and she scheduled a call with me, where Zo-Ee joined, and it ended up becoming an informal job interview.

By the end of the call, Shaza and Zo-Ee were willing to hire me, and I was pleasantly surprised. They were so willing to trust me based on my portfolio and articles, and how I answered their questions in an audiocall.

I started to see there the generosity of Shaza, and the willingness she had to trust and mentor young designers like me.

Within a week, I got sent a paid internship contract, and I accepted and signed it. This was definitely a “Hell Yeah!” opportunity for me.

4 Days of Learning

Shaza sharing some books she recently got in our team-wide videocall.

Fast forward to today, and it’s only been 4 days, but my internship’s already been great so far. Compared to my previous internships, Stampede actually had a more structured and better onboarding process, even if I was being onboarded remotely.

Shaza and I even had a 2-hour videocall where she discussed to me about Stampede’s Why and their core values, and discussed to me about their design process. I’ve already learned a lot from just a few days of talking to my teammates and observing Stampede’s processes as a UX design agency, and I can’t wait to learn more.

Filled with Gratitude

All in all, I don’t expect this high I’m feeling of being able to intern for Stampede to last the whole way. I’m sure that the work Stampede will give me might be difficult to juggle alongside my schoolwork, since I’m still taking a full load of classes this semester.

But I know that if I ever find myself stressed, bored, or not as passionate about working for Stampede, I just have to take a step back and remind myself how grateful I am to have this opportunity.

I’m grateful that I got to attend the UXSEA Summit, that I got to meet Zo-Ee and Shaza, that I get to work with and learn from this whole team, and that I get to learn what it’s like to work at a remote company.

It’s only been 4 days, but I’m already so thankful to be here. And I hope I’ll continue to be until the end of my internship in April.

Connect Deeper

I’ll likely be writing a couple more articles for Stampede, so if you enjoyed this post, like our Facebook Page or follow us on Medium!

My teammates and I have interesting articles and insights to share for you. Until then, keep dreaming and hustling, and I hope this article was insightful or inspiring for you.

The post How I Got the Crazy Opportunity to be a UI/UX Apprentice for Stampede appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

∼

Tony the Developer

Before joining Stampede, I found that communicating with my ex-coworkers wasn’t so intense although we were all in the same office. If you weren’t the extroverted type, this sort of environment was pretty normal and I’m sure others could relate to this. When I joined Stampede however, a large shift occurred.

As you might already know, Stampede is a remote agency with team members working from different places across the globe, so one would think that communications would be much less than your standard office.

Boy, was I wrong.

What I learned was that Stampede had a very active style of communication and coordination with the team was very tight. Our daily stand-up ‘Blitz’ meetings is just like warlords preparing for a strategy to stampede the enemy’s line (Wait, maybe this is why this company called Stampede).

BlitzThis is how our Blitz meetings feel like

To be honest, I had some trouble keeping up with the pace at the beginning but soon learned how the herd ran. While minor chatting happens throughout the day, our daily ‘Blitz’ meetings and weekly sharing session, ‘Happy Things’ make up the majority of our tight communication. It took me around two months to get comfortable with this sort of tension. I survived.

Tony the Project Lead

Back in 2016, we lost our project manager. Despite transition and hiring efforts, we just couldn’t find a new project manager with the right fit, let alone remote. Turning a near-disaster into an opportunity, we decided to experiment.

We asked “Instead of having one project manager, can we distribute this role to many people? And instead of managers, can we become leaders?”. Being a project lead means that you have to manage the team associated with the project, and deliver the project to the client on time and make sure everything signs off. You would have to be the bridge which connects the client and the team.

The first project which I got to lead was a brand called Big Film. The client had worked with Stampede before and good relations were already established. This knowledge pressured me. I thought to myself, what if I messed this project up? I would end up disappointing the client and my team. Luckily however, the project scoped wasn’t that large and only had two people on board; me as the developer and Shaza our founder, as the lead designer. It was a weird feeling giving directions to my own boss.

It was a weird feeling giving directions to my own boss.

But everything new is a learning process. What I learned from this setup was to:

Talk to team. As I mentioned before, to lead a project well, you need to deliver the project on time. To do so, I needed to get in contact with the team about each task’s status every day. At first I felt like I was being annoying, but I gradually got used to it and understood that it was my job to do so.

Talk to client. As a project lead you are the bridge that connects the client to the team. This task was a bit daunting to me at the beginning as I had to compose messages to the client to request and update the project’s status. I was worried that tone used in the message was wrong. Luckily, Zana helped me out with this.

What I learned from this

During my transition from a full-time developer to a developer with project leading responsibilities, I realised that the challenges and problems that came with the project could be solved by communicating it with the team. In the past, I would only see it from a developer’s perspective but now that I front the client and also work with more team members, I have a bigger picture of how the project runs.

So now I have modified my workflow. When I sign into work, I will spare 30 minutes of my time to check the status of the projects under me. From there, I will create a to-do list based on my observation from before. I find that my workflow is a lot more organised this way. At least I know what needs to be done.

Check, check and check.

To my fellow developers out there. If you find yourself in charge of a project, know that communication is very important. If you work it out with the team, every problem can be resolved efficiently with no need for double-work. Trust me you will not regret it.

The post From Developer to Project Lead appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

My campus life

Back in September 2015, I enrolled for a post-graduate programme at a local public university. At the time, I had to apply for special leave to focus on getting married and did not want to miss classes. After that was over, I re-enrolled back a few months later (March 2016) to pursue a Masters of Science in Information Technology. Why a Masters degree so early you ask? Well, ever since the day of my degree’s convocation day, my dad had been pushing me to pursue one.

I had a rough time deciding whether to go with research or coursework for my evaluation.

Not being one to waste time, I decided to look for what I was truly passionate about, and after 2 years I had finally found it, User Experience (UX). I was looking for a course in Human-Centered Informatics (HCI) and found out that this university has a lot of specialists in the field. As a bonus, it also helped out with my financial situation as it was still in an affordable range. I had a rough time deciding whether to go with research or coursework for my evaluation. Eventually, I came to a decision with coursework because they had this HCI Track in the study plan.

Unfortunately, it came to my surprise that they did not open the HCI Track for the semester. The Head of Programme then advised me to opt for the Research Track instead, which only begins on the 4th semester. Being the determined person I am, I stayed with the coursework because there was a subject called Human-Centered Informatics (HCI) that semester and I thought that I should give a shot.

As it turns out that I still have much to learn…

And then came Stampede

Around the same time, I applied for a job at Stampede, did their trial run and several rounds of interviews before accepted into the team. I was then introduced to the world of remote working. At the beginning, I was given a lot of training to make sure by skills were on par. As of now, I have already completed all the courses and presentation of what I have learned over the past weeks (will get more courses soon). But there was one thing that I was still struggling with, and that was practical development training. As it turns out that I still have much to learn in order to keep up with the company’s standard of quality. I have never sliced a design to HTML, pixel-by-pixel, and my HTML structuring still needs much improvement. As of me writing this, I am currently on my 2nd month at Stampede and looking forward to constantly improve my skills, especially in front-end development.

They encourage you to share your experiences…

So how do I think my experience at Stampede has made me better prepared for my Master degree course? The first thing I can think of is pretty much summed in this phrase, “You are not what you think you are”. You may think you are at a certain level of skill but reality will bring your feet back down to the earth. Remote working is not easy, especially when you are so used with going to your place of work, and working shifts or fixed office hours. But the team here is very welcoming and it did not took so long for me to be comfortable with them.

They are also very structured—I can even say that it is more structured than most companies with physical offices. The team encourages you to share your experiences. Just imagine if in a day one person shares one thing, that’s 8 new things we learn everyday (we are currently a team of 8), that’s 40 new things per week, 160 per month! (Let the math sink in).

Positivity is what brings the team forward…

Everyday there will be a team scrum usually before lunch. During this session each member will be updating their tasks and given new ones, this is new for me and personally I feel that this is so much better than a 3 hours meeting because you have to absorb so much just for one meeting.

Positivity is what brings the team forward, every week there will be a session where everyone will share what have made them happy and grateful from the previous week. Also, everyone is given a chance to host something called, Happy Things. It is a team bonding activity, that makes us become closer with one another. It is excellent for a new hire like myself to improve my speaking and presentation skills. Yes, that is on top of the presentation I have to do for every course I have learned.

Putting it all into perspective

All I can say is that the months of working at Stampede is a huge paradigm shift for me. The courses assigned by Stampede to train my soft skills has been nothing but an improvement to how I view and manage things. For example, I learned about the sunk-cost effect, which is defined as a tendency for humans to continue investing in something that clearly isn’t working. This has led my decision to change my Masters mode from coursework to research. As I had mentioned previously, HCI is my focus for the semester, so with Stampede being a creative agency which practices User Experience, the HCI subject has helped a lot in teaching me the importance of designing for people. As this is still my first semester, I hope my application to do research will be accepted and my time with Stampede will continue.

Thanks all for reading!

The post From Campus to Stampede appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

On working remotely

Many people might think that it would be easy working from home – that you can lounge around where pants are optional and you can just work any time you want.

Little did they know that, remote working requires a lot of discipline. It’s all about managing yourself to work in a non-traditional office enviroment; no superior to physically guide you, no colleague to hover around your cubicle to chat around and have some water cooler talks. Like every other job, remote working requires trust and responsibility from both the employer and employee to work. There is the challenge, on top of my dream to be a brilliant designer.

Only upon a few days joining Stampede, it felt like a breeze. Not only that Stampede has a system to make sure that everyone could work remotely very easily and comfortably while keeping to the deadlines, even the water cooler chats over Skype made me feel like we all sit in one physical office throwing banters over one another.

Stampede’s working environment evolve around Skype, Basecamp, Toggl, Invision, Bonus.ly and other amazing apps that help the team with the daily task. The team work remotely within miles away including (but not limited to, I know some move around a lot) Langkawi, Kedah, Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur and Perlis with only Skype and a Whatsapp group connecting us. Whilst technology has done such a great job as the medium, once again it is all about trust, responsibility and dedication from each team member to make this all work.

On design

While I had been designing from the start, I came from from advertising and print design industry for a couple of years before. Suffice to say website design and development is something I had been out of touch with for a long time. My knowledge on web development technology is way outdated. Thankfully, everyone at Stampede, especially Shaza my direct mentor, has been really helpful in training me on top of enhancing my knowledge and skills in designing.

From design trainings conducted by Shaza, I am currently learning some the new design techniques as well as keeping up with the latest web design trend. Shaza also teaches me new things on better understanding website design from font
for websites, font icons, typography, whitespaces, the do & don’ts in website design and many more.

I was also given the responsibility to post daily on Stampede Curated. The task is a good practice for me to spot on good design and gain more knowledge from the design itself. By observation, it could inspire me to design by learning through other people’s design. The task also keeps me on the latest design trend as it rapidly evolves from time to time.

While working with Sani in his training, i learned a lot on website designing development. Among them are basic CSS, grid in designing website, Bootstrap and Javascript. This is when I realised designing website is a team effort. When
you embark on a web design, you have to think on the front end developer’s side too. When you design, you always have to imagine how the others will work with your design, what type of components you should design, what grid you’re
going to use and such. This to ensure the total work process will be done with as less hiccups as possible.

The team

I had the pleasure to meet and to get to know everyone for the first time last week over our picnic and island vacation. Amidst Shaiful’s smooth ukulele streaming and munching Dov’s brilliant lamb shashlik, we chatted for hours like old friends.

While it may had been only my first two months here, it is almost like I have known everybody for a long time before.
Stampede team members are always up to no good – every conversation is filled with funny remarks and sarcastic retorts of which some we have compiled over in a tumblr called Things Stampede Team Says.

Joining Stampede has been such an amazing experience so far. I look forward for more exciting years to come so I could craft more and more stellar design works for the company.

The post The First Two Months appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.