I plan, design, test, and build digital products at thoughtbot.
I enjoy working through complex problems and coming up with simple solutions. I use tools such as research, design thinking, design sprints, and jobs-to-be-done to help me best understand what a product is trying to solve. I ship early and iterate. I enjoy a well-made peanut butter and jelly sandwich, cut in two triangles.
Writing
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How We Use Trello for Product Design and Development
Our playbook touches upon how we use Trello for all sorts of tasks, from projects to hiring to sales – however, it doesn’t dive deeply into how we manage our boards for each project. Each of our project boards are broken down into 6 columns: Ideas / Discussion, Next up, Doing, Code Review, Acceptance, and Week of.
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Lets blow this fucker up, again
One of the goals for relaunching this site was to teach me a lesson in iteration and motivation. I wanted to see how badly I could push a redesign over two nights on a weekend and then see how much I could iterate on top of that. I’ve managed to keep up and build something that I am sort of proud of. Throughout that process though, the design time has taken away from what the original goal I had, to write more. So while visually it made me feel better about my online presence it didn’t accomplish what I wanted.
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Philly joins Boston and Montreal in hosting 2nd annual Baseball Hack Day
We want to create stronger ties between Philly’s technology and sports communities. That’s why Philly will be joining Boston and Montreal in hosting a Baseball Hack Day, a one-day event to encourage the development of baseball-related tech projects, partnerships and experiments. It kicks off March 28 at CityCoHo on 24th and Walnut.
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Launch when you aren’t ready
I launched my site knowing it was far from perfect. It wasn’t responsive. It didn’t display any particularly appealing animations. It was lacking polish in several places. Regardless of this knowledge, I still chose to launch.
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DIY Design Sprints
Before each design sprint that I lead, I formulate an initial plan in order to feel confident about the schedule going into the sprint. admit that this process is a bit haphazard. To frame my plan, I reflect back on prior sprints to analyze what went well and what needed improvement.
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Converting to Jobs Stories
We have used user stories as part of our design and development process for many years. You could find several mentions of them throughout our playbook. We used user stories to give designers and developers context to the problems that the user is having and give space for them to solve that problem while building the product.
Select Work
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Developer Portal
An internal application for a major pharmaceutical company. They had been hiring more and more developers and found that there was a vast amount of knowledge between all of them but many weren’t tapping into others expertise or knowledge or only using personal networks to tap into their fellow developers knowledge.
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Philly Startup Leaders
A redesign and rebrand for PSL, one of the largest communities of entrepreneurs, designers and developers in the Pjilly area. The goal for the site was to show the thriving startup community in Philly, to give people an idea of what is going on and what to pay attention to in the area.
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Character Growth Card
An application to help teachers grade students on their character skills rather than just their academic skills. This non-profit had been conducting this research and encouraging teachers to teach these skills.
Podcasts
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Tentative
A podcast that I regularly co-host with Reda Lemeden. We talk about product design, graphic design and front end development.
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Between Screens
“Good” Designer | Saying “NO!” | Design questions | Apprentices | Onboarding -
Giant Robots
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The Dirt: Kyle Fiedler on the Jobs to be Done Framework
Speaking
- 1871 — DIY Design Sprint Workshop
- Chicago HTML5 meet up — Rapid Prototyping for the Web
- Geekfes#t — DIY Design Sprints
- Sass Conf — Large Sass Panel
Side Projects
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Baseball Stadiums
One of my bucket list goals is to visit every baseball stadium. This is my way of keeping track of which ones I’ve been too and which I still need to visit.
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Baseball Card Generator
During Baseball Hack Day 2015 I worked with Bill Criswell to create a random baseball card genrator. It used baseball card photos baseball nicknames and was styled after baseball cards found in the 60’s and 70’s. We won Best Design for the day.
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Build Guild Philly
A monthly meetup that I co-host with Brandon Haslip. Build Guild is web folks drinking in a bar. No talks. No recruiters. If you ever want to grab a drink with me come to Build Guild.
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Refresh Philly
A monthly meetup that I co-host with Troy Finamore. We have some of the best and brightest web professionals in and around Philly to give talks so that we might learn from one another.
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Baseball Hack Day Philly
A free yearly event for designers and developers to work on a baseball project. In the hopes to win one of several prizes. The days goal is to bring people together around a love for baseball.
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Coded By Kids
Coded by Kids is an amazing program that teaches kids of all age ranges in Philly. I’m happy to be a Board Member.
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Remembeer
Project I’m doing during some of my spare time to teach myself programming and Rails.