Product Design @ Datadog
Internship - Summer 2022
Overview
Datadog is a cloud-based monitoring and observability platform that provides real-time insights into infrastructure, logs, and application performance. Our products help businesses secure their systems, proactively avoid downtime, and ensure that their users are getting the best UX. I was their first intern on the platform product design team, kicking off Datadog’s product design internship program.
Projects
During my internship, I worked on Application Performance Monitoring (APM). For my first project, I spearheaded the redesign of a currently NDA feature present across all Datadog products. I also led the implementation process in conjunction with our design systems team and worked directly with our front-end engineers for the handoff process and to discuss the feature’s interactivity and edge cases.
For the second half of my internship, I worked on Database Monitoring (DBM), which provides users an overview of their database’s health and performance in one single place. I was the primary designer for another NDA feature that has since launched and was recently demoed to customers at DASH 2022 and AWS re:Invent 2022. While creating the designs, I focused on initiating frequent and intentional syncs with my team’s engineers, product manager, team lead, and other leadership stakeholders to push for fast and meaningful iterations.
Feedback
On top of constantly iterating and improving on my designs with frequent feedback cycles with my product’s team, I created several design review documents that were sent out to the larger product design team as well as leadership for further feedback on my designs.
As I honed my technical and soft skills as a designer this summer, I was also very much challenged and encouraged to advocate for design in every space. While past internships taught me about the importance of communication as a designer, I came out of this one finding joy in spearheading conversations and better navigating feedback cycles to ensure that design will never be a blocker in any project.
Demoing at the AWS Summit
I had the opportunity of being a demoer at the AWS Summit New York 2022 this summer, and it was a packed day of demoing the Datadog product to summit attendees. As I spoke and interacted with so many people throughout the summit, I recognized just how much I love interacting with real users. As a designer, I am most driven by my passion to help simplify and improve people’s everyday experiences.
Demoing to ~90 attendees, I answered product questions and developed a crucial perspective of our DevOps user experience.
Our team of demoers and staff! I was one of two undergraduate interns demoing and learned so much through my experience.
🖋 Interested in exploring more of my work? Check this out.