In terms of managing down, I want to be sure that people are on top of their annual goals, or if a goal seems too ambitious, to break it down into the doing parts. In terms of managing up, our head of R&D is extremely busy, and it is important to have done as much work as possible on a problem before passing it up the chain. The question should be specific and not able to be answered by someone else.

Being able to understand and prioritize the pain points a user experiences with a process or system is central to design. Healthcare and design are both highly empathetic fields because they are both in service of people.

We bring our individual 'work-in-progress' projects to a weekly design team so we can get impartial feedback from teammates to help improve what we are putting together. It helps to surface and correct problems before a client sees it or it goes to the engineering team for a build.

I communicate daily - whether it's writing a social media post, reaching out to a reporter about a story they might be interested, and my job itself involves communication in writing a wide range of articles for a broad audience.