When I first moved to San Francisco and started my job search, I began to feel that there wasn’t much out there that would allow me to use my full skill set from design thinking to visual design, yet still learn and grow. So when I heard about the opportunity for a three month internship at Cerebro Data, that would allow me to practice design thinking and user research, I was intrigued.
The interview process
Projects I got to work on
During my three month internship I had the opportunity to work on several projects at Cerebro including:
- Scoping and running a large empathy user research project: creating, testing and iterating on a discussion guide, recruiting participants, helping design and run user research workshops with one of our customers, unpacking insights and presenting those insights to the team.
- Designing marketing collateral and updating some of visual design for the company (e.g branding, style guides, layouts)
- Doing the visual design for our pitch deck and various other presentations
Learning a new domain
Lesson 1: Don’t be afraid to ask
Navigating ambiguity
Lesson 2: Be flexible, let go of perfection and just do
Getting comfortable with (or at least accepting!) being uncomfortable
Lesson 3: The answers you get are only as good as the questions you ask
My internship allowed me to interact with, or think about, several different stakeholders: founders, employees, customers, users, investors. Being well prepared for meetings, critiques and workshops resulted in much better outcomes and understanding. People are busy (especially at a startup!), and they will respond to the work you put in. Furthermore I learned how important visualizing early can be a focal point and facilitate a conversation.
We are currently busy designing and building a great data product and encounter many interesting challenges/projects on a daily basis. If, like us, you enjoy solving interesting problems, drop us a line at jobs@cerebrodata.com or feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if you have any more questions 🙂