Great design gives Fonz life. Prior to joining Netflix, he led a design team at Coursera – the world’s leading online educational platform. As a founder and growth designer, he’s led product design at two startups and worked with some of the world’s biggest companies. As a leader, Fonz focuses on balancing experience with spontaneity and intense creativity with discipline and methodology of production.
His undergraduate career began at the HBCU Morehouse College and ended with his earning a B.S in Computer Science from Georgia State University. With no formal education in design, he is an advocate for the self-taught designer. Additionally, he mentors design students through Cascade SF, California College of the Arts, and General Assembly’s UX Design Bootcamp.
Fonz’s passion is creating effective and successful experiences that engage, inspire and attract customers. He was a cohort member at First Round Capital’s Founding Designer Track and is currently a cohort member at Floodgate Fund and a Design advisor for Signal Fire. His talent and enthusiasm are well-respected throughout the Design industry and he has been invited to speak for several professional tech audiences, including Afrotech, DesignxUs, UC Berkeley, and UC Davis.
Past Talks
17 June 2021
It is often a juggling act to transfer knowledge throughout an expanding team while at the same time empowering new employees to incorporate their own experience. What do you need to do in order to make individuals, teams and products successful? Can both culture and process be intertwined to increase collaboration in teams? Is there a formula to build an efficient team? Is there a way where you can ensure teams are motivated, efficient and continue to ship great products?
In this interactive session, our speakers will talk through best practices that have worked for their businesses when building great and happy teams.
Can you have it all?
16 June 2021
One of the benefits of cross functional teams is that everyone starts together so they have a deep understanding of the space. This works easily for a small team, but what happens when you try to translate that within a large rapidly scaling organisation such as Netflix?
In this session, Fonz will share his template for success building out design teams at both startups and enterprises. From a design perspective he will share how you can improve:
- Getting the "new team" up to speed fast: Transfer knowledge in the best way as they join.
- Facilitating new people to implement great ideas early while still lacking full product knowledge
Lead Product Designer, Global Conversion