Tech Fleet

When you see the new Tech Fleet website on the horizon and you can't believe it: The new website is months in the making and truly a community contributed effort. We've done lots of research, information architecture, interaction design, branding, UX writing, and UI magic to make this happen as a community! Learn about how Tech Fleet works, who we are as an organization, how to partner with our community, and how to get in touch. Get quick access to things like our newsletter, user guide, and online community. Link in the comments! #techfleetworks #apprenticeships #community #web3

Looking for your first paying gig? Ready to hustle? Tech Fleet got you 🏃♀️ Tech Fleet's upcoming Getting Real UX Experience Masterclass is taught by Maigen Thomas, founder of Level 11 Technology. It helps early-career designers get industry-recognized experience by delivering real value to small businesses through freelance work! This masterclass teaches an end-to-end process for: - How to find a business you can bring value to at your current skill level - How to approach the business and pitch your services - How to sell a low-cost, high-value website evaluation  - How to evaluate a website to identify accessibility vulnerabilities and usability issues - How to make suggestions for improvement that will impact business metrics - How to prepare a slide deck and report covering your recommendations - How to deliver a stress-free stakeholder presentation - How to create a compelling case study for your portfolio Check out the syllabus and register through the link in the comments!

How many researchers does it take to build an objective experiment? 🤔 ... One! Just one! But only if you do it right! Here are some tips: 1. Agree to the goals of research before you build your experiment. Talk to your stakeholders, team mates, clients, and managers to ensure everyone adds their perspective into the things that are worth testing. Include everyone's perspectives in the test so that you can come back with meaningful results that matter to those around you. 2. Create a full research plan. You should have background, goals, research questions, participants, test method, materials, and measurements. This helps align you and your team as you proceed with your research. Review it with clients to ensure they are bought in with the plans and goals too! 3. Turn observations into measurements. Don't just rely on what people say in testing: capture their actions and reactions. You can do more than just tracking successful tasks! You can collect patterns with the actions you observe, where users make mistakes, what they think the right answer is, and more. This data helps you tell a compelling story about the experience as a whole. You'll have much more well-rounded results about the effectiveness of the interface. 4. If you're testing two interfaces, be careful which order you show people the interfaces. If you show both interfaces to the same person in a test, then you should rotate the order in which users see them in each test. You really don't know if users perform better in one interface because they saw the other interface before. If this happens, your results are biased! To avoid this you should rotate the order of the first interface in each test. You can learn how to make the best evaluative UX experiments without bias in the Prototype Testing and Usability Testing Masterclass! Kicking off for 4 weeks starting August 19th! Tech Fleet members can register for only $50.00. Get 8 hours of live instruction, real practical projects, and course content for life! Let's go scientists! 🧠 🔬 Register through the syllabus. Find it in the link provided in the comments.

Tech Fleet's thrilled to share that we’re supporting our friends Baddies in Tech for their 2nd annual BaddieCon! Happening in NYC’s Civic Hall August 15-18. The theme of the conference is “Transform to Thrive,” where industry experts will be sharing insights on strategies for navigating tech’s fast changing landscape, in light of the AI revolution and layoffs. BaddieCon will help you #TransformToThrive in your tech career with: 🎤 20+ Inspiring panels, keynotes and workshops 👯 Activity packed networking opportunities 💼 Career Expo & Live Job Interviews 🗣️ FREE Career coaching & Mentorship Use the promo code TF15 to get 15% OFF your ticket through the link in the comments! #BaddieCon2024 #BaddiesInTech #TechBaddies #WOCinTech #DiversityInTech

Happy 4th Birthday Tech Fleet! Wow, they grow up so fast 🎂 🎉 🙀 It was 4 years ago on this day that a revolution began to create fair access to tech careers. It started with a call to action on LinkedIn and a small online community in Slack. Since then, over 10,000 Slack members have helped push the mission forward and succeed together. Tech Fleet's Guilds have distributed the power and ownership to self-govern the community. Over 500 people have had a positive Tech career outcome after Tech Fleet training. Over 60 project phases have completed, and over 10 masterclass cohorts have launched. All in the name of breaking the exclusion in the industry. We've helped people from all walks of life all over the world. And Tech Fleet's only just begun. As a community-driven organization, the future is as bright as our initiative to make change in the world. We're here for it! Join the community today. Get involved in your own and others' future with peer learning. Join the managed chaos in real, client-facing, cross-functional Agile team training. #techfleetworks #agileux #apprenticeships #community

Join Tech Fleet's email newsletter to catch the latest news! 👀 Hear about: 1. New projects to apply to 2. New masterclasses to join 3. Nonprofit updates 2. Community Guild updates 5. Funny jokes Signup through the link in the comments! #apprenticeship #ux #productmanagement #community

Join Tech Fleet and Career Coach for Designers for the Portfolio and Interview Prep Masterclass kicking off next week! Learn how to tell your story in portfolios and interviews to put your best professional foot forward in Tech! Register through syllabus withing the link in the comments.

Not all leaders are alike, but some are more effective at leading Agile teams 👀 here are 4 Agile Principles to follow: 1. Self-organization Teams must be empowered to get together and decide how they work together in order to thrive with Agile processes. No one outside the team, not their manager, not the stakeholder, not the client, should tell them what to do and how to do it. The team decides. 2. Iterative Delivery Teams should deliver usable functionality early and often in order to receive feedback about their direction. This allows a self-organized team to form judgments about when to change their direction, and judge whether they are on the right track. 3. Servant Leadership "Servant" is an adjective, not a noun! Being servant to others on the team means prioritizing others' growth over your own, and supporting success with your peers. Servant leaders remove their ego and increase their active listening skills to the max. Everyone on a self-organized team should be a servant leader: UX designers, developers, interns, and bosses alike. 4. Psychological Safety Self-organized teams need to provide the room for individuals to speak freely, disagree, be included, and bring up concerns that might change the vision or direction. Without this, self-organized teams may not progress as much, and may be hindered in their delivery. Together, these four principles provide a foundation to mature an Agile team in the world. Want to learn how to master Agile leadership principles? Join Tech Fleet in the FREE Servant Leadership Masterclass cohort kicking off the week of July 8th for 2 weeks. See the full syllabus and sign up through the link in the comments! Let's go future Agile leaders!

If you write user stories, be careful. Sometimes they get de-prioritized and the work you plan never happens 😬 Here's how to avoid this: 1. Know Your Audience's goals: Always understand the audience you are writing for, and their perspective of the current state of the world. Understand the problems they experience and how they solve the problems today, even without a tool. Without this understanding you will not be able to describe the needs! 2. Communicate the goal, don't communicate the solution: It's common for people writing user stories to describe the solution that someone asked for instead of describing the outcome someone wants to achieve. Always describe the goal because the experts are going to figure out how to build the best solution. If you describe a solution, you're limiting the people doing work to think only in terms of your proposed solution, instead of solving the right problem and solving the problem correctly. 3. Always sell others on why the work is worth building: User stories should always have an "Audience" (As a ______), a "Goal" (I want to ______), and a "Why" (So that _____). They especially need the "So that" part! Don't just tell the world what users want, tell them why! UX is often an act of persuasion and you must be able to pitch features as if they are at risk of not being chosen by product owners. If they are too complex, and don't bring value, product teams may not plan them for sprints or releases. 4. User story goals should describe the scenarios that users face leading to problems: Problems are situational and user stories should focus on a single situation that people face. Doing this helps the person building the solution focus on the scenario and solve the problem in the correct way to maximize value in the delivery. 5. Always write one user goal per user story: Be careful how large you make your intended work. By describing several goals, you could be describing work that will take too long to deliver, and won't be able to be done in one Agile iteration. Writing one user goal helps ensure that you're able to create stories that are scoped for quick delivery. You can write multiple user stories that repeat a goal and showcase different pieces of value for different audiences. 6. NEVER use jargon in user stories: Help others who are viewing the user story "walk a mile in a person's shoes" by speaking in the language THEY use. This means you don't write any jargon that may be associated with the product you're delivering. Want to learn more? Tech Fleet founder is giving a free talk on adplist.org on June 26th @1p PST / 4p EDT / 9p UTC in advance of the Tech Fleet Product Requirements Masterclass (July 22nd @5p PST). Get some deep knowledge about deliverables in the Agile requirements lifecycle. RSVP for the ADPList talk on June 26th and register for the class starting July 22nd through the links in the comments! Get a special discount to the class if you come to the talk!

How do you position yourself as the best candidate for tech roles? 🤔 How do you stand out in this crazy job market? 🙉 We got you. Career coach master Steven Steiner from Career Coach for Designers hosts the next 5-week Portfolio and Interview Prep Masterclass in Tech Fleet to help students prepare after project-based work to stand out across UX and product roles! Starting the week of June 24th! Outcomes: 1. Be clear on what you want next in your career journey 2. Learn the 4 parts every hiring manager considers to determine your value 3. Activities to help you develop the 4 parts that should attract what you want next 4. Considerations for how to showcase your value in your portfolio for what you want next 5. Methods for how to prepare for interviews with your network and potential employers  Check out the syllabus and registration in the link in the comments!