May 19, 2022
A Day In the Life with Product Designer, Madeline Horvath
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Welcome to the “Day in the Life” blog series. Here we will feature interviews with Swimlaners to learn more about their experience. This series will give you a preview of Swimlane, our culture, and the people who keep us going.
Hi, I’m Kate Hasz. I currently live in Denver, CO – moved here after finishing college at Towson University in Baltimore, MD. My family consists of my husband Ben, my 2-year-old son Oberyn, and our dogs Ponyo and Soz.
How long have you been with Swimlane?
Since August 2021. Prior to that, I worked as a Design Consultant at KPMG, working across many industries such as: accounting and finance, change management, oil and gas, and automotive.
What does your job entail?
My role as a Product Designer at Swimlane focuses both on user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design within our product. I work closely with the product and engineering teams to continuously evolve our product by designing new features for our users. The challenge we face as designers in the automation space is providing power and value while maintaining usability and accessibility for all our users. We are the constant voice for our users ensuring that whatever is being worked on has their needs in mind. A day in my life might include rapid design and prototyping, reviewing feature designs with teams across Swimlane, and testing them with stakeholders for continuous improvement.
What do you enjoy most about working at Swimlane?
I work with all the smartest people in tech! Working at Swimlane provides daily mentoring and learning opportunities from coworkers who are eager to share insights around their approaches to tackling our complex problems. While I’ve never been more challenged in my career, I’m also growing as a designer and learning to see things differently on a daily basis.
What excites you most about your work?
Seeing my designs become reality and also discovering what our customers think of that new reality. My work often starts with an idea or user need. Through collaboration and continual iteration, these ideas become fully functioning features in our product. We also ensure that our new features are tested with customers to ensure our designs are usable, enjoyable, and provide value.
What do you like to do when you aren’t working?
I live your standard Colorado lifestyle – hiking, camping, and skiing. I also enjoy painting in my free time. I mostly work with oil paintings doing Colorado landscapes or fun animal paintings for my toddler.
What’s a fun fact about you many people may not know?
I play the harmonica! Not very well, but I’ve been taking lessons for a few years and I find it really fun. I’ve even done a few open mic nights.
Your motto or personal mantra:
Working with the smartest people can often leave you feeling inadequate or with a case of imposter syndrome. When this happens, I remind myself that you’re as smart and capable as anyone else, they usually just have more context than you. Figure out what questions to ask and who to ask them of and you’ll quickly be the smartest person in the room as well.
Three words that best describe you:
According to my closest friends and family, my superlatives are: the constant dreamer, the creative thinker, and the risk-taker. Not sure if I agree with the risk-taker part but apparently I come off that way.
What Swimlane core value resonates with you the most?
It would have to be “Happy Innovators”. Working within the automation and security market space, and with a product as powerful as Swimlane, provides many challenges as a designer. But they are exciting challenges that we see an impact from immediately. Our design team is constantly innovating on how we work as designers and the features we design. We have a great time doing it, you could absolutely say we are happy innovators.
Life in the Swimlane
Swimlane is a rapidly growing, innovative startup in the Denver metro area with a passionate team focused on improving the lives of security practitioners through security automation and orchestration. We’re always looking for dedicated, ambitious problem solvers who thrive in a fast-paced work environment to join our team.
