Mar 24, 2022

Making the Switch from Agency to In-House

About this video

Description

Panelists are Eugene Aquiler, Sudar Ganes and Cortney Ward

*This webinar is sponsored by Yelp*

Are you currently at an agency and wondering what working in-house is like, specifically at a tech company? Hear from three Yelp panelists at various stages of their careers who have made the jump. We’ll talk about the pros and cons of both types of work, and how to make the switch yourself.

Moderator:

Josh Mahoney, Head of Consumer Design at Yelp

Josh is the Head of Consumer Design at Yelp. He leads a team of thirty designers that are responsible for helping people connect with great local businesses and experience the best of their neighbourhood. Josh also led Yelp's modernization effort to redesign the core product suite and started the Design Systems team. He began his Yelp career as a product manager at Yelp Eat24, and still has his burrito koozie to prove it. Before Yelp, Josh was on Google's travel team and before that led product and design teams at Lonely Planet. In an even earlier life, he was a TV director (fun fact!) and is always interested in anything that combines his love of solving problems for people, creating engaging experiences and traveling to / eating at exotic places.

Panelists

Cortney Ward, Principal Product Designer

Cortney is a principal product designer at Yelp, primarily focused on consumer services. She helps people connect with professionals to enhance the places they live, work and play. Cortney has played a key role in creating Yelp’s design principles, advocating for adoption and usage of the Cookbook (Yelp’s design system), and improving personalization within the product. Cortney draws from many years of agency experience and has designed for companies such as Fantasy Interactive, Publicis, Razorfish and McGarry Bowen to name a few. Outside of work, Cortney can be found immersed in her own world, split between sci-fi fantasy and chasing her one year old.

Eugene Aquiler, Product Designer - Core Experience

Eugene is a product designer at Yelp and works on the Consumer team focusing on the Core Experience side of the product. Eugene first joined Yelp in 2019 as a graphic designer onYelp’s Marketing team, working on everything from high-level email targeting campaigns and performance marketing ads, to Demand Generation campaigns. Eugene is going into his fifth month as a product designer and it has been everything and more than he expected when he transitioned roles. Eugene graduated from design school in 2015 with a Bachelor of Science in Graphic & Web Design and worked at a startup for four years on the marketing team. Outside of work, Eugene enjoys spending time with family in the SF Bay Area and the Philippines, keeping up with his fitness and doing freelance photography/social media work for a local auto detailing specialist shop in San Francisco.

Sudar Ganes, Senior Product Designer - Restaurants

Sudar is a "T-Shaped" product and user experience designer with a passion for connecting with people, solving complex business problems, and creating compelling digital products. He has a Master’s Degree in Digital Experience Innovation from the University of Waterloo. The experiences he’s had throughout his design journey have allowed him to grow his skills as a UX practitioner and grow as a person. These experiences include having worked for companies across several industries, including a few startups (one of which was acquired by SurveyMonkey), enterprises of different sizes, and consulting agencies. In this pursuit, Sudar feels fortunate to have worked on everything from marketing websites, e-commerce platforms, conversational interfaces, as well as helped build internal enterprise SasS tools for various tech giants in Silicon Valley.