A Day in the Life of Kelby Hawn, Dolly Co-Founder & Sr. Product Designer

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In our Day in the Life series, we introduce you to a member of the Dolly team and give you a peek into what it’s like to work for Dolly.

Name: Kelby Hawn

Title: Co-Founder & Sr. Product Designer

How long have you been working at Dolly? Since the beginning! About four years.

What do you do here at Dolly? I’m the system owner for dolly.com which I’ve designed (and redesigned a few times!) and developed since we first launched. I’m primarily a member of the Product Team, where I design the user interfaces for our iOS app, Android app, and booking website, book.dolly.com. In addition to product, I also work with the marketing and business development teams to provide any design assets they need for emails, social posts, in-store merchandising materials, and more.

What’s your favorite thing about working at Dolly? The team! I know this sounds cliche, but I love our team so much and look forward to seeing everyone each day. We’re working on some exciting stuff for the new year!

Any fun facts about yourself that you’d like to share? I’m obsessed with the Golden Girls. I’m definitely a Dorothy, but aspire to become a Sophia.

Kelby’s Day in the Life

6:00AM

Can you spot Bianca?

I woke up today around 5:45 and fed my cat, Bianca. After she’s taken care of, I made my bed and ate breakfast while checking personal email and reading NPR. Then I meditated for a few minutes and did a quick yoga routine on Gaia.com before getting ready for work. I always listen to a podcast while I’m getting ready and today it was an episode of 2 Dope Queens.

7:00AM

I took the bus downtown to the office and arrived around 7:45.

8:00AM

Each morning when I get in I make a cup of jasmine green tea in my Creative Mornings mug. Then I check my work email and Slack to catch up on anything that came up in the night and start getting to work on my to-do list.

9:00AM

Today I have some sprint cards to work on. Our team works in one to two week sprints where we create new features, fix bugs, and support other teams. One fun thing I’m doing is styling a new feature on book.dolly.com. My absolute favorite thing is CSS and SASS so I boot up the terminal and Coda and get cracking! At 9:45 the Product Team meets for our daily standup meeting where we catch up on what everyone is doing.

10:00AM

After the standup meeting I had some parmesan Goldfish crackers (my favorite snack!) for my morning snack and got back to coding.

11:00AM

Switched from coding to working on an email for marketing.

12:00PM

It’s pizza lunch time! Every Friday we get pizza, pasta, and salad delivered to the office and everyone eats together in the kitchen. There is usually puzzling involved too, and this week we are working on a Wonder Woman puzzle (we are big fans of Wonder Woman at Dolly!).

1:00PM

Made more progress on the marketing email.

2:00PM

We had our quarterly all hands meeting yesterday to kick off 2018. During those meetings everyone is given note cards to write any questions they may have. Today we had our follow-up meeting where the leadership team answers everyone’s questions. These Q&A sessions are great because anyone on the team can ask anything, and it’s good to get some clarity on where we’re headed.

3:00PM

Finished up the marketing email after the meeting and went back to coding book.dolly.com.

4:00PM

I like to read articles or newsletters in the afternoon to take a mental break so I took about 15 mins to do that and catch up on more emails. Then I helped Clare, our UX Designer, clean out the product room to prepare for the new year. We’ll use the newly empty walls to print out the most up to date complete Dolly process app screens (booking a Dolly through having a Helper finish it) so anyone can go in there and see the complete flow.

5:00PM

Checked everything off my to-do list for today and headed home to feed Bianca and grab a bite to eat before heading out to our 2018 kickoff party at Navy Strength.

11:00PM

I got home from the party around 11pm. The food was awesome, my drink of choice was water, and we had macarons from Lady Yum for dessert (which are an office favorite—thanks Casey!). This ends my Day in the Life, and now I’m off to bed!  

Interested in joining the Dolly team? We’re hiring!