Getting Started
Hey there 👋, my name is Alex Siclari. I am a dad of four, a dog enthusiast, and a designer living in Buffalo, NY. Growing up I loved some of your typical stuff, video games, sports, family, and wolves. My passion for wolves started after I had a pen pal from the Alaskan Iditarod write to me while in 5th grade. That turned into my love for Huskies because it felt like I was able to get a wolf. With my grandmother seeing my passion, she helped me find my creative side by tracing wolves from an encyclopedia. She continued to inspire me to tap into my creative side while going to high-school where I made clay sculptures of football players. She was able to pull something out of me that I never knew that I had. I also learned so much from her, she taught me that you're never to old to learn something new. She taught herself how to paint at the young age of 62 and I have multiple paintings of hers hanging in my house. After going to college for Sports Management, I realized that my passion for design was greater then my passion for sports and I decided it was time to make a career switch into design.
Family Life
My family has been my reason why for the past 11 years of my career. After getting married to my wife, we started our family with our first furry baby Bandit. He was everything that I could ever want in a dog, loyal, loveable, and the cutest sky blue eyes. After having Bandit around for a couple of years my wife and I decided it was time to start our human family. We have been blessed with four loving, crazy, and energetic children. My family is the reason why I've pushed myself to grow as a designer and a dad. I have been lucky enough to provide a life for them that I always wanted.
Career
Being from Buffalo, there is this mentality that we are always the forgotten area in New York. Growing up with that mentality that we are the little guys or the overlooked area of New York, I wanted to start my career by helping the smaller to medium-sized companies compete against larger corporate companies. I would sit with these business owners to understand why they had started a business and what made them unique to the area and different from big corporations. Learning from my grandma, I wanted to teach them how to understand search engine traffic data, content marketing, and landing page designs that could help them compete against large-scale companies on the web. While working remotely, I moved to Orlando, Florida, to spread my wings and get into more product-focused design and building software to solve problems. While in Orlando, I was drawn to work with DeCarlos and the team at Bandbasher. Their co-founders' passion for wanting to help the independent artist spoke to me with wanting to help the little guy win. This was my first experience working in an actual startup environment being the third employee. While working there, I understood how you could take stories and research to impact how a product is made.
Learning Process
With learning so much about what it takes to build and grow a startup, I looked for my next adventure to help with one of the biggest problems I faced while working for a small startup, structure. As much as I loved the ability to flex and change on the fly within a startup, I wanted to have a proper product cycle with sprint planning, project managers, and understand how processes can impact an iterative approach for products, and have a work-life balance. I landed at another great company, Banno, where I joined a much larger team of 165 plus product team members with formal sprint processes and project management. I learned what it took to be a team member of a design team and not a team of one or two designers being scrappy to figure out how to solve problems. I learned a lot about corporate culture and led a super impactful product initiative with the redesign of their native mobile and web SaaS solution. Sticking with the theme of impacting and helping the little guy win, Banno helped small to medium-sized banks and credit unions compete against the large corporate financial institutions. While working at Banno, I started to miss that scrappy startup feel that came with my other work experience. With that, I wanted to head back in that direction.
My Biggest Growth Stage
Headway is a product development agency that helps startups, medium-sized, and large enterprise clients develop products and ideas to meet product-market fit and keep them there. I learned so much while I was there about research, product-market fit, fast-moving iterative processes, design systems, Figma, and how to work on small scrum teams. They helped build my confidence with sharing ideas with stakeholders and how to defend my design decisions with research instead of assumptions. I learned how to help grow a design team, mentor other designers, improve processes, and impact small startups and large enterprise companies at the most crucial time in the world while facing a pandemic. They should me what it is like to work so closely with developers, sprint planning processes, and how to adapt based on the client's need. Billy Sweetman, the Head of Design at Headway, impacted me so much. He believed in my abilities and let me shine while I was there. I learned so much that has impacted my growth as a designer, a leader, and a team member.
What I'm Up to now
As I continue to grow as a designer, I have found a passion for helping designers grow in their craft, working on processes to help design teams and product teams grow, building and scaling design systems, and helping solve problems with research and data. Away from the screen, I love hanging out with my four kids dancing around to Disney songs, finger painting with them, hiking, going to sporting events (pre and hopefully post covid), golfing when we are not covered in snow, and traveling to places that I have lived in the past (Nashville and Florida). I'm always willing to listen and see what adventure may be next for my career, so if you'd like, you can reach out to me at hello@alexsiclari.com.
