My steps to WorkStep: A story of learning to take risks

Welcome to our April edition of “My Steps to WorkStep.” Each month we feature a member of the WorkStep team and dive into their role and what led them to it, tips for applicants, and a fun fact about them.

This month we talked to Jason Metzgar, our Product Designer, who lives, works, and mountain bikes in Eagle Mountain, Utah. He shared how he came to love computers and technology, his path to designing, and how his personal relationships drew him to the WorkStep mission.

What is your role at WorkStep?

Product design / making our customer’s dreams come true. Basically to make sure that we’re helping build the right things. So the dreams come true part is really about listening to customers and hearing what those problem areas are and then coming up with solutions to solve those problems. And coming up with solutions that should be easy enough for everyone in a broad audience to understand, and hopefully make it pretty at the same time.

What is your typical workday like?

I spend a lot of time in design tools working and sifting through possible solutions and wireframes. But it’s also a lot of stakeholder and customer interviews, getting to know who our users are, not just the problems that they have, but what their day-to-day is and how we can make that a little bit better.

What was your path to this role like?

The path that brought me is probably similar to a lot of people in that it was not a straight line. I started my career in non-profit work, and often in those jobs you wear lots of different hats. So I was the tech guy, the marketing guy, and the design guy – really the everything guy. It just happened that I kind of gravitated towards design and marketing.

Towards the end of that career I went back to school to get another degree, and I thought internet marketing is what I would want to do. I graduated Valedictorian from school, but I think most of it had to do with the fact that I spent ungodly amounts of time on the actual presentation of all my work, not necessarily the content of all the work. I liked marketing, and all the number crunching I found interesting, but I didn’t enjoy doing it. I really liked working on the presentation side.

While I went back to school I was doing Customer Success with software training, so I’d travel around and teach people how to use the software. So that taught me a lot of empathy, and I was able to combine that with some of my design skills as well as some marketing. It worked out that the company I was doing Customer Success for had an opening on their design team and I applied. I didn’t get it the first time, but I applied again and got it the second time.

How did I land at WorkStep? It was really two different things. One was a recommendation from someone that was excited about the company already, so that was part of it. And then another one is that both my wife and my best friend are frontline workers.

We’ve always talked about how ridiculous my tech jobs are compared to their jobs, and the different treatment. We talked about how there’s got to be some sort of change in the industry at some point that values the forklift operators and the people that are on the line in the same way that people who sit at a desk are valued. I was excited that WorkStep might have a place in that conversation.

Do you have any tips for aspiring WorkSteppers?

I think the biggest thing is to focus on the opportunity here, in terms of the impact we can have on the market or the industry as a whole. That’s the thing that excites me. We’re at the very beginning of what WorkStep is doing, helping people find jobs and also retaining their workforce. But we’re just at the beginning, and what we’re doing seems like it’s coming together to really both create a new need and solve for a need. I see what we’re doing at WorkStep, there’s so much it can evolve moving forward.

So I think the exciting part is being part of those solutions, not just stepping into a company that is set in their ways, we’re doing something new and we’re asking new questions all the time like, “Is what we’re doing the right thing? Is there more to do?” and kinda coming up with new ideas. So that’s what I like with what we’re doing here, and like I said before, just that opportunity to really change the perspective of the industrial workforce.

What is something people may not know about you?

Here’s one interesting thing: my mother was very much a gypsy. It’s interesting to work in technology, because we didn’t have electricity or any of that until I was probably close to junior high. We were very disconnected with the tech world in general, so once I had access to some early computers it was like, ‘Oh my goodness this is revolutionary! This is so cool.’ So I think that’s something that got me interested in computers.

What advice would you give to your past self?

That’s easy. Don’t be afraid to fail at things.

That’s probably something I still have to remind myself about. But one of the privileges we have in tech is the ability to try things with low risk, because we’re dealing with ones and zeros in terms of technology. But every time we try something we learn more, and so learning from all those mistakes or all those little failures I think really helps catapult.

And that was not my perspective when I was younger. I always wanted to be somewhat perfect, or do the right things all the time and was just so nervous about people thinking, ‘Oh, he doesn’t have what it takes,’ or ‘He doesn’t know what he’s doing.’ The truth is I didn’t know what I was doing and I was so afraid to let people know that. So if I could just go back and be a little more comfortable in my own skin, learn from mistakes, and know that’s part of the process, that would have been awesome.

What do you enjoy the most about being a WorkStepper?

What I enjoy most is the team that I’m on and the people that I’m working with. The team is just excellent.  There’s a lot of pressure with me being the only designer right now, in terms of both creating stuff that looks good, but also functions well. But I really don’t feel as much of that pressure since there are so many creative people that are not only knowledgeable in the area that they’re working in, like developers that are great at developing, but also have some sense of what good design is, what would work well, and what our customers need. And they’re just good humans, and I like to work with good humans.