Mom, I Got This!
A podcast with Stanford Women in Design
During my freshman year at Stanford, the COVID-19 Pandemic sent us all home. I had just discovered the d.School and felt overwhelmed and uncertain as I dove into a brand new field and tried to navigate my career journey from my bedroom. Originally, I had been interested in pursuing a degree in medicine, so the design industry’s nonlinear career path provided stark contrast for me. I discovered that most people’s career journeys were a collage of following their curiosity, inspiration from their role models and intervention from the world. Though as I listened to more and more of these stories, I felt there was something missing, something that young people interested in design wanted to know. As a student at the beginning of my career, I was curious not just about what values guided them to their success but how those values were developed. I pitched the idea to my team on Stanford Women in Design and it resonated with them. With this, “Mom, I Got This!” was born. Our goal was to uplift the stories of women who use a designers mindset in their careers and what the early stages of that journey looked like. We wanted to elevate the voices of female designers to empower other young women at the beginning of their design careers who may not see themselves in the field.
Beginning Development
Once we had the idea, we decided the best launch date would be at the beginning of Stanford’s fall quarter. That gave us six weeks to develop and produce the podcast. Luckily, we had an incredible team who supported the development and we were able to launch at the start of school. We collaborated with three different teams in Stanford Women in Design, coordinating and directing brand and marketing strategy, content creation and production.
For each episode, we did extensive research on our guest and then developed an interview sketch. We structured the interview like a story and centered it around beats, like in improv, these were moments that we had to hit, that gave our interview shape. We aimed to find the balance between approachable, casual conversation that follows a story thread and leads to unexpected discoveries and a structured interview that follows a script.
Interviewing
We had the pleasure of interviewing 10 high-profile industry guests from business, technology, venture capital and more, including Eventbrite CEO, Julia Hartz.
The Final Product
Overall, we acquired upwards of 1400 downloads across 10 episodes in two seasons. Once we finished season one, we reflected on the process and synthesized that information into some major take-aways. With these new learnings, we made changes that optimized our production strategy. This us led to double downloads per episode between season one and two and increase social media interaction by 40%.
