I’m Jonah Becker, VP of Design at Fitbit, and I’m Working on It.
In his two and a half years at Fitbit, Jonah Becker helped the company surpass (pun intended!) Industry giant Apple. As VP of Design, he oversees the UX and Industrial Design teams for Fitbit’s line of wearable health tracking devices. Prior to that, Becker spent fifteen years running the design studio One & Co., which HTC acquired in 2013. We asked him how he works.
Location: San Francisco
Current Office: VP of Design, Fitbit
One word that best describes how you work:
Current mobile device: Right now I’m trying to decide which phone to buy! I am currently switching between a couple of HTC phones and a Nextbit Robin (my friend / former business partner Scott Kroyle was head of design there)
Current computer: MacBook Pro 13-inch
First of all, tell me a little about your past and how you became who you are today.
My mom is a graphic designer and since childhood she worked at the CCA faculty in San Francisco, so I got to know all the design disciplines. Her home studio gave me many opportunities to play with all kinds of design tools, and I knew from a young age that I wanted to become a designer.
Before getting my industrial design degree from the CCA, I went to the University of California at Berkeley to pursue a broader liberal arts degree (philosophy) and play on a tennis team. I have spent most of my career building One & Co, a design agency based in San Francisco that has worked with brands ranging from Nike and Adidas to Microsoft and Amazon. In the end, my partners and I sold our business to HTC to create a design team that would help the company turn it into a consumer brand (and launch the world’s first Android phone).
In 2015, I left HTC and joined Fitbit, where I had a great opportunity to combine my professional background in technology and sports with my personal passion for health and fitness. I lead the Industrial Design, User Interface and User Experience Research teams to create products that help everyone in the world be healthier. I can’t imagine a better way to pass the time!
What apps, software or tools can’t you live without?
Although he may date me, I cannot live without a pen, whether on paper or on a blackboard. For a designer, thinking and visualization happen simultaneously, and over the years I’ve expanded this skill from sketching specific designs to visual thinking through design strategies, team structures, and many other tasks.
How is your workplace arranged?
I rarely sit at my desk these days, so this is a pretty straightforward arrangement. I have a height-adjustable desk with a monitor that I rarely use, and a closet where I keep some personal items (like my gym bag for my workouts at lunchtime … that’s Fitbit, of course!).
The rest of the design studio is where the “real” work takes place. We have dedicated premises where each program lives from the early stages of research / sketching to production, a CMF laboratory (color / material / finish) and a workshop with all the interesting prototyping tools. I spend most of my time reviewing work with my team in the project rooms. Or, of course, at meetings.
What’s your best time-saving shortcut or life hack?
Cycling to work! This means that I exercise for at least forty minutes every day, and it is much faster and less stressful than driving a car or public transportation.
What’s your favorite to-do list manager?
I use Google Keep on my phone for all my professional and personal affairs. I use it for everything from themes to lighting my one-on-one meetings with James (Fitbit CEO) to gifts for my wife and kids. However, all the ideas that come to my head before bed are first written down in my notebook because my bed is a place without a phone and my Fitbit takes care of all my sleep tracking and alarms.
What are some of the things you do best in everyday life? What’s your secret?
I’m good at finding simplicity in this noise, whether it’s cutting down on basic visual elements in a design to make it feel easy, or defining an efficient process for a complex organization.
What do you listen to while you work?
I definitely prefer silence when my job requires strategic thinking. I love background music in a design studio, and I definitely enjoy listening to music when I’m in a sketching storm with the designers on my team.
What are you reading now? Or what would you recommend?
I switch between reading for fun and reading for personal growth. In the first category, I just finished Sympathetic Viet Thanh Nguyen and Trevor Noah’s Crime Born . Although the books are very different, they provide an insight into the Vietnam War and Apartheid respectively, which is fresh for someone who grew up in the United States.
For personal growth, I recommend Working With Me by Barbara Annis and John Gray. The authors explore gender differences in the office environment, physiological and social causes, and strategies to address these differences. It gave me a new perspective on work, not to mention the inner life, where I am a single man with a wife and two daughters.
How do you replenish? What do you do when you want to forget about work?
Family time comes first. As for a hobby, playing the guitar gives me an instant relaxing and exciting feeling. Running, cycling and gymnastics are also important to me both physically and meditatively. I also do cyclocross and cross country running. I have a competitive streak that started early.
What’s your favorite side project?
I’m currently working on a slap guitar technique to get the funk feeling with the guitar.
What is your sleep pattern? Are you a night owl or get up early?
I am naturally more like an owl, but with my daughter who goes to school at 7:50 in the morning, and she needs to cook breakfast, pack school lunch and play sports from time to time, I started to get up early.
Who would you like to see answering these questions?
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
On a personal level, I asked my uncle for parenting advice when my first daughter was born, and he realized that to value your children as they are, not as you want them to be. Spot on.
From a professional perspective, when I was a partner at One & Co, a more experienced executive from another agency advised me to start acting like the business you want to be. It forces you to focus and step outside your comfort zone.