Mariah Hay
Designer
Mariah Hay
Mariah now serves as Vice President of Product on the executive leadership team at Help Scout. In the past four years, Mariah has led the product-side integration of three acquired companies, growing her organization from 8 to nearly 40 cross-functional teams, challenging and inspiring each one to understand the daily life of the end-users, guiding the design of a human-centered product from the ground up.
In your own words, what is curiosity?
For me, curiosity is the very best part of life! It’s genuine interest in the world around you. It’s the endless quest of joyful exploration. It feeds the spark of wonder in life. It’s not merely consumption, it’s connecting a dot to your current collection of dots, or trying to arrange dots in a new way, or removing a dot and seeing what happens. It’s growth, change, and motion.
How has being curious impacted your life?
All the very best parts of my life exist because of curiosity. I was lucky to be raised by parents who themselves were curious. We had a dictionary in most rooms of the house so we could quickly look up meanings. We watched the news every night and talked about the world. We made things (It didn’t hurt that they were both teachers and artists), and experimented. And as I got older, they encouraged me to do the same in my education; follow paths that I found interesting and engaging. Explore things that lit up my brain. And work hard at things where curiosity was required. And today, I have the privilege of working in Software design and I get to be curious about what problems people need to have solved, and then figure out the best way to solve them.
When time in your life were you the most curious? What were you curious about?
That’s a hard question. I suppose the times in my life when I feel at my most curious are times when I am free to problem solve. The quest to understand and solve a good problem requires extreme curiosity. When I was in school I was curious about solving the problem of acquiring and applying knowledge, so I was the most curious about the fields of design, human sciences, and making. As I moved into my career I was curious about practicing and evolving my craft, and collaborating with others. Now I’m curious about how to build and lead companies that empower teams to be at their most curious, so people can tap into their own deep wells of potential to solve the hardest problems.