Hannah Donovan: Structured Serendipity

We've all heard the saying that people don't plan to fail they fail to plan. Well, the expression is true, especially for creatives looking to spark innovate ideas.

Creativity requires unstructured, structured time, which means we need to plan times to be unstructured in our days, or we'll get swallowed up by our calendars. Think of this as structured serendipity.

Hannah Donovan knows how crucial structured serendipity is for creative work.

Hannah is a product & design leader in the tech industry. She creates consumer tools & experiences for self-expression, with a focus on collaborating with machine learning.

Han is currently director of product at VSCO, a photo and video editing platform with a focus on creative wellbeing. VSCO acquired Han’s company Trash, an AI video editing app at the end of 2020. Han founded Trash in 2017 and raised capital from top tier VCs.

Before that, she was the General Manager at Twitter-owned Vine; led the team and product at Expa-backed music startup Drip (acquired by Kickstarter); was VP Design at Ripcord (a product incubator funded by MTV); co-founded the song-sharing service This Is My Jam while leading R&D design for The Echo Nest (acquired by Spotify) and was part of the original leadership team at early music discovery service Last.fm (acquired by CBS for $270M) where she led design and PM’d many features to market.

Han co-hosts a podcast called ‘It Just Got Real’ for creative women in business, and she’s spoken at conferences worldwide including TEDx NYU, and lectured at top universities including Imperial College London, Princeton, Parsons, and as visiting faculty at Cornell Tech. Her work has been featured by media such as the Guardian, the New York Times, Forbes, Variety, and the Today Show.

Han is passionate about changing the ratio in tech for under-represented people. She’s also a startup advisor and has mentored through programs including Google's 30 Weeks, First Round Capital's Product Program.

She also writes a newsletter called ‘Let Go and Haul’ about building consumer products for self-expression. You can find her on Twitter/Instagram @han or at hannahdonovan.com

In this episode, Hannah dives deep into her creative process and the importance of thanking yourself.

Listen to this episode and learn about:

• Hannah giving credit and thanks to herself (3:51)
• Creative expression for rest and reflection (7:21)
• Structured serendipity (11:03)
• Stopping the cycle of being busy (19:29)
• Action creating motivation (25:12)
• Appreciating dark, cloudy moments (27:46)
• Unlearning to spark creativity (34:59)
• Hannah's message to herself (41:05)

Links

• Connect with Hannah on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannahdonovan/
• Hannah’s Website - hannahdonovan.com