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Building design in a fast-growth startup

Wouldn’t it be great if you could search the internet and get all the information you need to build design teams? I tried, but most of the shared knowledge is either for individual contributors or require that I’m in a stable environment for complex processes.

I thought it would be great to write about my learnings in building design for startups. This page is my own professional diary, disguised as a portfolio piece. :)

 

MY LEADERSHIP STYLE

A long time ago, I thought the only kind of great design leader was the one who gets out of people’s way. After I started leading teams (first at Radius, then Earnin), I’ve found that teams in different cultures and sizes need different leadership traits. I’m also figuring out who I am, thanks to my team.

How I lead can be explained with these core values:

  • Leaders eat last

  • Treat others how they want to be treated

  • Empower people to do their jobs and grow while doing it

  • Provide a transparent, collaborative, and safe environment

  • A strong team is diverse in backgrounds, skills, and cultures

As a result, I work well at places that don’t have very strict structures, where people collaborate instead of compete, and value frequent, honest, direct feedback.

 

EVOLVING THE EARNIN DESIGN TEAM

As my team grew, my activities changed tremendously.

  • When the team was two designers and myself, I designed most of our high-priority projects, and lightly set the stage for brand improvements. Design systems didn’t even matter at this stage; we all knew what was going on and aligned. I had deep connection to all team members, and was responsible for keeping quality.

  • When team reached five people, alignment started to suffer, so I asked one of my designers to be a Design System lead. The “system” at this stage was merely a collection of design patterns. To ensure that the team moved fast, we didn’t enforce any adherence; rather, everyone contributed new patterns to the library.

We got by with design principles rather than design processes. We also started regular pair designs and pair critique.

I started working on a number of educational workshops for the company, on topics such as:

  • What does Design & Research do?

  • Who are our customers and what do they care about?

  • How to give design feedback

Now, as my team is 15+ people with researchers, the need for having a standard process and quality control starts to emerge. We started having deeper retro, team planning, and more guidelines on how to use the Design System. I also focus more on hiring and growing people into managers, company brand building, and alignment with stakeholders.

HIRING DESIGNERS FOR A STARTUP

I believe that any designer with a growth mindset can learn anything. For startups, as things change so quickly, I knew I needed designers who can execute fast across the spectrum of design, from research to visual design.

However, knowing that unicorn designers don’t actually exist (or if they do, are super expensive), I decided to build a diverse team with complementary skill sets. I formed a simple list of criteria:

  • Company value and culture fit

  • Mindset fit:

    • Customer-driven, data-informed decision-making mindset

    • Fast learner and not fearing changes and unknowns

    • Ability to prioritize

    • Can disagree respectfully, and know how to push back for design quality

  • Design skills:

    • User research and testing

    • Interaction design

    • Visual design

  • Product strategy thinking

I then designed my hiring process specifically to test for the above items. I was able to grow the team from two to over 15 within nine months with these lessons:

  • Prioritize the absolute skills the team needs and focus on assessing only those skills

  • Be clear and fair on the “pass” criteria of each skill

  • Align all interviewers on their role and what skills they need to assess

  • Create an efficient interview process, focusing on hard skills in the early stages and soft skills later

  • Fast-track strong candidates, and don’t wait on rejecting “maybe” candidates

As the team grew beyond seven designers, I made a chart of all of our design skills, and saw the need to prioritize specialists — illustrators, animators, or those strong in Growth design — to uplevel the team.