All of these products have exclusion built in. Someone made a design decision to not ask the essential question: Who are we leaving out? These design decisions are hurtful, not just to those who feel unseen, but for the businesses who make them as they’re only addressing a fraction of the total addressable market.

Designing for diversity and inclusion isn’t that hard. First, we need to see the that bias slips into our design decisions. Then we can bring frameworks and tools into the design process that will help us see where we can be more inclusive.

The following resources will help you tune in and design inclusively.

A framework for designing for diversity from Project Inkblot

Jahan Mantin and Boyuan Gao, co-founders of Project Inkblot, have created a practical framework for designing for diversity with 4 key questions you and your team can ask to draw attention to where your process is falling short.

The first question, “What’s the worst-case scenario, and on whom?”, is an important one as it helps us see potential gaps between good intentions and the actual impact on people and communities.

Mantin and Gao point out that most people think of their impact as their intention, but these two things are very different. Here’s how:

• Intention is personal to you and your team, and what you hope to achieve.

• Impact is how what you make is lived and experienced in the real world in actual communities.

Read “How to begin designing for diversity”

Matter-mind Studio: A toolkit for emotion-centered design

Matter-mind studio, a research collective that investigates people’s emotional needs, have created a collection of thoughtful research methodologies that can help teams better understand the emotional state of customers. While their framework can be applied to a wide variety of emotional situations, it can be helpful when trying to better understand the perspectives of any under represented group. As we see into the emotions of others, we start to gain perspective on how to serve their needs and think inclusively.

Read matter-mind studio's lookbook for emotion-centered design

Microsoft: Inclusive design toolkit

Microsoft have created an amazing set of guides that draw our attention to the full range of human diversity. It helps us see from many perspectives related to abilities, identities, and situations.

Their guides show us that designing for inclusivity not only opens up our products and services to more people, it also reflects how people really are. All humans grow and adapt to the world around them and our designs should reflect that.

I love how their toolkit puts people in the center from the very start of the design process, and those fresh, diverse perspectives we get become the key to true insight.

Read Microsoft’s guide to Inclusive design

What resources are missing from this list? Let me know.

Interested in learning more about designing for inclusion and diversity? Check out the new edition of my book Designing for Emotion from A Book Apart.

My friend Erika Hall who was also working on a second edition of her book Just Enough Research (it’s great, you should read it), DMed me just as I was arriving at the realization that this book project was a heavier lift than anticipated. 

“Are you finding that doing a second edition weirdly does not take a fraction of the time, but about the same amount of time?”

—Erika Hall, author of Just Enough Research, second edition

Um, yeah. Writing this new edition felt like writing a brand new book. I took a stab at updating all of the examples in the first edition, but my editor and I quickly realized that, like a giant Jenga puzzle, when you move a couple of pieces in a book, the whole thing collapses upon itself.

After a few months of research and rewriting, I found myself starting again. It was a dark time for me.

The tunnel

Writing a book is like driving through a very long tunnel. Once you enter, it’s hard to see where you are. You might emerge into the light quickly, or you could find yourself plodding forward for a long, long time. 

In total, it took me close to a year to write this second edition, which is about how long it took to write the first edition. On nights and weekends, I researched, I wrote, and I addressed the edits from my editorial partner, Sally Kerrigan. 

By February of 2020, we had wrapped up all significant edits, and by April I emerged out of the tunnel and into the light with a completed book. 

New times, new perspectives

Like many designers, I had an optimistic view of the web back in 2011 when the first edition of this book was published. “Design for delight” was the mantra of those times when we shared an optimistic view of how the web and technology would bring us together. 

Today I see that the technology that brings us together also has the power to tear us apart, and if we’re not careful, we can find ourselves sharing responsibility for the destruction. 

I couldn’t simply update the examples in the first edition because the world has changed so much. I had to begin again to help readers see that designing for delight falls woefully short in feeding the needs of the human spirit. 

This new edition is about expanding our view of what it means to design for emotion—all emotions. 

As I wrapped up writing we entered intense times that have triggered so many emotions in us, fluctuating from fear and uncertainty to joy and hope. Recognizing that your customers bring those emotions with them when they use your products is essential to deciding what you design, how you design, and who you design for. 

I believe that designing for all emotions is the essential next step in the evolution of our design process.

What I’ve learned about writing

I once heard Annie Lennox in an interview described singing as painful. She talked about seeing Aretha Franklin sing with a power and grace that was at her disposal at all times. But Lennox has to work at singing. She has to warm up and find her way to the notes she seeks. 

That’s how I feel about writing. It takes me a long time to find the words, and the process is painful. By the end of this book it was literally painful as I’d contracted shingles, a painful viral infection of the nervous system triggered by stress. But in the end it was worth it. 

It’s worth investing long nights and weekends. It’s worth being vulnerable in front of editors who knowingly send one back to the drawing board for another go. It was worth pressing forward through sickness. 

The feeling of finding one's voice is like nothing else. 

I hope you’ll check out the new edition of my book Designing for Emotion from A Book Apart available in ebook and paperback formats today.

It’s great when well-designed products can put a smile on our face. Digital designers learned how to do that quite well in the past decade. But human emotion is multidimensional, complicated, and mercurial. Nothing like a pandemic to amplify that truth, right?

We’ve got to figure out how to design for the whole human experience, which includes negative emotions too.

Headspace: Acknowledging stress and anxiety

Companies like Headspace, the app that teaches us mindfulness and meditation, consider the sharp edges of stress, fear, and anxiety people bring to their product and design for these emotions. So much of their product design approach is about acknowledging the imperfections of the mind and the swirling emotions within.

Press “play” to begin meditation and the circle containing the play button begins to undulate, moving like the mind in unpredictable directions, impossible to control. It’s reassuring, as if it’s acknowledging that our imperfections are welcome here.

Character animation illustrates the messiness of our mind and softens the shame of confronting one’s imperfections.

TurboTax: Acknowledging loss

Intuit, makers of TurboTax, have considered the sadness their customers confront when filing one's taxes for the first time after the loss of a loved one. Re-experiencing deep sadness in the clinical setting of tax preparation software can be dehumanizing, but TurboTax thoughtfully acknowledges this loss with a well written message: “We’re sorry to hear about your loss. You can count on us to help you get your tax return done right.”

It’s complicated

Design is getting more complicated and rightfully so. We are complicated beings with shifting emotions that shape our experience. 

Everything we've learned these past two decades about our craft, our process, and our design philosophies have prepared us for the next stage of our growth as designers. Just as we learned to design experiences that adapted to different screen sizes and connections speeds, we need to learn to design for shifting human emotions. 

The lives of the people using the things we design change daily. The fear that comes with unemployment, the pain of losing a loved one, the anger of feeling excluded, and the constant stress of these uncertain times are environmental factors we can and should design for. 

More than designing for delight, we can design for all emotions. We spent the first twenty years of this century designing user experiences. Let's spend the next twenty years designing human experiences.

Interested in learning more about how to design for these complex times? Check out the new edition of my book Designing for Emotion from A Book Apart.

When you’re part a fast-growing company, it can often feel like the challenges and breakthroughs you’re experiencing are unique to your team and organization. In some ways, that’s true, but you can certainly learn from the experience of others rather than suffering in the school of hard knocks.

Being part of Mailchimp’s growth from 6 employees to 550 in 8 years, and now witnessing similar growth at InVision, has afforded me a unique perspective on the stages companies, teams, and individuals go through as design scales. I’ve paired that experience with insight I’ve gained from interviewing dozens of design leaders on their growth and challenges, and distilled it down to some hard-earned lessons I shared with O’Reilly Design Conference attendees in March. Today, I’d like to share them with you.

Inflection points of a growing company

It can be hard to navigate the territory of a scaling company, especially when no one has a map. It turns out there are clear transition points along the way, and knowing where they are can give you perspective when things look more dire than they are.  

In general, the following stages represent distinct inflection points on a company’s growth journey:

• 1-30: The organization feels like a family. Everyone is doing multiple jobs. Communication is constant and effortless because you know everyone in the company. Decisions are made quickly, and are often founded only on hunches, but that’s okay. The product is in its infancy and the to-do list is clear.

• 31-50: More people have been hired to help relieve the pressures of wearing too many hats. Hire well, as these people will hire many more and have a big influence on your culture. With more people comes the need for better communication. You’re starting to explore process. The team is mostly comprised of generalists still.

• 51-200: Big changes are happening, and they often feel awkward. You no longer know everyone in the company, and you may not know who to speak with about basic issues. Chances are you and others will have to move to new roles to keep the company moving forward. You’ll have to hand over your previous projects and team to new people, which can be hard. There are more meetings and formal processes. You can no longer base your strategy on hunches as there’s too much at stake. Define your company values now to guide the growth of the culture.

• 201-750: More big role changes for many. Some of the people who’ve been with the company from the beginning will be leaving and a new guard will take charge. The company has shifted from innovation to optimization. The product is mature, and now you need to stabilize everything to continue growing. The company has many more specialists who will introduce new capabilities. With so many teams now, you’ll need connector people who can bring them together and can communicate institutional knowledge.

• 750: Culture and values are well defined. They can be changed still, but it’ll require a lot of effort to move things. Beware of teams and individuals putting self-interest in front of the company’s interest.

Andrew Crow, former VP of Design at Uber, saw insane growth in his tenure. Just as they got a handle on their workflow, more people would be added to the team requiring a retooling of both org structure and process. He likened it to bringing water to a boil, only to add more water and drop it back down again.

As roles change and responsibilities shift you and your colleagues will undoubtedly experience FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Recognize that this is normal. Reorgs mean FUD, but clear and consistent communication can reduce it.  Leadership can ease the turbulence by communicating changes early and often, and normalizing the emotions people are feeling.

Giving up your LEGOs

As your company grows, you’ll inevitably have to shift roles and rethink your identity. Molly Graham, a veteran of rapid scale and an operations master, has sage advice for surviving periods of rapid growth. Give up your LEGOs—the project or role that has defined your work.

Giving away your job to someone new is a difficult thing to do. Your attachment to the work or skepticism of your successor’s ability to fill your shoes may make you leery of change, but you’ll be needed elsewhere in the company. There are new mountains to climb and more opportunities for growth for both you and the company.

Letting go can be liberating. It’s exciting to learn new things and expand your skills. It’s much easier to let go of your precious LEGOs when leadership helps you see that the next batch of LEGOs are even better.

A changing product

Just as the company changes with scale, so too does the thinking around the product. For a product to mature you’ll need to continuously change the way you think about its evolution.

We can map the evolution of product thinking into 3 stages:

Stage 1

Early on, new features are like low-hanging fruit on a tree—they’re easy to see, easy to reach, and should be harvested as quickly as possible. Priorities and direction tend to be clear at this point. The product is immature and you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you. You move fast just to get basic features built.

Stage 2

Rapid development inevitably leads to some rough edges. The product may not be as usable as it should be, and it’s likely to have some gaps in functionality that can be deal breakers for some of your customers. It’s time to refine to prevent churn and shore up defenses against fast following competitors.

But what refinements are most pressing? The fruit is now higher in the tree, and a little harder to reach. You’ll need to talk to customers, and watch them use your product to know where to invest your energy.

Stage 3

Your product is maturing and hopefully stabilizing. Core features and integrations are built, and now it’s a little fuzzy what to do next to make another innovative leap forward. New ideas are harder to come by—the fruit is at the top of the tree. Your next big idea probably won’t come from internal brainstorming, but from studying your customers and the market more carefully.

Visit customers in person to observe how your product fits into their life. It’s unlikely that a customer will tell you what feature or product they need. You’ll have to spot a problem they’re unwittingly suffering through to find your next big idea.

Shifting priorities

Priorities will shift as your product matures and your customer base grows. Speed is essential as you build out core features. The product will change dramatically, but with a small customer base the disruption is minimal. Rapid change is exciting to your early adopters.

But middle-stage customers won’t tolerate an ever changing UI. They’ll have something new to learn each time they use your product, which slows down their workflow. Where speed was once a virtue, it’s now a vice. You’ll need to be much more thoughtful and incremental when you introduce change to the product.

Slowing your roll can be a buzzkill for many in the company, but there’s a silver lining. Though the product may advance more slowly, your work will be far more influential because you now have more customers in the product.

This is where the importance of constant quality improvement comes to fore. Your ideas may be great, and highly influential, but if they’re buggy and inefficient, you’ve got problems.

You need to start formalizing a refinement process—something at MailChimp we called “Guns forward, guns backward.” That might mean having a team dedicated specifically to product refinement, constantly sanding off the edges.

We’ve talked about process, product, and your own role. Now let’s look next at lessons to be learned in hiring and management.

Your legacy is the people you hire

Growing a company from 1 to 100 to 300 and beyond is not easy, and you and your team will face countless challenges, big and small, on your journey.

Imagine yourself on a beach, retired, contemplating your legacy. Is it, “I made this thing that changed 6 months after I left”? Hopefully not. That’s why hiring is the single most profound impact you, as an individual, can have on your organization’s success. The people you hire will be your legacy.

Hire people, not skills

That doesn’t mean just choosing the best people with the right skills. It means identifying those individuals who have the potential to grow into something bigger. Companies that have low churn and a great success rate have mastered this skill, and it involves looking at both hard, “technical” skills as well as soft skills.

This is an art—not a science. It sounds simple, but the most valuable thing you can do when assessing soft skills is to simply spend time with a person—get to know them. It’s easy to fake your way through an hour or two of interviews. It’s a lot harder to do so on a multi-day, multi-person immersive experience.

One core skill to look for? Adaptability. You have to change in your role—giving up your LEGOs, remember?—so the people you hire will have to change too.

Diverse team perform better, so as you review candidates be careful not to gravitate people who are too similar to you. Different perspectives will help you and your team see problems from different angles, and will help you empathize more effectively with the many customers who will use your products.

Scariest of all can be hiring someone who is smarter or more experienced than you, but that’s what you have to do to level-up your team, and to leave it better than when you found it. It’s also a great opportunity for your own personal growth.

Keep your standards high

If you must become more comfortable hiring those who are better than you, you must also avoid becoming comfortable with mediocrity in your hiring.

Consider this: Mediocrity begets mediocrity.

When you hire someone who’s pretty good, because you have a timeline to complete a product and everyone says you need to move faster—someone who can get on board quickly but may not be the best—their mediocrity will become a problem sooner or later.

It will attract other less-than-great people, and tell your team that mediocre work is okay. It’s an insidious problem that brings the whole team down, because you cannot hire top talent with mediocre people.

Communicate—always, in all ways

If you’re hiring, you’re probably managing too, and delving into good management is a blog post (or several…) all its own. Here are the top lessons I’ve learned, though, both in my own career and in speaking with other leaders in design.

Get stakeholders involved early and often. Bad things happen when people feel left out. We all know the chaos that can erupt when you get far down a product path and realize you didn’t involve key stakeholders like engineers, executives, or marketers. Not only does it lead to bad feelings all around, it also jeopardizes your work which may get derailed by skeptics or transformed into something much different than you’d expected. Involve stakeholders in design reviews regularly to make sure they stay in the loop. Regular communication about the design is far superior to a grand reveal.

Get good at conducting 1-on-1s. 1-on-1 meetings with each individual contributor are key to the care and “feeding” of the people on your team. It’s their time to ask questions and get feedback, so don’t cancel or clog up the conversation with status updates. This is the time to talk about their needs, their career path, and how you can help them maximize their potential.

Your team wants a place where they can grow, get feedback, and learn how to do better work. Getting good at 1-on-1s will help you hire the right people and build the next generation of leaders at your company.

Grow comfortable with changing processes. Time and again I hear the same question: Centralized, distributed, hybrid—what’s the best design team structure? The truth is, there’s no answer because it depends on the stage of your company’s growth, and your goals. Each team structure comes with pros and cons.

Let go of the idea that a team structure is permanent; what’s more important is knowing your company’s primary goals right now and optimizing to help your team work towards them. When you reorg, your team share with them the benefits and trade-offs to destroy the FUD that occurs when reorgs happen. They need to hear how change helps the company and helps them do their best work.

Spread the knowledge

As designers, it’s tempting to shroud design in mystery. This is born out of fear—fear that if others are involved, you as a designer may not be as valuable.

The truth is, you are not magical alone. You will be magical—and more valuable—if you involve more people in the design process, and make design less of a black box. Doing so shows others the true, deep value of design.

Sometimes as a designer, especially when you’re working alone, it can feel like you’re the star at the center of the universe, when you’re actually just a piece of the constellation. It can be disconcerting to adopt that mindset, but also exciting—because you realize you’re part of something much bigger.

When design is a black box, it’s hard to see its value. When it’s transparent, the value becomes more apparent to all. As a company grows designers must build social capital with many teams to help usher products through the many phases of development.

Get to know the other people on your team who influence and shape your product, from every team. Because at the end of the day, what we’re doing here is a team sport.

Design is hard—that’s what I hear from design leaders at every company I visit. As the VP of Design Education at InVision, I study how design works and breaks in businesses. After nearly a decade of leading product teams I know first hand that design is indeed hard, even at a company that values and invests in it.

What makes it so difficult? There are organizational challenges, people challenges, and process challenges. Each seems monolithic in its own right, but when you stack them up they feel daunting.

I once thought that the challenges I faced as a design leader were unique to my situation, but I know now after interviewing many design leaders they’re common to almost every team. I find it comforting to know I’m not the only one who has struggled, and not because misery loves company (though it does). If these problems are common, then chances are we can find solutions.

Design leaders far and wide are struggling to find solutions to these 7 problems:

1. Isolation

Agile has become the law of the land and it has redrawn team lines on many an org chart. Designers are finding themselves embedded in cross-functional teams with engineers and product owners. It’s a great opportunity to learn from others with different perspectives, but it often leaves designers craving the feedback and camaraderie of other designers that’s needed to improve their craft. In isolation, many designers feel their growth has stagnated as has their career. Designers disenchanted with their work can find themselves searching for greener pastures where their creativity can be more freely expressed.

Outnumbered as they often are in cross-functional teams, designers acquiesce to engineers who encourage smaller design iterations and a simpler approach. Do we really need that animated transition? Does it add much value? It’s difficult to champion the necessity of small details when you’re the lone designer. Many simply give in and get back to work. Exceptional design is almost impossible to achieve when corners are continuously cut.

I see a few strategies emerging as companies recognize the challenges of cross-functional product teams. Some companies like Spotify and Envato are experimenting with design guilds which bring designers from many teams together for regular design reviews and discussion of design strategy and style. This approach helps designers get the feedback they need to grow, but still doesn’t address the awkward power dynamic of being the only designer in a product team.

Slack pairs designers on projects so they get the feedback they need to work through ideas quickly and thoroughly.

Other companies are simply moving designers back to a dedicated design team where creative exploration and design vision come more easily. The pitfall here is that design and engineering aren’t afforded as much opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other. Perhaps there’s a middle ground? I’ve seen success from temporary product teams in which designers and engineers tackle a big project together then return home to their respective teams. It lets these differing cultures build rapport without totally assimilating as they’re forced to do in a cross-functional team.

The jury is still out on how we’ll solve the problems of team structure. We need to experiment more and compare notes.

2. Lost Vision

As teams divide to specialize on domains or areas of a product, the shared vision for the product can get lost. Designers feel the loss of a product vision most acutely as they need a North Star to guide their design systems.

Design leadership is needed to define vision that extends past the incremental improvements of sprints. Some design teams create large boards that show design style or tell the story of how their product will fit into the lives of their customers. Others create short videos to illustrate to all how the product will fit into the customer’s lifestyle.

Airbnb worked with Pixar illustrators to create storyboards that showed how their products would fit into the lives of their customers. Their storyboard gave everyone a vision of the product experience they wanted but still gives each team the freedom to solve the problems as they see fit.

Product roadmaps also guide teams, but they only express what to do and when. They don’t tell a company why. Vision—whether presented through a video, storyboard, or some other means—gives purpose and clarity to our work. Without it teams often lose sight of their mission.

3. Inconsistent/Broken UX

As a company grows and acquires other companies, product UIs quickly become a hodgepodge of styles creating a clunky user experience. Inconsistent UIs bloat code, are difficult to maintain, and make new product ideation inefficient.

Large enterprises like IBM, Atlassian, Salesforce and Westpac are starting to invest in design systems that not only standardize UI with a library of patterns for designers and developers to follow, they’re also adding user personas and broad design principles to their systems.

Design systems work best when they’re managed by a dedicated team. There is a new type of team emerging around design systems: Design System Ops. Spotify’s design guilds regularly communicate with their design system team to keep their UIs and code efficient across platforms.

4. Speaking a New Language

Designers struggle to speak the language of business as a company scales. They have to interact with new executives and engineers and communicate the ideas behind their work and how it will help the business succeed. They can’t get lost in the weeds talking about typefaces, they need to talk about empowering customers.

Designers need to learn more about the business they serve and business in general. They need to get to know the people in charge and ask questions.

Despite the impact design has on the success of a business, it’s rare to see a designer in an executive position. There are many reasons for this, not least of which is that design leaders need to become adept at speaking the language of executives. The C-suite is dominated by talk of statistics and data, territory that can be uncomfortable for designers as our work is not always quantifiable. That doesn’t mean it’s not creating value, though.

Designers need to be able to articulate the value of a great user experience and frame design in the context of business goals.

5. Building Social Capital

When a business grows, more people need to come together to ship great things. Designers who succeed in large organizations create social capital by developing a rapport with colleagues across the organization. Product design in large organizations is not a solo activity. Take off your headphones. Get up and talk to people. Designers who don’t make an effort to work across teams will inevitably be deselected from their organization. Count on it.

Get in the habit of grabbing lunch with a developers. No need for an agenda — just get to know each other. Spend time with researchers who have their finger on the pulse of your customers, sales people who hear frequent requests, and customer service agents who know where users struggle the most. All have valuable context to offer. Each one influences the success of the product.

As designers become connected to colleagues on other teams, not only will their designs be more informed, they’ll also create inroads into their work, putting design on everyone’s radar.

6. Incremental Not Innovative

In the early days of a startup everything that’s shipped feels big and innovative. As the product matures and the customer base grows the company will be much more conservative in what it ships, valuing optimization and stability over innovation. Everything gets broken into small sprints that can feel incremental, not innovative. Many designers find this frustrating as the problems may seem less interesting.

Designers need a safe place to explore new ideas. Teams can schedule 20% time to explore new concepts for existing products or for brand new ideas. Some companies establish a dedicated R&D team to fuel innovation, or plan creative retreats where a team can experiment.

Companies that lose touch with experimentation will find barbarians at the door soon enough, ready to disrupt their business.

7. Moving Slower

Early on there are a select few people who create product strategy and the roadmap. But as a company scales there are more stakeholders involved in the process. Things slow down as more teams need to touch the product before shipping. Designers who were involved early on can become frustrated that they can’t move as quickly as they’d like, and may find themselves looking for another company still in the early stages of development so they can tackle problems quickly once again.

It’s important to remember that speed isn’t everything, though. Large companies may move slower, but often have far greater influence than scrappy startups. Shipping slower but reaching more people can be satisfying too.

Sound Familiar?

Does any of this resonate with you? If so, know that you’re not alone. Every company I’ve talked to regardless of their market sector is wresting with the same issues. But seeing the patterns makes it easier for us to find solutions.

How are you solving these problems in your organization? Are there other problems you’re confronting? Let’s spark an honest discussion in the comments of this article. There’s so much we can learn from each other.

Tom felt lost. After four years of tremendous growth, his company was no longer the scrappy startup he’d originally joined. In those early years, Tom simply rolled his chair over to a colleague’s desk when he needed feedback on a design. The work was collaborative, feedback was immediate, his work was known and respected. It was fun! He was able to put on his headphones and devote all of his attention to design.

Then things changed.

The product and company grew — fast. He built out his team, and so did his colleagues. The company moved to a bigger office to accommodate all of the new people, and before he knew it a physical and mental distance developed between his design team and the rest of the company. The designs his team produced weren’t always on people’s radar, and subsequently stakeholders no longer understood the value of the team’s work.

Sound familiar? This scenario is common in most growing companies. Design — once transparent, and integrated into the product process — becomes a black box, isolated from engineers and stakeholders, and in the precarious position of being misunderstood or ignored.

When design isn’t visible, it’s no longer powerful.

At a small company, it’s easy to grasp the state of a project by asking a colleague for a peek at their designs. In large companies, spontaneous design conversations rarely happen; design is separated from executives and developers. Designs often remain guarded until a grand reveal brings stakeholders together. By that point, it’s too late for honest feedback — the stakes and repercussions are that much higher because so much energy and emotion have already been invested in what’s likely an off-the-mark design.

This is a dangerous place for design — it sets the stage for spiked projects and designers searching for more fulfilling work. And of course, designers aren’t the only ones who suffer. Companies that don’t ship their best work run the risk of unrealized potential and less satisfied employees.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Connecting Design In A Large Organization

As a company grows, everyone has to work harder — and smarter — at communicating. Designers who succeed in large organizations create social capital by developing a rapport with colleagues across the organization.

You’ll have to get in the habit of stepping away from your computer to create the social capital you need. Grab lunch with a developer who may build out your next design. No need for an agenda — just get to know each other. Spend time with researchers who have their finger on the pulse of your customers, sales people who hear frequent requests, product managers who understand schedules and scope, and customer service agents who know where users struggle the most. All have valuable context to offer you. Each one influences the success of your work.

And don’t just network laterally — spend time with different stakeholders and executives to understand their roles and expectations. Ask questions about the broader strategy of the company. You’ll need to understand the big picture to design products that fit into the company vision.

As you become connected to colleagues on other teams, not only will your designs be more informed, you’ll create inroads into your work, putting design on everyone’s radar.

Making Inroads

It’s important to bring stakeholders into the design process early and often to get feedback and fresh perspectives. Sharing your work digitally makes it easy to gather feedback from specific people, but there’s value in setting the stage for unsolicited feedback, too. Surprising things happen when you print screens and post them in a space where passersby can catch a glimpse. Leave post-it notes and pens nearby and see what happens — I’ve gotten incredible feedback from unexpected sources with this approach.

Unlike digital, print is persistent and casual. It invites spontaneous participation even when you’re not around, which is perhaps its greatest strength.

When design is accessible to all, the process feels inclusive.

Design is often protected — intentionally or not — from those who are perceived to be outside the process. That’s a shame, as often there are experts that are excluded simply because they don’t move in the same social circles at work. Take note of who leaves useful feedback so you can include them when you share your next digital prototype.

Regularly scheduled design reviews can be a great way to not only keep your design team synced, but to forge connections with other teams. At the health tech company Counsyl, Laura Martini made a habit of inviting engineers and execs to design reviews to get new perspective for her team but also to put design on people’s minds.

Todd Dominey, Director of Design at MailChimp, has found that sharing digital prototypes is important to create inroads to his team’s work, but face-to-face design reviews go further still to help the company see the big picture.

Making A Change

Design teams aren’t the only ones who struggle as a company scales. All teams do. The flat structure and fuzzy roles that once made communication easy in a startup must give way in an enterprise to a well-defined organizational chart and domain experts for the train to stay on the tracks.

Things have to change, and so do we.

You’ll need to be more than a pixel pusher. You’ll have to learn to communicate. Spend less time at your desk and more time talking to colleagues. You’ll need strong relationships to do high impact design work.

The black box that alienates and disempowers design will sneak up on you. Don’t wait for it to take hold of your company. Build inroads into your work now if you want to elevate design and build better products.

Here’s your to-do list:

• Share early and often. Set Design Review days on your team’s calendar and invite anyone to participate.

• Network and build social capital. Your org chart is not a list of names; it’s a group of potential allies. Get to know them.

• Be open and accessible. Post your work in a public space. Present your work at company coffee hours. Talk about your work and answer questions in a company Slack channel.

• Solicit feedback every step of the way. This isn’t design by committee, but good ideas — and constructive criticism — can come from anywhere.

Hiring is hard. It requires time, patience, and sensitivity to subtle signals that help determine whether someone is a fit for the position. I’ve spent more than a year searching for the right candidate for some positions, because I’m not just trying to find the right skills for the job—I’m trying to find the right person.

People have personalities and perspectives that influence their performance and the way they communicate on teams. These things are squishy and hard to size up, but ignore them at your peril. In my experience, the primary reasons for letting an employee go rarely have to do with a lack of technical prowess. It’s almost always a shortcoming in soft skills. Missing technical skills can be remedied with coaching, but shortcomings in soft skills are so much more difficult to correct.

Focusing too much on technical knowhow can lead companies to hire the wrong people. Job postings are too often dominated by a checklist of requirements. Interviews are filled with technical challenges and design dog and pony shows to gauge a candidate’s chops. But how do we gauge a candidate’s willingness to collaborate, or their acceptance of critical feedback? What about their resilience when faced with adversity, and how their personality aligns with team and company values? Without a sense for these kinds of traits, it’s hard to know whether someone will succeed in their new position.

When interviewing product team candidates, I get to know the person before discussing technical stuff. I want to know what they’re passionate about and how they see the world. It can sound like casual chatter, but it provides the clues needed to evaluate soft skills. Here’s what I look for when interviewing candidates:

Broad perspectives

We don’t want to hire a bunch of employees who are just like us. I’m not looking for people to hang out with on the weekend. I’m looking for people who bring new perspectives to our company. This is why we avoid the term “culture fit,” instead talking a lot about building teams with a variety of voices and perspectives. Backgrounds, interests, reading habits, and conversation topics all say something about how open-minded and curious a person is. When everyone brings a different perspective to the team, innovation happens.

Adaptation and grit

If a candidate openly shares their life and work experiences, listen hard. I love hearing about key moments that shaped people into who they are today. Stories of overcoming adversity, not fitting in, moving to a new country–these details give clues about how someone deals with challenges. Adaptation skills show that when the candidate encounters a tough problem, team change, or new project, they’re going to feel confident they can overcome it. These folks don’t give up easily.

MacArthur Fellow and psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth calls this quality “grit.” Grit is more than just perseverance. Duckworth ties grit to a focus on longterm goals and following through on commitments. Candidates who’ve overcome adversity over a long period of time because they can see a rewarding end result are gritty, and are usually great people to hire.

Unique interests

Asking candidates about their interests and hobbies outside of work can be extremely helpful. At Mailchimp, we love it when employees have side projects or part-time creative businesses. I like to ask candidates when their passion for a discipline ignited. Finding a love for a subject can change you. It builds confidence and creates intrinsic motivation to learn.

The subject doesn’t have to relate to our company. I look for people who are a little different. I love it when a candidate surprises me or says something unexpected. Misfits and oddballs tend to do well at Mailchimp because, well, so many of us feel that way ourselves. This kind of person spends a lot of time on their own growing up, so they tend to be independent. And they’re usually comfortable finding their own path, which can make them easier to manage.

Being a little weird can leave you with something to prove. The feeling of “I’ll show them!” can be the fuel that pushes an already passionate person to succeed. There’s nothing like getting a taste of success built on hard work and a love for what you’re doing. That’s just the sort of person we want to work with us!

A collaborative mindset

Few skills are as important to a product team as collaboration. When interviewing an individual, it can be hard to gauge how well they’d work with others, but there are ways to pick up signals. You can start by asking them about the dynamics of other teams they’ve worked on and finding out how they like to collaborate.

In some situations it makes sense to create a small project that a candidate can work on under a tight deadline with members of your team. When the results are presented, make sure there’s a group discussion with critical feedback. Listen carefully to how the candidate responds. Are they defensive or open-minded? Do they talk more than they listen? Do they seek credit? You’ll learn a lot in that short interchange.

In this process, you can also find out if someone is a linear or conceptual thinker. We all approach problems differently. Some of us see things linearly, as a series of tasks to be completed. Some of us look at problems conceptually, seeking connections between different things and thrive in the creative process. Both are valuable if properly channeled. When you’re hiring, consider which mindset is best for the position. If you’re hiring a product designer who’ll be working on new products, a conceptual mindset is a must. If you’re hiring someone who will follow a well-defined process or may be digging through mountains of data, a linear mindset will be best.

Social aptitude and energy

Social time with a candidate gives you and your team a chance to ditch the high-pressure interview process and get to know each other. Personalities come out if you make the space. Later in the interview process, we invite candidates to lunch or to spend an entire day with us.

After spending time with them, are they still excited to be there? Do they seem to gel with your team? Can they hold a conversation, or is there a lot of awkward silence? Any uncomfortable situations you experience may be amplified if the candidate joins the team, so pay close attention.

I always look for the right energy fit too. I once interviewed a candidate and knew from his crushing handshake and deafening greeting that he would be too overbearing for my team. As the interview proceeded, my hunch was borne out. Gut feelings can tell us a lot if we’re willing to listen.

Humility

Humility is a core value at Mailchimp. Humble people tend to be quick learners because they’re willing to listen to and learn from others. They don’t crave credit, so they’re natural collaborators. They treat others fairly and with kindness.

Humble people make great teammates. A candidate’s humility, or lack of it, comes through in a longer interview process. When they checked in, how did they treat the people at the front desk? Did they ask a lot of questions? Did they take the time to learn about the company, you, and your team before the interview? Humility is not a trait that’s easily turned into interview questions, but if you tune into subtle behavior cues, you’ll quickly get an accurate reading.

Is it worth it?

It can be time consuming to evaluate soft skills, but trust me, it’s worth it. Hiring too fast fills your company with people you don’t want to work with, who will derail your progress and demoralize your best performers. Fast hiring often leads to slow, painful firings.

If you lead a product team, there’s nothing more important than hiring. So put in the time. Get to know each candidate well. Choose people who bring new perspectives to your team, and people who will be happy in your company for years to come. Each new hire has the potential to make a big impact on your business, so treat them like a person, not a checklist of skills. If all goes well, you’ll be spending a lot of time with them.