After a few semesters in grad school, I met a woman who had an incredible idea and was looking for a designer. She pitched me on the idea, a classroom data tool that saves teachers time on grading and lets them know instantly where their students are struggling, and I was hooked. My mother was a teacher for over 30 years, and I’d been getting tired of academia, so I decided to take a sabbatical and work at her startup.

I was hooked. Like, give up all my time, take a paycheck some of my friends have called “criminally low”, and fully commit to this company. I started as the Design Intern, and through a series of trials, tribulations, and bouts of self teaching; took on most of the front end development, planning the product roadmap, managing our offshore dev team, managing the product, and doing the support for the product. My official title is now “Director of Product and UX” but like Simba, anything the light touches (or that has to do with product), is mine.

Everything the light touches

Give your designers room to grow

To me, this is f*#%ing rad. This is rad because I was young, untested, and inexperienced, and my CEO took a chance on me when I stepped up to plate and gave me opportunities around roles that I had never thought of investigating before. After two years, I have some thoughts. I’ll outline them throughout this blog, but the first of which is about how to help your designer be successful.

Designers need people they can connect with

If you’re going to hire a designer (which you should if you are building a product, and if you don’t agree with me, then I don’t think you’re ready to build a product) I’d suggest - wait for it - hiring two.

Now, humans are expensive, and you might not have budget for two, but it’s similar to puppies - they’ll keep each other company, and out of trouble (or they’ll make twice the mess, who knows!). Design is social. And not to sound elitist, but design is also a learned language. So while you may think it’s helpful for you to give your designer the feedback that “I want it to look like this picture of the sky, without it being this picture of the sky,” you’re actually just helping them board the struggle bus.

It would be much more helpful to have someone else sit next to them and say “I like the spacing and layout that we’re toying with, I think we might want to inject a lot of personality into the colors we use for links so that it keeps this light quality. Do we want to put shadows under this div to give it a feeling of floating?”

This doesn’t have to be expensive

One way to do this without breaking the bank is hire people who can blend roles: a developer with design experience, or vice versa. Or, try and work in a co-working space where you know other teams have designers who are looking to do reviews of each other’s work. And start the behaviour of being open and constructive about bringing designs out-of-house early on. Make it a part of your culture. This will help your designer feel super comfortable bringing their work to users for feedback, because they’re already showing their work to others often.

It will make your designers better and your product better

I like to think that I’m pretty good at what I do, but I am by far not the most talented person in my field. In fact, I’m probably not even the most talented person in the coffeeshop I’m sitting in right now. And honestly, I’m totally ok with that, because working with people who are super talented is a privilege, and it makes you so much better, that I really hope the well of amazing, talented people never runs dry. Working with multiple people also means that less things are likely to fall through the cracks, and if you’re a product company, your product is how most people are going to interact with you - you want it to be good. Really good.