All of our Design articles

Product

The Unsung Ingredient in Stripe, Square and Linear’s Success: Taste

Tactical advice for weaving craft into your product and operationalizing taste.

Product

Lessons in Product Scaling and Storytelling from Figma’s CPO

Figma CPO Yuhki Yamashita offers up his playbook for the gnarly phase of product building that arrives after a startup clinches product-market fit — and sets its sights on the next phase of growth.

How Figma taps into taste, simplicity, and storytelling | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO at Figma, ex-Uber, Google, Microsoft)

Yuhki Yamashita is the Chief Product Officer at Figma, leading the product and design teams. Previously, he was a product and design leader at Uber, where he orchestrated the redesign of the rider and driver apps. Yuhki was also a product manager at Google (YouTube iOS app) and Microsoft (Hotmail)

How to leverage intuition, customer support, and raw effort | Colin Zima (Omni & Looker)

Colin Zima is the co-founder and CEO of Omni, a business intelligence tool that has raised over $26.9m. Prior to starting Omni, Colin was Chief Analytics Officer and VP of Product at Looker, which was acquired by Google for $2.6b.

An org-design masterclass from a Square GM | Saumil Mehta

Saumil Mehta is the GM of Square’s flagship point-of-sale business, as well as CRM, Square Staff, and Square Online.

The go-to-market guide for open-source companies — Douglas Hanna, COO Grafana Labs

Our guest today is Douglas Hanna, Chief Operating Officer at Grafana Labs. Grafana Labs is an observability stack built around Grafana, a leading open-source technology for dashboards and visualization. Douglas is a seasoned revenue leader, previously leading operations and GTM strategy at Zendesk.

Why everything we’ve been taught about quitting is wrong — Annie Duke

Our guest is Annie Duke, a retired pro poker player and First Round’s Special Partner focused on Decision Science and author of the bestselling book, “Thinking in Bets.”In today’s conversation, we’re talking about her follow-up to that book, titled “Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.”

Design

The Design Leadership Playbook: How to Hire, Onboard & Manage a High-Impact Design Org

From the high-level perspective of what makes for a great design leader, to the tactical suggestions around the slide that needs to be in your portfolio presentation, Twilio & Segment's Hareem Mannan shares useful advice for every stage of a designer's career.

Take your design org from good to great with these principles from Segment to Twilio — Hareem Mannan

Today’s episode is with Hareem Mannan, who was a product design leader at Segment for nearly four years, and joined Twilio as a Senior Director of Product, Enablement & Design following the company’s acquisition of Segment.

Building a hybrid go-to-market motion — GC Lionetti’s lessons from Confluent, Dropbox & Atlassian

Today’s episode is with Giancarlo 'GC' Lionetti, the former CMO of Confluent and VP of Self-Serve Growth at Dropbox.

Starting Up

A UX Research Crash Course for Founders — Customer Discovery Tips from Zoom, Zapier & Dropbox

Zoom’s Jane Davis answers all of your tricky customer development questions, creating a highly tactical guide for founders flying solo on UX research as they explore startup ideas, validate concepts, iterate on prototypes, and troubleshoot common product problems.

Go unreasonably deep on complex problems and build with naivety — Bowery Farming’s Irving Fain

Today’s episode is with Irving Fain, founder and CEO of Bowery Farming. Bowery is a modern farming company that grows produce indoors, free from pollutants and using significantly less water and space.