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.

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.

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.

Design

The Case for Adding DesignOps to Your Org Chart — Lessons From InVision

Drawing on her experience in design operations at InVision, Automattic and Hot Studio, Alison Rand explains what DesignOps can achieve for your startup, and how to get a successful team up and running.

Design

The Ultimate Guide to the Founding Designer Role

We summarized the most tactical, honest pieces of advice from a group of design experts on what it really takes to be a startup's first design hire — from choosing the right startup to join to excelling in the role and growing your team.

Design

Ready, Set, Hypergrowth: How Duo's Product Design Lead Primed Her Team for Momentum

Sally Carson joined Duo as its first product design leader, just as the security startup was ratcheting into hypergrowth. Carson shares her roadmap for scaling the product design function, from advocating for design in an engineering-centric org, to setting up her team for success during rapid growt

Design

Defining Growth Design: The Guide to the Role Most Startups are Missing

Angel Steger serves as our guide on a trek to better understand the still developing speciality of growth design. She shares lessons learned from her roles leading the function at Dropbox and Pinterest, and outlines tactics for early-stage startups looking to source, interview and onboard growth des

Design

Our 6 Must Reads for Building and Leading a Product Design Team

A well-thought-out design team often accompanies enduring product design. Here are six pieces of advice to help you build and lead a design team from the sole designer to a larger design organization.

Design

Defining Product Design: A Dispatch from Airbnb's Design Chief

Airbnb VP of Design Alex Schleifer shares how design can become a more intentional, integrated discipline — and why it must be in order to better build products.

Design

Here’s How Asana Won With Its Product Redesign

Redesigns are difficult and inevitable. Product manager Sam Goertler shares how Asana successfully executed its redesign with a unique, iterative approach.

Design

Making Design Bets to Knock the Blurs into Shape

Dom Goodrum, Design Director at Percolate, talks about making long-term bets to build a strong design team and strategy.