MEETUP
Building and growing design team
One reason I was excited to join Meetup was the opportunity to start a design practice and team from scratch. In my time there, the team grew from 2 to 13 people and design was fully integrated into the product development process. Our team includes Product Design, Content Strategy, and UX Research.
Role: Hiring, Career development, Design ops, Design direction, Product leadership (Manager) Team: 8 Product Designers, 3 Content Strategists, 2 Researchers
THE CHALLENGE
Build a design team from scratch
In the past 3 years much of my focus was on creating the foundations for a strong design team — crafting the rituals and processes that help us work well together, defining clear roles and responsibilities, hiring and onboarding candidates, and building a scalable design system to ensure consistency across platforms.
PART 1
Hiring and career growth
As the team leader, I worked with the Design Director to establish a Career Framework where every designer knew their responsibilities and what it would take to move to the next level. This was something I talked through with the team, used to set growth goals, and checked in on progress during 1-1s.
As the company grew quickly, I wanted to ensure we were intentional about how the design team grew, and that new designers could ramp up and start adding value quickly. I worked with the Design Director to create a robust onboarding process to help designers get up to speed with the company, their product team and the design team.
PART 2
Building a design system
As our 3 platforms evolved at different speeds, the visual language began to diverge. The lack of consistency made the product feel disjointed, unconsidered and made it difficult for designers to work efficiently across platforms. We set out to create a scalable design system that designers could use across platform.
Our approach was to start with a few of the core (non-controversial) flows and views to design. From those screens, we extracted a set of core components that were versatile enough to build most of our screens from.
The team had weekly feedback sessions along with async slack feedback to make sure we were creating something everyone felt great about.
PART 3
Setting up UX Research
One of the big challenges when I started at Meetup, was to better connect the customer experience to the work we were shipping. I set up a Research team with two researchers that helped bring customer insights upstream to inform product roadmaps and make sure the organization was familiar with our customer needs.
As we built up a library of qualitative insights, we still found that teams were sometimes starting from scratch in areas we felt confident about. Myself and our Lead Researcher documented and codified our “truisms” and the insights we feel confident about through qualitative research, so that teams would have a better starting point.
BONUS
Reframing product defects through a customer lens
As a design team, we regularly identified things that needed to be fixed on the product. Sometimes we had trouble prioritizing defects that occurred often but were small in individual impact against larger more technically “broken” features.
I worked with our customer success team to reframe the way we thought about defects in our product to be more customer oriented. This helped us report and fix things that might not have been technically broken, but made the experience feel confusing, frustrating or resulted is the loss of brand love.
RESULT AND IMPACT
Design is a strong and trusted team within the organization
One of the things I’m most proud of is the strong design culture and team that we have at Meetup. We were careful in hiring entrepreneurial designers, researchers and content strategists that were ready to roll up their sleeves and do whatever it takes to push the product forward.
The company has seen some crazy ups and downs in the past few years — being acquired by WeWork, a change in leadership (entire C-suite including CEO), product direction changes and currently being spun out of WeWork. Through all the changes, we’ve maintained high retention of design team members, mostly because we all love working with each other.