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A Solo Designer’s Journey in a Fast-Growing Startup
From design-team-of-thirty to design-team-of-one
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Over the past two years, I have been a design-team-of-one at a fast-growing startup, and the experience has been nothing short of a rollercoaster. In the absence of a dedicated design team, I’ve found myself collaborating with a product manager, front-end engineers, project managers, subject matter experts and various other colleagues to navigate the intricate world of design, ideation, testing, and critiques.
To give you some more context, before I joined start-up, I had worked in a much larger company, with a large-scoped product, which had a strong team of 30 designers. As you can imagine, we had an established design culture and stack of UX tools and practices we used on a daily basis. And, as you also can imagine, my life and workflow changed completely, when I started at a company, where this type of culture didn’t yet exist. Having only 2 years of experience and being used to the previous way of work, I faced some challenges (and continue facing some, to be completely honest): getting buy-in on tools and paid licences (in the beginning we had just one Figma file!), introducing new practices to the team of developers, understanding user needs for the technically-heavy product, ideating alone and with my team, establishing design culture and…