What I learned in 1 year as a designer at Pocket, a top-notch startup in San Francisco.
This past week I completed my first year at Pocket, a startup in San Francisco. The journey started with an email from Nate the founder and CEO, a trip to San Francisco for some fancy coffee and now here I am, wiser and even more humbled by the chance to make a difference helping to create a product people love alongside an awesome team.
Without further ado, here is what I have learned about working as a designer in a top-notch startup:
Nothing is wasted.
I have worked in design consulting, large companies and startups. In large companies and agency a lot of the work we performed never saw the light of day. Whether because of politics, or a change in leadership or priority, what ends up happening is people pouring their sweat and tears on design and code that never sees the light of day.
At a startup with a small team like Pocket we can’t afford that. All of the design thinking, research, code, marketing efforts, growth efforts need to have an impact. As a company we need to prioritize the right efforts and work efficiently together, while as individual contributors we need to be effective with how we spend our time to maximize our efforts.
The beauty of this effort in prioritization and efficiency is that every single design and research project I have worked on at Pocket has been implemented into the product or A/B tested.
Everyone knows their sh*t (and then some).
Our engineers know UX. Our designers know growth hacking. Our data analytics team knows product strategy. Our community managers know code. Our partnerships team knows design thinking. You get the point. We have really talented people who are not only great at what they do, but can contribute in other areas as well. This really helps in working across functions effectively and connecting the dots on the big challenges we are working on.
Everyone is a leader.
On top of working well together, each person is a leader. When a person gets assigned a project the team expects that person to own that project wholeheartedly — to drive it, pursue it, look for support wherever she/he needs and arrive at a great solution at the end.
Trusting the process.
Here’s the one thing that is true about every startup: No one really knows what will happen. No one knows what the next step will be. One day you are a darling, on the other you could be shutting down. Or raising another round (as Pocket did earlier this year). Or getting acquired (like Meebo, my first company in the valley). Or even IPOing (like Chegg, my previous company). Who knows what the future holds?
However the best startups follow a process. To keep improving their product and service they work diligently through ideation, design, prototyping, validation and iteration. If you work at a startup that is phenomenal at this process you are constantly learning how to increase your chances of being really successful. Pocket kicks ass in this process. Having learned about Design Sprints from our investors at Google Ventures, and applied it in our work across the company, Pocket’s process is rooted in this type of continuous cycle of learning.
Ok, so that is what I had to share today. It is late, so I will hop in bed and get ready for another fun year at Pocket.
Cheers,
D.
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