Running Design Reviews

"Essentially founders of the company, they still review a hundred percent of screens that are being shipped and everything that you will see in the app pass this review. And there are a lot of eyeballs that were scrutinizing this and thinking of all possible edge cases and nuances that we need to consider to make sure that every single customer will be happy in this product, in this flow."

"I think we're relating now is any large rock that we have on the roadmap needs to be brought into the product review process, where myself and the head of design are present and giving feedback, but it needs to be structured in a way where you are asking specifically for what type of feedback you need and you're highlighting the key risks and tradeoffs that you're making implicitly in that review."

"The best thing is just seeing what's there and really being able to understand what's not working about it and what your goals are... Always think big picture before you think minutiae, because sometimes people think that... They'll throw a bunch of minutiae stuff at me, but it's because they haven't really stopped to think about what is the overall thing that's bothering them. You just never get there if you're always trying to address detail before you address the big picture stuff."

"The first thing that's most important to address is, well, is this thing actually valuable, is this solving the problem?, is it doing the job correctly... Then once we do that, then let's focus on the next layer which I think about as ease of use... And then finally, if it is valuable, it's easy to use, then I think we get into is it joyful to use, is it pleasurable."

"I usually find that if you're going to go in and run a design critique or review session, it's helpful to start off front by saying, 'Here's where we are in the process. This is the most important set of things we want to validate.'"

"I still run the design team, so I do see some of the designs on a weekly basis and then, or one of the other co-founders or head of product, we are basically the sponsors for the projects. So then we are responsible reviewing the work. And so we might just have a meeting where we go through, okay, well let's go through the demo and people can explain what's going on and how they think about it and why."

"But then before we are launching it, I might just go in and try it out and try the different states and click it around. And sometimes I find things... I just captured those things and send it to the team. And so we had to pull back the release a little bit until those things were fixed."

"Ideally in a perfect world, there's three check-in moments. There is the first principles check-in. What are you trying to build... What is the most important thing?... Once you've aligned on that, then it's like, all right, what approach are we going to use?... And then it's like, all right, this is ready to ship. Let's check in again."

"The inflection points are the kickoff... design concept review. Then, the products spec. Then, the full experience review or design crit of the end-to-end experience and launch."

"Our design leadership team does a triage of everything that got shipped into high quality or not high quality. It's just like a binary function... The reason why we believe it's not high quality is because A, B, C, D, E and we're making it available to other designers so they can actually start to build that telemetry."