https://review.firstround.com/the-design-leadership-playbook-how-to-hire-onboard-and-manage-a-high-impact-design-org
Just about a year ago, in late 2020, Twilio closed on its acquisition of Segment, a customer data platform. For design director **Hareem Mannan,** the news prompted a powerful moment of introspection. “All sorts of folks on the Segment side really took a step back to reflect on how we got to this achievement and what made each team at the company special,” she says.
Mannan had joined Segment back in 2018, but quickly climbed the ranks as the company grew — her impressive trajectory includes stints as an individual contributor, design manager, Head of Product Design, and eventually Director of Design and Product in just three years. “I’ve been lucky to always have managers who believed I was more capable than I believed I was,” she says.
When I first got to Segment, I got the advice that the job will be as big or as small as you make it. I’ve taken that to heart and tried to be a heat map to the biggest problems I could solve in any given moment.
Amidst this rapid-fire rise, she partnered with folks all over the org chart, from different product areas, career levels and growth stages, giving her a close-up lens on some of the biggest challenges facing high-impact design teams. Along the way, she’s dished out heaps of design advice as an instructor and on her own personal blog for other heat-seeking designers. Plenty of startups focus on hiring standout IC designers but don’t put as much thought into the progression to design manager and director. In this exclusive interview, she ties all the threads together from each step of her career at Segment and delivers tailored advice for each step in a designer’s career path.
For IC designers earlier in their careers, she articulates the three specific qualities she consistently sees across the highest performers, including one under-appreciated skill not often discussed in design circles. She also draws on her ample experience hiring for growing teams, with tips for job hunters on how to stand out during interviews and the slide you need to include in your portfolio review.
For design managers and directors, she reflects on the three qualities that stand out amongst the most impactful leaders on her team, particularly their deftness for navigating cross-functional partnerships and boosting trust with their direct reports. She also draws on her own missteps as a first-time manager, and shares why a fear of micromanagement caused some unintentional headaches. Finally, she offers her advice on developing an interview loop that surfaces designer candidates with high signals for her three must-have traits, along with her ultra-tactical guide to onboarding with purpose. Let’s dive in.
Plenty of designers earlier in their career have sketched out their career goals and are eager to be a sponge for pieces of wisdom from higher-ups. But oftentimes, after years of managing later-in-career direct reports, folks higher up on the org chart have begun to lose touch with the unique challenges and opportunities facing individual contributors. Only a couple of years removed from being an IC herself, here’s how Mannan articulates the traits of the best IC designers:
As Mannan puts it, the best designers are amazing advocates for what a good experience looks like across the entire product stack. To further illustrate this point, she leans on what she admits is an overused, but apt analogy. “I like to think about product quality as an iceberg. In this case, the tip of the iceberg that’s peeking out of the water is the part of the design that you can see — the user interface that customers interact with,” says Mannan.
Dip underneath the surface of the water, and you’ll see the foundation of product quality — beyond pixels and buttons. “Are customers able to actually accomplish what they came here to do? Are they able to use the APIs that they want? The best designers that I’ve seen at Segment really look at that entire iceberg from top to bottom. Whether that’s thinking about the visual design or the product design, or even engineering workflows — they don’t just focus on their own work, but evangelize to other areas of the product as well,” she says.
Great designers understand the difference between problem-solving and problem-hunting.
Mannan sketches out an example to further illustrate sizing up the whole iceberg. “There was a period of time when Segment got the feedback that the product was a bit of a black box — you send data through Segment, and you can’t really see what’s happening to it. We just promise you that we’ll send it to all the places that you want to send your data to,” she says.
Cue the product and engineering folks clamoring to sink their teeth into the problem. “What’s happening to the data as it flows through Segment sounds like a product and engineering problem, but it’s actually a design problem. So a couple of designers on our team got together with our researcher and literally mapped out the journey of a data point as it goes through Segment. It’s not a traditional interpretation of design, and it’s not work that our customers can see,” says Mannan. “But it’s a clear illustration of what it means to invest in product quality — thinking about the journey of a data point and where it’s important to surface to our customers as they get a better sense of what’s happening under the hood at Segment.”
Mannan doesn’t expect designers earlier in their career to bring a finely-tuned sense of product quality — step one is learning good from great. “You can’t be a product quality ambassador if you don’t fully understand what great product quality looks like. So spend a couple of years learning how to evangelize and create the product quality that you want to see,” she says.
The next step is bringing other folks along with you. “Being a product quality ambassador means that you're not just evangelizing that within your own product area, but also making sure that other people are also quality ambassadors around you so that you're building this chorus of what good looks like in your company,” says Mannan.