Dropbox

The Portfolio Design team is a group of Senior Principal, Principal, and Staff Designers whose job is to set design direction, connect dots across the customer experience, and improve the quality of what we put in customer's hands. We tackle both breadth and depth within the company, working through challenges that require rich expertise and deep customer understanding.

The Portfolio Design team was formed from a simple observation: Siloed teams who are moving fast unintentionally ship disjointed experiences. By putting our team in between product teams, we're taking Dropbox to a premium, thoughtfully designed portfolio of tools, hence the team name.

CM

Our team worked on the web redesign project for quite some time and we all contributed in so many different ways. I worked on this project for its entirety, from the early stages of trying to build the core thesis around why change was necessary, to the final, finished result.

We weren’t just looking at how the experience had become disjointed, but we were also trying to surface opportunities for huge improvement. By bringing in new business opportunities and strategy, we created a new information architecture that would allow for big bets we were making to better land with customers.

CM

Previously, we had a user experience that directed users to separate, loosely connected products, causing friction and difficulties in navigation. For example, if someone was trying to quickly edit a PDF, add signature fields, have the document signed, then store and track it, this experience would have taken them to three different products with different identity backend systems. We knew this wasn’t working for our customers. With this in mind, we focused on integration and building common UX patterns so that our users now feel like they can accomplish work much more fluidly and naturally.

CM

We have a concept called 'core collaboration hours,' which is a four-hour window that overlaps across time zones and is reserved for synchronous collaboration, like meetings. As a maker, I find this tremendously valuable because I can do deep work outside of that window. For example, my mornings in Central Time allow me to be incredibly productive. In my last job, I had meetings scattered from eight in the morning till five in the evening, which hindered my ability to be productive and focus.

CS

Building on that, with this framework, we're asking ourselves, "Does this need to be a live, synchronous conversation? Is there another format that could be as impactful or potentially save us time?" Over time, especially as a more senior designer, you accumulate numerous one-on-one meetings from past projects across different parts of the organization. At Dropbox, there is encouragement to audit our calendars very actively, and this practice is incredibly helpful.

CS

You need to embrace ambiguity and feel excited by it. Embrace the feeling of being challenged, push past it, and dive into the fear of the unknown. I believe that people who tend to be biased towards action are particularly valuable on this team, but in general, the more you can create momentum and understand when to push things forward, the better here at Dropbox. It's crucial to ensure that you're generating energy and sharing the vision to get people excited and motivated to move forward together.

CM

I might also add deep empathy for the customers we're trying to serve and a ruthless commitment to crafting great experiences. This entails caring deeply about interaction details, typography, visual design, motion design, and all the fundamentals that contribute to creating a memorable experience. We have the opportunity to be extensively involved in the creation process and set the tone for the design throughout the organization.

They can check out jobs.dropbox.com