OpenAI

CA

I think that in bigger companies with a lot of people, there will be PMs asking you to do stuff, and you'll just be trying anything because you have the resources. In my previous company, there were a lot of things that weren't happening in the end. If you have a smaller team, you need to be very conscious of what you're working on. The challenge, though, is that we are small. So sometimes it's a lot of work, and maybe the work goes a bit faster. I'm missing a bit of the time for really exploring and researching.

JD

A lot of times, you will work with little processes, which is a challenge and a good thing at the same time. When you're in big teams, usually people tend to add a lot of processes and a lot of rules, and it slows the team down. When you're in a small team, you tend to have less process, which allows you to make decisions faster and move faster. At the same time, this can hinder collaboration or make things more difficult to understand for new joiners or even for existing team members.

JD

I think another challenge of being a small team is as soon as one person is travelling, the distance becomes big. If you have 30 people, there will always be someone somewhere. Having a small team, we have to be very focused to know what we're going to work on.

CA

But it’s also a good thing because we have to do this asynchronously, which gives us a lot of time for focused work. At my previous company, I was having meetings all day and maybe just two hours of work, which was very tiring. Here, yes, we have these difficulties with time zones, but these make us do a lot of thinking async, which gives us a lot of time to focus. I believe this type of setup is ideal for designers. The focus on deep, uninterrupted work is exactly what we thrive on.

CA

Something big that we launched was our new brand. It was exciting not only because we were shaping a better brand, but also because we were working on a visual system. I feel now it's clear that we also have these systems that allow us to publish and produce faster. With this idea of having systems instead of one-offs, we are now trying to translate this into the templates that we offer in our product.

JD

There was something that the engineers previously put together, but it was not a system that was built with the design and code in mind. So the system that I'm building is not built in Figma, it's built in the code. That's the main characteristic of the system. It's not something that is drawn in Figma and then somebody has to build it. It's written directly into the code. And because of that, it's almost like the pieces of the system are the actual product. You don't have to plan it and then build it, you just build it.

JD

Figma is an emulation of the browser. So if you look at a website, the real thing, the real website is the code. And Figma just imitates what the browser can do.

The issue is that design tools can only emulate 10% or 20% of what the browsers can do. So it's kind of trying to design a 3D object in 2D. It's extremely hard because if you want to do that, you have to define every single measurement and draw it from multiple angles. 

So it makes sense to start from 3D and then try to project it on the 2D space, which would be the design tool. The best design tool right now is CSS. It's a crazy design tool. You can do amazing stuff. You can generate sizing, spacing, colors. You can change things in seconds. You can change the entire palette of an entire website in seconds. You can experiment with multiple typographies. None of that you can do with any current design tools. Once you get into that tooling, it's just hard to go back to Figma because everything is so manual.

CA

I think that a lot of companies are trying to find the same profile, these extremely extroverted people who are part of everything and so on. One of the things that I like about what I see at Flodesk is that they understand that there are different types of people, and they don't force everyone to be the same.

In terms of the design team, one of the most important things is having a good eye for design. I think that we can have design reviews and design feedback, but there needs to be a baseline, for me, it's important that this person knows what good design is. And being a small team, I think it's also important to be very proactive because there's a lot that we need to do.

JD

One thing I've also noticed at Flodesk is that for every person, you can tell the person is very geeky in their field. I know that if Dropbox tomorrow releases a new UI, I know that I can go to Yuri and talk about how that little micro-interaction is 300 milliseconds when it's so nice. If someone is releasing a new AI product, I know I can go to Axel and discuss the onboarding process or a lot of product stuff for hours.

And the same with Claudia. If I see some new brand, I know I could go to her and discuss the kerning of the typography of that brand for hours. And I think that it's the first time I see this in everyone, like every member of the team.

JD

We're not doing this just because it's our job and we need to get paid. But I think we're doing this because each of our areas excites us. Whenever I'm done with work and I close the laptop, it doesn't mean that I won't talk about design anymore. And I won't want to discuss these topics anymore. Probably as soon as you close it, you're still going to be on Twitter or looking at other websites, still wanting to know more about it, wanting to talk about it.

CA

The brand team also uses a lot of After Effects because we have the new motion system and we need to make things move. But Figma is the most important one. And internally, the design team loves Notion.

JD

Yeah, there are a lot of tools I was surprised by. When I joined, I had to create a dictionary of the tools we are using because there's quite a lot that you're given access to. But the main ones as designers are Figma, to create the designs. Amplitude for data, Notion to document. And then I'd say product management uses ClickUp. We also use Monday.com for some other stuff.

JD

We also use Linear. I think Linear is probably one of the best products out there. We use CodeSandbox to prototype quickly. We have this pre-made CodeSandbox, where you can drop in the components from the system. So if the designer is speaking with an engineer about building something, the engineer can quickly put the components into the CodeSandbox, and they can go over the design in that CodeSandbox. And that CodeSandbox, once it's discussed, can go as-is to production. So we're not talking about a static design file, it's an actual element in the browser.