Flodesk

CG

Working in a small team can be challenging, as things tend to move quickly. It's crucial to be mindful of your workload and priorities. While the work is often dynamic and engaging, finding time to explore or conduct deep research can be tricky. The key is finding the right balance between getting things done and making space for growth and innovation.

DJ

While having many processes can slow teams down, having too few guidelines can also be challenging, as it might make it harder to collaborate and to navigate work for new joiners, and even for existing team members. When I joined Flodesk we had minimal guidelines, which in some ways was challenging. However, it was also an opportunity to contribute to developing those guidelines. Now, we're in a much better position (and double in size!). The key to me is to strike a balance between providing clarity and allowing for flexibility.

CG

It’s also a good thing because we have to communicate with our coworkers asynchronously, which gives us a lot of time for focused work. As creatives, having meetings all day and maybe just two hours of work can be extremely tiring. Here, we have this complexity with time zones, but these make us think 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 precisely what we thrive on.

CG

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.

HA

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.

CG

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.

DJ

Someone with an incredible eye for detail, a good taste for visuals, and the drive to go and talk to our members and understand their problems and needs very well. You love well crafted products and enjoy talking about the small details without losing focus on the big picture.

YM

We're looking for people that are passionate about their craft. The ones that always try different approaches, or work by themselves to improve an area of the product not because it's on the roadmap, but because they see it could be done better. We're constantly sharing news from the industry, and trying to keep ourselves updated. Design is not only our work, it's our day-to-day.

CG

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.

DJ

As a designer, the main ones are Figma to create the designs, Google Docs to document anything, and we recently introduced Linear to manage projects (it’s so good!). We also rely quite a lot on Frill to get feature requests, and Amplitude to understand data.

HA

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.