Finding Your Product’s Level of Readiness and Manifesting Design systems (w/ Keenan Cummings, Airbnb)


Our guest today is the inspiring Keenan Cummings, Team Leader at Airbnb and former Co-founder/Creative Director of Days (acquired by Yahoo!) and the Designers Debate Club.
Keenan started his career as a designer in NYC, working in brand agencies and doing print work, where he landed what he thought would be a dream project, redesigning and rebranding the Chicago Cubs. However Keenan felt that there were bigger problems he wanted to dive in to, so he made the transition into digital design. He co-founded Days app, and then found his path into product design eventually joining Airbnb, where he led the development of their design systems and leads an extraordinary team.
Victor Yocco (UX researcher & Author) on applying psychological theory to digital design


David was fortunate today to sit down and have a great conversation with author and UX researcher Victor Yocco. With Victor he discusses how UX research fits into the workflow, what it takes to create a really good experience, and how user psychology comes into play in design.
Jon Lax from Facebook on the Teehan + Lax story, and useful tips for design managers


This week we were fortunate enough to meet face to face with Jon Lax, Director of Product Design at Facebook. In this insightful and brutally honest conversation, Jon shares the lessons he learned while scaling Teehan+Lax to almost 50 employees.
Scaling a Design Team, Episode #5: Feat. Joel Califa, Product Design Lead at Digital Ocean


This week we’re thrilled to share with you our talk with Joel Califa (twitter). Joel is a Product Design Lead at DigitalOcean, Founder of Design & Code, and Front-End Instructor at GA . On this call with us is Noam Liss, senior product designer at SimilarWeb.
Scaling a Design Team, Episode #4: Feat. Emmet Connolly, Director of Product Design at Intercom


This week we’re thrilled to share with you our talk with Emmet Connolly. Emmet is Intercom’s Product Design Director. Also joining us on this call is Noam Liss, senior product designer at SimilarWeb. Talking with Emmet was insightful, and we learned a lot about the way Intercom’s design team works and scaled.
Scaling a Design Team, Episode #3: Feat. Melissa Hajj, Design Manager at Facebook


This week we’re coming at you from the Facebook Tel Aviv office, where we were lucky to have two special guests join us, Melissa Hajj and Noam Liss. Melissa is the head of Facebook’s core growth design team, whose stated mission is connecting the next billion people to Facebook (no big deal). Noam is a senior product designer at SimilarWeb and the editor in chief of Pixel Perfect Magazine. Melissa was full of insights and gave us great ideas for improving organizational structure, design leadership, and for creating the ideal work environment. An hour with her was just not enough.
Scaling a Design Team, Episode #2: The Hacking UI Design Panel event in San Francisco


This November we teamed up with Design&Startups and launched a free product design panel event, discussing product team structures, responsibilities, and workflows. It was an amazing experience for me hosting the first ever Hacking UI event in San Francisco. The panelists were amazing and listening to what they had to say was super insightful!
Scaling a Design Team, Episode #1: feat. Billy Kiely, VP Product at Invision


In this episode we talked with the amazing Billy Kiely, VP Product of Invision. Billy was the first designer at Invision, and he scaled the company alongside Clark, the CEO, with design thinking as one of it’s core values. We talk about the structure of Invision’s product team, about how Billy made hiring decisions, what it’s like to work at Invision on a daily basis, and more.
This is our first episode, so we would love to hear your feedback! Write us in the comments!