I’m joining Scale!

I am happy to announce I’m joining Scale! I want to share with you the story behind this exciting new journey.

My Previous Chapter:

Three years ago, I was fortunate in joining Auth0 as the first designer on the founding team of five people. During my time there, I designed and developed the company’s brand and website, the products Dashboard, Webtask, Passwordless, Guardian, and Lock, and its design system, Styleguide.

The company grew to 200 employees, and I was able to build a Design Team of 10 people, who passionately worked along side me in product and marketing design . I will forever be grateful for my time and experience at Auth0.

Enter Scale

A few months ago on a visit to San Francisco, I was introduced to Scale and to the idea of being their designer. I met with Alex and Lucy, and they shared their excitement about well-crafted design applied to developer products, which is my passion and expertise.

Working at startups has shown me first-hand the power of embracing constraints and I believe the best way to succeed in product design and development is with small teams of exceptional specialists. As companies grow so do the diversity of tasks. So how do you stay lean and efficient? Meet Scale.

An API for Human Work for any developer in the world to use. An entire team of qualified individuals one REST API call away.

I can summarize my decision to join their team in the following:

• Founders, culture and values: Alex and Lucy met working together at Quora a few years ago. This is a very important thing for me as I like to see founders who have previously worked together before starting a new company.
• Product & Vision: This company has a huge opportunity to change the way we work and the way we interact with technology.
• Customers: Another strong point in favor of joining this team is the product already works on large enterprises like Uber, Alphabet, P&G, and Houzz.
• Growth: The company is growing rapidly. After seeing their internal dashboard, I realized I was joining something that’s working. Customers love it.
• Investors: They started at Y Combinator, and in 8 months they had a strong product and great customers. The best investors in the Bay Area are backing Scale, and their advisers are people with extraordinary experience in the field.
• My passion: I realized, while I was interviewing, that my passion is to design for the developer experience, as I did before for Auth0 and Gitlab. Alex, Lucy, and their investors believe in the same values as I: Design is the silent ambassador of your brand.

My role

This road map is what my Scale team and I will follow for the next 6 months:

• Branding: I am going to help develop our branding. We want our identity to communicate how easy and enjoyable your work can be with the help of Scale.
• Website: My plan for the website is to keep it small, with no more than 15 pages, where all the communication is clear and where the content precedes the design. I will use live demos of Scale, as I did in my previous positions.
• Blog: Medium is great, but as we grow, we want our own house!
• Dashboard: With the help of user research, I plan to improve our new user on-boarding and customer dashboards.
• Integration: I’m going to unify the Website, Blog and Docs with a React + Next.JS app, to provide a single destination and better experience for our visitors.

Do you have tasks to Scale?
If you have any processes at your company/organization that you would like to automate with a simple API call, please get in touch!

Find me on Twitter: @rickyrauch

Thank you.