How the role of design at Carta has changed over the last 5+ years
Welcome to another edition of Design Voices, where we invite industry leaders and experts at Carta to share their insights and experiences on the world of design.
Today, we are excited to feature Jun Fan, a lead product designer on the venture capital and LLC teams at Carta. Having been at Carta for over 5 years, Jun has a wealth of knowledge she’s gained from her years of experience. Let’s learn more about her journey!
Why are you a designer?
I knew I wanted to do something creative since I was a kid. I dreamt of having a range of careers: I was keen on sketching on whatever materials I could get my hands on. I thought I wanted to be a fashion or car designer for a while. Later, I thought about being an architect. Music has always been a huge influence on me. Like many Asian kids, I was a serious piano player growing up, and I played the flute in orchestras that toured around the world. Because of that I was briefly into the idea of becoming a professional pianist as well. I somehow ended up studying communication in college and I hated it. The next thing I knew, I’m in Seattle where there are lots of tech influences. Naturally I discovered this field of product design, where I am able to marry logical thinking and creativity. Being a designer at Carta, I always feel excited to translate complicated notions and systems into something tangible and understandable for users.
What drew you to Carta initially?
It was Carta’s “personality” that drew me here. I had no idea what a cap table was, not to mention 409A, ASC 820, etc. For someone fresh out of college, the Carta of six years ago simply looked cool. I still remember the day I came in for my on-site interview in Carta’s old Seattle office — it looked more like a rusty, dark, boutique coffee shop rather than an office. The four conference rooms in the center were named Aviary, Terrarium, Aquarium, and Lion’s Den. Who cares if they didn’t have any windows 😜? As the conversations flowed, I knew it was a good fit. Before the interview, I had read online about the hackathons, 8:30am start time, free haircuts onsite, no shoes policy, camping trips, etc. Some of these rituals are no longer here today, but the culture still remains. I love things are a bit quirky.
What was designing at Carta like when you initially started? And what are some of the biggest changes?
When I interviewed with Carta, there was a coding round for design interviewees to write basic HTML/CSS in Codepen. At that time, all designers were called “Producers” and were expected to write code and commit to GitHub. During my first month, all I did was refactor tons of tables in React. For my first product I designed here, I spent a handful of my time writing code (that went into production) for a new tracker component. There wasn’t a design system back then — all of us simply remembered the CSS classes, the code needed for styling products, by heart. We used these classes everyday to build new products: as producers, the more familiar you get with CSS classes, the faster you could contribute. We scaled so fast in these years, from 300 to ~2000 people in 4 years. Looking back, I think having a deep understanding of front-end code and how React components worked, made us realize very early on, that we needed a design system to scale fast. That inspired us to build the Ink design system which we still use and continually develop today.
How have you seen Carta’s design culture shift over the last 5 years? What are the key turning points?
I think design culture is a subset of Carta’s culture.
I love the transparency here at Carta — one of our key operating principles is to Play in the Open. Everyone can see and feel that, in weekly meetings like Show and Tell, we show whatever we are working on regardless of how polished it is — some design sketches, a demo that ends up broken, or even a working excel sheet is all fair game.
Being helpful is another big one. This is something I have experienced since day one. If you have any questions, just ask — someone will help you out, as long as you are willing to learn. For my first project, I had to Slack every valuation analyst, and have them teach me how to do valuations. I am very grateful that my co-workers on the other side of the business can also teach me finance. Over the years, the format has changed but the core hasn’t. There’s been much less chaos and more process (in a good way).
The same applies for the design team and design process. Like lots of companies at this similar stage, we suffered from growing pains. Soon after I started, we realized the inefficiencies of the producer role, so it quickly split into product designer, product manager, and design technologist. Many products couldn’t keep up with the pace of the business, so there were always product areas that didn’t have designers. This is where ink, our design system, came into play. The good thing was that the designers at Carta already knew how to code. So we started to build ink in 2018. We collaborated, debated and iterated a lot on the processes. For example, how should designers contribute to ink during its infancy period? How do designers work in different product domains with unique requirements, while trying to be consistent? We debated over the years. Honestly, everything is changing constantly — the roadmap, the business goal, the leadership, etc. Gradually you adapt and realize the importance of understanding the rationale behind the changes. Running a business org is similar to the design process — you have goals and stakeholders, but there can be a lot of back and forth on the process to get there. It’s very iterative.
What hasn’t changed is the people and culture. There’s always new things to learn, and new problems to solve.
What are some things you’ve learned over the years? What would you tell yourself 5 years ago?
- Learn to embrace change. Like I mentioned before, understanding the “why” behind changes is what makes sense of them. Sometimes when the rationales aren’t clear, it’s important to speak up and ask why.
- Stay humble, stay hungry — I am the kind of person who enjoys new things. Challenges keep me excited and motivated. To be honest, I didn’t expect to stay here that long at all in the beginning. But Carta keeps showing me new territories to learn and problems to solve for, so I’m never bored. I am very grateful for that.
- Last but not least: It’s ok if you keep breaking your local development environment — you won’t need to worry about it soon.
Thanks for reading this edition of Design Voices! This article has been conducted and edited by Shan Feng and Chloe Thai. You can also follow us on Instagram and read our other articles here.
