6 things I learned starting a product design fellowship
This is the first of a three-part series on the Color Design Fellowship. We’re currently looking for an aspiring product designer and content designer to join our next cohort of fellows.
For a not-insignificant portion of my 20s, my resume read like a long list of internships: a series of experiences that provided space to try on new roles, develop professional skills, and contribute back to organizations I cared about. I wouldn’t be where I am today without these experiences, which included community organizing; journalism and book publishing; social media and web design; and the Peace Corps.
Once I finally found out about user experience design, it felt like a light bulb had switched on but I wasn’t sure how to break into the field. I opted for a masters program in design, found my way to content design via a fellowship program, and ultimately became a product designer. In some ways I’m the poster child for casting a wide career net in order to find the right fit, and I know I’m not the only one. So when Joanie McCollom, our Head of Design, asked if I wanted to create a fellowship program at Color targeted at people who took an unconventional path to design, I jumped at the chance.
Had I ever started a fellowship program before? No. Had I ever started a new program like this, period? Also no.
In September 2021, after a few months spent researching, coordinating, cheerleading, and evaluating candidates, we launched the Color Design Fellowship, a 12-week paid program that provides fellows with the opportunity, tools, and mentorship to tackle real-world problems through design and kick-start their professional journey.
What follows are a few things I learned along the way that I hope others find helpful as they create programs of their own. As with all things, this is a work in progress and we’ll continue to iterate and evolve as this program matures.
1. Create your committee
It took seven months to get our first program off the ground because there was so much to do and I felt uncomfortable adding tasks to my teammates’ already very full plates. Once I started asking for help, I realized how willing everyone was to lend a hand, which is just to say: unless it’s your full-time job, you’re going to want to surround yourself with enthusiastic co-conspirators to help you take on this challenge and get your program up and running.
Your committee isn’t just there for you to delegate tasks; they’re also your thought partners to help identify blind spots, brainstorm new ideas, and shape your program into something that benefits the people you hire as well as your team and community. Bringing folks from across your team and company into the mix early can also help you get the buy-in you need to support the fellows you eventually hire. Our committee right now includes members of the product design, recruiting, and human resources teams, all of whom contribute different perspectives and strengths that help drive our program forward.
2. Define your program
I wanted to be intentional about the type of program we created, so I started by posing a ton of questions: Who was our program for, and what might success look like for our ideal candidate? How long should our program be, and what type of budget were we working with? (Pay 👏 your 👏 fellows.) How would this program benefit our fellows and add value to our team? I compiled the answers in a shareable one-pager stating our goal for this program, our proposed timelines, criteria for our “ideal” candidate, and the number of candidates we could reasonably support.
I also created the following set of principles to help guide our decisions as we went, both in terms of who we wanted to hire and how we wanted to run the program.
- Inclusivity: We seek to recruit a wide range of candidates that represent the diversity of the U.S. We don’t recruit exclusively from universities, nor do we prioritize those who have completed big-name intern/fellowships over those with less experience or who live outside of major tech hubs.
- Ownership: We trust our fellows to take on challenging projects, and provide them with the time and tools necessary to make an impact at Color.
- Mentorship: We offer support and guidance along the way to help each fellow grow toward their goals, and to help them achieve a successful result.
- Collaboration: We make sure fellows have the opportunity to work with cross-functional partners during their time at Color.
- Do-ability: We define projects and agree on an achievable scope before a fellow joins each team to make sure they have space/time to receive feedback and iterate. If and when additional project needs arise, we help the fellow prioritize.
- Expectations: We set clear expectations for the fellowship from the outset, including any potential future opportunities at Color. Fellows understand from day one what they might come away with at the end of the fellowship.
Getting clear on what we were trying to achieve was incredibly helpful in getting buy-in across the company and helping folks get up to speed on both the “what” and the “why” of the fellowship.
3. Make your application accessible
Job applications are too often a black box, and what you’re expecting from candidates shouldn’t be a mystery. A few years ago, I read an article about how comedian Samantha Bee recruited one of the most diverse writing staffs in late night TV, and I wanted to emulate that. Folks that are new to design might not have a formal portfolio or case study to present, and we wanted to account for that in our application. To level the playing field, we asked applicants to complete a short design activity. We also provided them with clear guidelines and a Google Slides template showing what their case study presentation should look like, including notes on formatting and industry terminology, so that newcomers to the design field wouldn’t be penalized for their lack of experience. We made sure that the activity could be reasonably completed in the allocated time using free and accessible software, and in our evaluations we prioritized the thought behind design decisions over the overall aesthetics of the final mocks. Design activities have rightly gotten pushback over the years; if you decide to require an activity as part of your application, make sure it’s not related to the work your company does, and that you’ve scoped it to be achievable in the time allocated.
4. Come up with an evaluation strategy
Being a new program, I wasn’t sure we’d get any applicants, so I was floored (and a little overwhelmed) when we got more than 250 in a little under two weeks. We’re lucky to have an incredible recruiting team at Color that made all of this feel manageable, but it became apparent very quickly that we needed more hands on deck to evaluate candidates. I found it helpful to create a Slack channel for fellowship updates where I could share progress, solicit feedback, and ask for help (such as reviewing applications) when the time came.
With the help of a rubric and a spreadsheet to aggregate scores, members of the design team double-reviewed each candidate’s design activity. Creating a rubric here is crucial — each evaluator has their own idea of what they’d like to see and brings their own set of biases, so clearly stating what differentiates a “1” from a “4” in each category ensures you’ll have more consistent outcomes. Agree on an application review process ahead of time, divide the work into manageable chunks, and set clear timelines to keep the process moving.
5. Create a foundation for success
Hiring your fellows is just the beginning; before they start, ask yourself what types of support you can put in place to ensure their success. This is especially important if you’re hiring candidates with less experience. On their first day, I provided our fellows with a Figma onboarding file to help them ramp up and familiarize themselves with our design tools. This file included a checklist of starter tasks related to their assigned project, as well as a list of designers and cross-functional partners to meet with. To create consistency, we assigned each fellow a dedicated mentor on the design team to bounce ideas off of and get feedback throughout their time at Color. We also implemented a feedback cycle to help fellows get a feel for how they were doing and identify growth areas.
It’s just as important to create structure within your team before your fellows start. Set clear expectations about how they might support a fellow joining their project, work together to identify and scope projects, and provide them with enough lead time to plan and prepare for the fellow’s arrival. Once your fellows have arrived, check in with project leads throughout the project to make sure they’re feeling supported and course-correct as needed.
6. Learn, adapt, repeat
We set expectations from the outset that this was our first time running the fellowship program, and invited our fellows to give feedback along the way about what was working well and (more importantly) what wasn’t. Initially, we planned for each fellow to cycle through three different teams over 12 weeks. Though we tried our best to make sure each project could be completed within a two- to three-week rotation, we didn’t factor in how things like company-wide hack weeks and holidays might throw off our schedule. Instead of moving ahead as planned, we decided that two rotations felt more manageable. Create space to check in with yourself and your fellows to see how things are going, and make note of what you can change now versus what you can do differently next time.
So far, the Color Design Fellowship has been a huge success, and we couldn’t be more pleased with the talented designers that brought our program to life, Blanca Diaz and Michelle Strecker. As with all design projects, our Fellowship Program will continue to evolve as we learn, and we’re excited to welcome a product design and content design fellow to our team this Spring. To apply, please visit color.com/careers.
