Catching up with Charles Chen

An interview with our longest tenured designer here at RocketReach.

When did you know you wanted to go into design?

It took me longer than I’d like to admit, if I’m being honest. Growing up with Asian parents meant more or less that you could be anything you wanted to be, so long as it was a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. I went through my first year of engineering school before realizing it wasn’t for me and dropping out. It was also when I discovered graffiti, which was a real shot in the arm in terms of creativity. It took me a few years of community college and art school to help guide me toward a career in design. I graduated from my undergrad program with a Bachelor’s Degree in Graphic Design and a specialization in UX.

How did you find RocketReach?

I was fortunate enough that they found me. I was feeling somewhat lonely and listless at the last company I worked at, as most of my favorite coworkers had moved departments. Some of my past coworkers had moved on using Hired.com, and so I just put my information on, and someone from RocketReach found my profile and made it clear they wanted to interview me. At the time, they weren’t sure they had enough work to employ me full time, and I wasn’t certain I wanted to be at a startup and lose the stability of my job, so we agreed that I would join the team on a contract basis. After a year of contracted employment, we were both happy and so I was extended the full-time offer at the first company meeting in San Francisco!

Why RocketReach as opposed to bigger companies or other startups?

I’m thrilled with the sheer breadth of things I get to work on in a startup environment. As a self-appointed design generalist, I find fulfillment in working on different aspects of design, whether it’s UX-specific things like interviews and research, or design generalist tasks like marketing documents and video production. I’ve also found such a wonderful kinship with the team we’ve built here. The culture feels real, and there’s a genuinely collaborative environment with feedback I really value. Having worked in dysfunctional startup environments, I’m really thankful for the stable and growing culture at RocketReach, and I feel like I really belong as a member of this team.

What areas do you think your design career has helped you grow in your non-professional life?

I’ve become more accustomed to finding success through iteration. Designers (especially product designers!) know very well that the first try doesn’t always hit the mark, and that successive iterations smooth over rough edges and fix finicky issues to end up with the best version of something. As a result, I’ve learned to be more patient with myself, to seek more feedback, and to realize that whether I’m making coffee, cocktails, or cucumber sunomono, the best way to go about it is to seek honest feedback and hone the craft until what you produce is actually, genuinely good.

What would you change about your early career decisions and actions knowing what you know now?

I regret not taking an IBM internship I was offered. I think at the time I was feeling homesick and just wanted to spend time with and help out my family, but in retrospect I regret not taking it and seeing what it would have done for my career at the time. Otherwise, I’m pretty happy with the path I took and I’m thankful for the mentors I’ve met along the way.

UX Design is often described as a “T”. Jack of all trades, master of one. Do you agree with this assessment? What is your mastery?

I can at least say that in my own personal experience, this is very true. I’m not necessarily a master of any particular design discipline, but I think I’ve got a pretty significant spread as far as design disciplines go. I’m most comfortable in the areas of UI, motion , document, and brand design. Thanks to this role, I’m also developing skills in UX design and UX research.

If you could go tell 19 year old you who was just starting their career out a bit of advice, what would it be?

I think I’d tell my younger self to swing for the fences more. It’s taken me a long time to come out of my shell and I think even now I sometimes err toward the side of comfort and safety, producing a design that is more likely to gain support because it’s easier to implement, rather than something that’s truly game-changing. (I’m very thankful to Tyler for advocating this particular point!)

I’d also tell my past self that I can advocate for myself more in terms of doing what I want to be doing. I’ve spent the lion’s share of my career so far doing what has been asked of me, and maybe that’s led to more making others happy and less doing the work that I really want to be doing. I certainly feel like I’ve ended up in a position now where I’ve got more agency over the type of work I do.

Any shortcuts of life tips for designers looking to break into the industry?

Seek constant feedback until it’s second nature. Designers really need to build this muscle of being able to intuit the type of feedback you receive from your stakeholders. Early on in your career, it’s really easy to build something, get attached, and have difficulty expecting or integrating feedback. If you can build something and understand what’s good and bad about it on the fly, you can quickly adjust and iterate to produce something that will get past all of your stakeholders.

Lastly, any new design technologies that are exciting to you that you’d like to keep exploring and pushing the limits of?

I’m excited about anything that helps designers produce more varied output than just the traditional image. In the past decade, product design software has gone from being glorified Illustrator clones, to allowing us to interface with developers more closely with precise callouts for color, motion, and typography. New technologies like Rive and Webflow allow designers to produce assets and websites without even needing to interface with developers at all. I’m not looking to cut developers out of the equation or anything, but enabling designers to produce more things is always a plus in my book.