Meet Flexport’s UX Team: Alexa Kaminsky, Product Design Manager
By Menglu Gao and Alexa Kaminsky
Get to know Alexa, a Product Design Manager on our Customs Clearance team! Our Flexport Customs team aims to take away the complexity involved in moving goods across borders and let our customers clear their goods with ease. The Customs Clearance team specifically focuses on building solutions that help Flexport’s customs operators and brokers efficiently clear customs on time and compliantly.
How did you get into Product Design?
I originally went to Georgia Tech and majored in Biomedical Engineering. I realized it wasn’t for me when I thought about living the rest of my life in a lab. I had taken a web design class in high school that I loved so I ended up switching my major to Computational Media.
Computational Media was basically a combination of Computer Science and Design. You were really able to make the major your own since you were exposed to so many different classes: create your own Gameboy game, information visualization, design of online communities, ethics in computing, motion graphics, 3d modeling, and more.
Through the exposure to the different classes, I found that I loved understanding how people think and solving problems in innovative ways.
Why did you join Flexport? What keeps you here?
I knew absolutely nothing about global trade before I joined Flexport but I loved the mission to “Make global trade easier for everyone”. I watched a video of the founder, Ryan Peterson, explaining Flexport’s vision and realized that this was a really complex and hairy problem space that needed solving.
I’m still at Flexport for three reasons. First, the people here are so smart and friendly. You should never be the smartest person in the room and that never happens to me here. Second, we’ve only made a tiny dent in making global trade easier for everyone. There is so much to still do and it’s exciting. Third, I’ve become more worldly and feel like I’ve taken a crash course in economics. I’m ashamed to admit it but before joining Flexport, I didn’t even know that the US and China were in a trade war.
What does your day-to-day look like? What are you working on currently?
I’m leading a team of two product designers and a UX researcher that builds products that help our customers clear customs on time, compliantly, and at the lowest cost possible. Our team is located in Amsterdam and we collaborate closely with our sister team in San Francisco.
My day to day consists of supporting my team members by ensuring they have what they need to work on their projects: collaborating with product, engineering and business stakeholders on the strategy and direction of our product area, and by creating processes and resources to enable us to work smarter, more collaboratively, and produce higher quality solutions. AKA a lot of meetings, but that comes with the territory :)
What types of design challenges will you be working on in the coming year?
It’s an exciting time in our domain area. We are building new features to attract new customers and improving our internal operators’ workflow so that they can do their work more efficiently and happily.
The workflows and features that we need to build are bespoke to our industry, which is a fun challenge to tackle. You need to build a deep understanding of the domain and user problems in a complex system. We have built a strong relationship with our users since they are internal and we get to work very closely with our business stakeholders. This has been very different compared to anywhere else that I have worked.
What’s the design culture like at Flexport?
We’ve doubled in size since I started working at Flexport which has been really exciting. Even though we are spread out through 7 different offices around the world, it still feels like a welcoming and intimate community.
Everyone is smart, knowledgeable in their domain area and always willing to help. We have fun in our watercooler slack channels, are constantly working to improve our design culture through our different workstreams and up the quality of our work through our reviews and collaborative work sessions.
Creative outlets are so important to have as a designer, what do you like to do when you’re not designing to help inspire your work?
I love listening to music and playing around on my piano and making DJ sets. I also took a few music production classes a few years ago. Making DJ sets or playing on the piano helps me get out of my perfectionism tendencies. You always know that the first thing you make will not be perfect. You have to keep going and pushing through the messy middle to get to something good. Very similar to the design process.
If you weren’t a designer, what would you be doing for a living?
Sometimes I think I should have followed my dream as an 8 year old to be a cruise ship architect that lives in Australia. I always loved playing the Sims and designing houses as a kid. Even today, one of the first apps I check while I am still in bed is the Netherlands equivalent to Zillow. I’d love to design my own home one day.
