Product Design Around the Globe: My First Months as Product Designer at Hopper
Changing jobs is not always an easy decision to make, especially when it requires moving across the globe. Sometimes all you need is a new challenge to get you out of your comfort zone and help you grow professionally. In this article, I’m going to write a bit about my experience of moving to a new country for work, and some of the things I’ve learned in my first 8 months as a Product Designer at Hopper.
My girlfriend and I are both citizens of the world, as my parents would say, having already lived in Florence, Lyon, and Worcester in different moments of our lives, and finally, Berlin, where we actually met. At the beginning of 2019, we started rethinking our professional lives again, and how we both wanted a fresh start — experience a new country, a new culture, and new challenges. That’s when Hopper (and Montreal) came in.
My relationship with Hopper actually started a long time ago in mid-2016 when I first moved from Porto Alegre, Brazil to Berlin for work. That’s when Hopper became a long-distance friend of mine. My brother first introduced me to the app as an option to search for good deals to fly back home. I decided to give it a try and I absolutely loved the idea of being able to “watch” certain routes if I wasn’t ready to buy and be notified of the best time to book. But as someone with a background (and passion) in graphic design, the creative aspect of the app was what really made me fall in love: the brand, the tone of voice, the illustrations and the bunnies… those bunnies made every search a fun experience!
Life in Berlin moved on. Like that good old friend you don’t text every day, but check in on every once in a while, I would watch a flight here and there, and check what was going on with Hopper. To be honest, I never really thought this relationship would change its status, until the moment Hopper started looking for a new designer while I was also looking for a new adventure. After a lot of conversation, the stars aligned and my friend Hopper and I decided it was time to get closer together.
Eight months ago, my girlfriend and I packed our lives into 4 suitcases and boarded a one-way to Montreal (TXL-YUL) not knowing exactly what to expect, but excited to kick off a new chapter of our lives together. And for me, a new professional challenge was about to start at Hopper.
When moving to a new country for work, it’s hard to know what to expect. When you say yes to a job offer in a new place, you’re saying yes to a lot of other things as well: you will be immersed in a new culture and exposed to a whole new work environment.
Adjusting from Berlin to Montreal
I’ve been an ex-pat a few times now, and it’s always challenging when moving to a new place — it’s just part of the deal. The move from Berlin to Montreal, though, was surprisingly less of a transition than I was expecting. I had thought that moving from Western Europe to North America would be more of a shock, but Berlin and Montreal share more similarities than I realized.
Berlin, as a city that had a wall splitting it into two 30 years ago, nowadays tries its best to forget the past and embrace people from all over the world. This makes it really easy for everyone to find their place, even when language is a barrier. Montreal has a different history, but as a growing bilingual city located in North America, it becomes attractive for people willing to find a job or study in English and at the same time be exposed and learn French, making the city diverse and welcoming.
A new work environment
My previous company was much smaller than Hopper — we were around 85 employees in 2 different office locations. Here, we are around 380 people in 7 offices, which makes collaborating remotely a core part of the workflow. Making the change from a smaller to a larger company, I’ve also adjusted to the different ways we deal with processes, tools, communication flows, and how decisions are made and teams are structured.
Some lessons learned (so far)
Working at a fast-paced and growing company requires alignment between the employees and the company goals in order to walk in the same direction and deliver quality outcomes. Here are some of the things I’ve learned working at Hopper so far:
1. The Importance of a Supportive Team
The way you feel about the team you work closely with has a massive impact on your general happiness, professional growth, and results delivered. For this reason, when deciding to change companies, it’s important to always take team structure into consideration. I remember feeling really comfortable during the whole (remote) hiring process with Hopper and how every person I spoke to made me feel like I was already part of the team. After arriving in Montreal, getting familiar with the processes and being immersed in the team’s culture, I couldn’t be happier to be part of such a talented design team that:
- Is extremely friendly and transparent
- Prioritizes collaboration through constant meetings and open feedback sessions
- Learns fast and executes
- Uses data to inform decision-making and always keeps the user in mind
2. A Culture of Experimentation Accelerates Results
Coming from a smaller company, I was used to different processes and ways to try to solve problems. Because we had a smaller team and user base, we would take time to validate an idea with users through prototypes and the results from those tests would guide the solution we would implement. I wasn’t familiar with the term “experiment” before starting work at Hopper and this changed my perspective on how quickly ideas can be designed, implemented, shipped, and validated. This concept allows us to learn with real-world data, accelerates innovation, and helps the company to make informed decisions at high velocity.
3. Be Proactive and Propose Solutions
A complex app is a product touched by lots of different hands. When multiple teams are jostling for the same screens to display the features they’re working on or reusing the same components for completely different purposes all over the app, it’s pretty easy to lose track of the whole user experience. When something doesn’t feel right and data can support that feeling, we (not just designers) are encouraged to identify what the problem might be, proactively offer solutions, and quickly test it. Speed matters in business, and if users are constantly dropping off at certain steps of the flow, the sooner you fix it, the sooner you will have a positive impact.
4. Own What You Build
It’s often said that bigger companies use some sort of waterfall process where decisions are top-down, employees act as executors, and most of the time their voices are not heard. Even though Hopper is already considered a big company (by my parameters), that is not the case around here. While we all have a primary goal to follow, the teams and projects are structured to allow ownership and autonomy for each individual on a company level, which also reflects on the design team. Every designer is trusted to figure out the best solution for the problem they’re trying to solve and it happens naturally as a byproduct of the company culture.
Final thoughts
As I mentioned, moving across the globe to a place you’ve never been before for work can be challenging. We arrived in Montreal in the so-called “in-between” season, right after winter and before summer, when the snow was melting and the city looked quite dirty. We jumped from Airbnb to Airbnb so many times while trying to find an apartment and, some days we even asked ourselves: “What have we done?”
But soon we started creating our own routine and getting familiar with the city. My girlfriend found a job and I was happy — growing, learning and adapted to my new life at Hopper. Summer slowly kicked in and we started to see another side of Montreal that made us start saying to ourselves: “I think we did the right thing!”
These first 8 months passed so fast that it feels like it all happened a week ago. But let’s be honest, it just feels like that when the journey is exciting!
Did you like what you read? Join us, Hopper is hiring! Check out our open opportunities here.
