(Two) Day(s) in the Life of a Rubrik Designer
A Work-From-Home vs. an In-Office Day of a Product Designer at Rubrik
Hi there! I’m a product designer at Rubrik, focusing on design systems. As a designer on the design systems team, my day-to-day looks different from that of a UX designer on the team.
Rather than working on specific product areas, my role consists of building and maintaining components in our design system, as well as supporting the design team with tooling, processes, and guidance on development. I collaborate with designers and UI engineers to identify technical needs and communication inefficiencies to solve within the design system, from design to implementation.
I joined Rubrik in March 2021, when the company work policy was fully remote. When the Palo Alto office opened for return to office in 2022, designers local to HQ started adopting a hybrid work schedule. I currently go to the office one to two days a week, and work from home the rest of the week.
In this blog, I’ll go through what a day working from home versus working in-office is like as a product designer at Rubrik, and highlight key differences I experience with a hybrid work model.
What a typical day looks like
Regardless of where my work location is, my workday roughly follows a schedule like this:
Early Morning — Team meetings (e.g. design team all-hands, design systems engineering sync)
Late Morning — Online hour (e.g. replying to messages and comments, reviewing design diffs)
Early Afternoon — 1:1 syncs (e.g. with designers, UI engineers, managers)
Late Afternoon — Focus time (e.g. components work, design reviews, creating tickets)
Now, let’s take a look at how this schedule differs when I work from home and when I’m at the office.
What a WFH (work-from-home) day looks like
Our design team is made up of team members across more than five time zones, with a mixture of hybrid and remote work models. Not only does this allow me to choose the working style that is best for me, the diversity in geography drives our team to operate with a digital-first approach in our processes.
Most of the week, I work from home, so here’s what a Tuesday may look like for me.
9–10 am: Product Design All-Hands
Our weekly product design team meeting happens on Tuesdays, which includes all the designers, managers, UX researchers, and UX writers.
The purpose of this meeting is to inform everyone on company-level news, and also be an open discussion forum for team members to ask questions and share their thoughts. In the first half, Oded, our VP of Design, shares important announcements and reminders to the group; in the second half, other team members may present items they’d like to share to the whole team.
10–10:30 am: Design Systems Team Meeting
There are currently four of us on the design systems team at Rubrik: a director, a principal designer, and 2 designers. We have a weekly sync to check in on everyone’s workload, help review any blockers, and share design inspiration we came across that week.
10:30–11 am: Messages + reviews
Every morning, the start of my day begins with catching up on messages in Slack, Figma, Jira, and my email inbox. Since our design team spans multiple time zones, including India and Israel, asynchronous communication is a natural part of our work culture.
During this time, I also create an outline of the tasks I want to accomplish for the day, looking at in-progress items I had from the day before, and new requests that came in.
11 am–12 pm: 1:1 with teammate
I have a weekly 1:1 with my fellow designer on the design systems team. In addition to discussing work items and divvying up design requests, we also use part of the time as a live work session.
We may also use this time to audit the UI of a feature, do some brainstorming work in FigJam, or help each other troubleshoot a complex component in Figma.
12–1 pm: Lunch break
I eat lunch at home, and if the weather is nice out, I go for a short walk in Hayes Valley to clear my mind and get a coffee.
1–2 pm: Design syncs
When I’m working on a component request or design review that I feel I need more context, I schedule a one-time sync with the designer or engineer to get my questions answered. These meetings are often in the early afternoon on days when I work from home, as most people’s mornings are often already taken up by recurring meetings, and late afternoons are reserved for head-down work.
2–5 pm: Focus time
Likewise, I have a daily focus block on my calendar so I can have uninterrupted time for design work. During this time, I’m either building or updating components in our design libraries, designing icons, writing components documentation, and/or creating development requests in Jira.
What an in-office day looks like
Our Palo Alto design team goes to the office on Thursdays, with some people going a couple other days of the week as well.
Here’s what a Thursday may look like for me.
9 am: Arrive at the office
I commute from San Francisco to the office in Palo Alto, which takes me around 45 minutes by car. The drive on the I-280 highway is so calming in the morning, and I love seeing the sky gradually get sunnier as I make my way down the Bay Area peninsula.
A podcast I sometimes listen to during my drive is “Design System Office Hours,” hosted by Davy Fung and PJ Onori, two experienced design system practitioners who dive into nitty gritty design system topics candidly.
Once I arrive at the office, I set my things down at my desk in our Rubrik Design Studio space, chat with a couple colleagues while getting coffee in the kitchen, and then make my way to the conference room for our product design critiques session.
9:30–10:30 am: Product Design Crits
Every Thursday, we have a product design crits session, where anyone on the team can sign up on the agenda to present something they’re working on and ask for feedback from the rest of the team.
The guidelines for presenters are to begin with the context of the project (e.g. goals, constraints, customer use cases), and then specify the type of feedback they are looking for (e.g. workflow, interaction, visual design). This ensures the presenter gets the most out of the session, and reviewers are able to give feedback that is helpful.
10:30–11:30 am: Messages + reviews
After the team meeting, I go back to my desk, and start going through my Slack messages and design review requests. Similar to my work-from-home mornings, I list out my goals for that day, and any reminders for myself for later in the week.
11:30 am–12 pm: Sync with teammate
From the messages and requests, there will often be questions that I need to sync with my fellow designer on the design systems team. Since we’re both in the office, I go over to her desk to discuss these items. We also confirm which requests each of us is working on that day.
12–1 pm: Team lunch
At the Palo Alto office, we use a lunch ordering service that lets each person order what they like for themselves. Lunch gets delivered to the office around noon, and we get notified by email when our lunch arrives. The team heads over to the dining area together, and we often eat outside on the patio tables to enjoy the nice weather.
1–4:30 pm: Focus time
On days when I’m in the office, I try not to schedule any meetings in the afternoon, so that I can be available at my desk for designers to approach me for design system questions.
Other than the occasional person coming over to my desk to ask a question, my afternoons at the office are not that different from my focus time at home. I work on the components-related tickets I set out for the day, and create development tickets to get those design changes implemented in the system.
For an afternoon energy boost, I might take a walk around the office, make myself a green tea and pick up some savory snacks from the kitchen.
4:30–5 pm: Office happy hour
There will often be happy hours in the office with catered food and drinks, to celebrate product milestones; for example, our Cyber Recovery feature went GA earlier this year.
These in-office events foster company morale, and are a good way to meet other Rubrikans on other teams that I’ve never worked with.
Differences between the work modes
Design review meetings
Since we work on a desktop-based digital product, the best medium to review design work is a computer screen, the way our customers experience it. This makes design reviews incredibly effective to do over Zoom, with the presenter sharing their screen for the reviewer to see on their own computer.
However, in the office, presenting design work in group meetings in conference rooms involves casting the design on a TV monitor so everyone can see from a distance. I find I’m not able to evaluate the work as well, due to the different conditions. So, I prefer to have most of my design reviews on days when I work from home.
Answering questions
With a geo-diverse team, asynchronous communication drives most of our work. Yet, sometimes it’s quicker to chat over a problem, rather than sending typed replies back and forth. Being in the office allows me to answer a lot of questions from folks in the office, just through organic conversations I have with them as I go about my day.
Focus time
On the flip side, managing focus time can be a bit harder in the office. Part of my role as a design systems member is to support designers so that they can do their work more effectively. The presence of the design systems team in the office provides designers more immediacy to get their questions answered. Since I only go to the office once a week, I accommodate this by scheduling most of my recurring meetings on days when I work from home.
Meeting people from other teams
There are thousands of Rubrikans globally, and around a couple hundred based out of the Palo Alto office. Going to the office helps me put faces to names I’ve only seen on Slack, and gives me casual opportunities to get to know them outside of work meetings.
Closing thoughts
I’m grateful for Rubrik’s flexible work policy that allows me to adopt a hybrid work model. Although all my work responsibilities could be performed from home, the option to work in-office allows me to become a better collaborator and supporter of the team. With the type of work I do and the size of our team, working at the office once a week lets me take a pulse check on how my team members are doing.
Interested in joining Rubrik’s product design team? Check out our open opportunities here.
