Early Career Design Survival Handbook: From a New Designer at Segment

I can’t believe it’s been 4 months since I’ve joined Segment as a product designer. By popular fan demand and peer pressure (lol jk kinda), I’ve decided to put down some thoughts on paper and share my experience so far as an early in career designer at Segment!! (okay… or maybe I just wanted a reason to make my ✨Medium debut✨

As a designer early in my career, I had many questions, concerns, and fears for this new chapter of my life transitioning into working full time! Whether you’re reading this because

• you’re curious about my experience working with such a JUICY® (not yet actually trademarked) team
• you too, are early in your design career seeking advice
• you’re interested in fostering an environment to support those early in their career

or you’re here as a fan and want your question answered (jk unless), I hope this sparks some joy and gives you a peek into my life as an early career designer here at Segment.

Before I dive in, I also want to preface that my career motivators are people + partnership, pure challenge, and lifestyle, so take what you will!

1. Seek a job where you will be surrounded by talented people who you enjoy working with

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard recently is that “in order to ship, you must build relationship”!! I don’t know about you, but one of my biggest career motivators is people and partnership; I feel most energized when I get to collaborate with folks that inspire me to do my best work! Working in a supportive environment enables me to take more risks. I am more receptive to giving and receiving feedback and I feel empowered to drive key conversations.

Given how complex and technical Segment is as a product… I was equally excited and nervous. I was worried about not being able to grasp technical concepts, asking too many “dumb” questions, and overall feeling unsure about how to wrap my head around the product. Imposter syndrome for being a designer? Nah, try adding working with a bunch of engineers with strong technical background while you’re still trying to understand what an API is…lol

During my interview process and as I began to onboard, I’ve learned that not every designer on the team came from working on products with this much technical complexity (some even came from designing for the underwear industry). The drive to learn and eagerness to simplify hard-to-understand concepts that are shared across the team is what makes the job challenging, exciting and fulfilling. In addition, the second I saw this Dear New Designer post that Hareem shared, I knew I had found the right group of folks to join 🥲

2. Understand how to collaborate with different roles

Regardless of what project I’m working on or what team I’m part of, one of the most transferable skills from my past internships and even school projects has been the ability to collaborate with cross-functional partners. Understanding how to collaborate with different people/roles has helped me empathize with them, form better relationships with my team and optimize ways to best articulate my thoughts, to ultimately get support from the team and create the best user experience together!

Never worked with certain roles in the past? Try asking these questions during your 1:1 with them:

• what has been your experience working with a product designer? what went well, what didn’t?
• how would you prefer to receive feedback?
• what’s your communication style?
• how do you want to be involved during the design process?
• at what stages do you want to be involved in reviewing designs?

While it’s important to understand how other people collaborate, don’t forget to ask yourself: how do you envision collaborating with this person? After all, collaboration goes both ways and it’s about being able to find the best way to work efficiently together.

Design is not a solo journey and it takes a village (of PM, Designers, Engineers, Researchers, Marketers, etc) to raise a product. Lean on each other and learn how to communicate efficiently with your cross-functional partners can take you much further!

3. Gather context with intention

As you are onboarding and treading through unfamiliar waters (or…products in this case) at a big company, it can feel overwhelming to grasp every concept, every product context, every metric, every terminology.

ahh, how much should I know??

One onboarding tip Vanessa (who fun fact, also joined Segment as an early in career designer) shared with me is to focus on learning about the product from the context of your project or the problem you’re solving. When you begin working on a project, you will naturally start to ask questions like: How does this part of the product work? How are customers using it today? What are the biggest customer pain points here? What do you mean by X, Y, Z? How might this impact other teams?

Set intention for what context you need and why you need it.

It’s exciting to onboard and learn everything about the product. Yes asking questions is important. However, to protect your sanity and mental memory storage, I recommend you narrow down your focus and ask yourself why.

4. Be flexible, be a slinky, or better yet, be a cat in containers

It’s pretty common to see early in designers expect the perfect end-to-end textbook design process for every project they work on (*ahem* exhibit A: me). However, that’s not necessarily the case in ~da real world~.

Something I’ve learned over time is to accept flexibility during the design process, you won’t always have the resource (time/money) to talk to real users, you might not always be collaborating with the same folks, you might not have all the technical constraints identified before brainstorming ideas (painful but not uncommon), sometimes priorities and timelines change. I know, I know, this list is starting to sound daunting, but hey! Just like validating your designs, you never know what kind of feedback you’ll get. Be okay with change and adapt as you go, design is dynamic, just like cats. Exactly like cats.

5. You won’t always be pixel pushing

Expectation: I’m a DESIGNER, I WILL LIVE, DRINK AND BREATHE FIGMA

Reality: I spent my whole day in meetings and slack, what did I even do today T_T

Okay, I too am a Figma stan, but just because you’re not pixel-pushing in Figma doesn’t mean you’re not creating value.

Some days, I realize that I spent most of my day in …

• Slack → discussing trade-offs with the team
• Jira → creating tickets and documenting design changes to ship
• Zoom → aligning the team on timeline, expectations, design direction
• Paper doc → finalizing research plans

By the end of the day, it can easily feel like I wasn’t productive or should’ve been designing but your role as a product designer isn’t JUST to ~design~, it’s also about driving alignment and actively collaborating with and supporting your XFN partners. So don’t be scared that you’re not pixel-pushing all the time. Again, be flexible, be a cat :3

6. Set expectations and plan for success

Alright managers, if y’all are still here (ty ily) this is where I’d recommend y’all to pay the most attention.

It’s week 1 on the job, you’ve attended some onboarding meetings, you started setting up 1:1s, you see everyone pushing pixels, orchestrating team collaboration, strategizing product plans, and BAM omg what am I doing here, why do they need me, why did they hire ME, how do I make an impact when I still know NOTHING, I will never learn this product, mom pls come pick me up

Woah slow down

Yes, joining a new team or company can be A LOT, especially in a remote world when you can’t see what anyone else is doing. It can feel impossible to contribute when everyone else has been moving with momentum built up wayyyy before you joined. I was concerned about that before joining Segment and openly shared those concerns with my manager.

Something that helped me onboard was to have a 30, 60, and 90-day plan with my manager, including action items to help me set expectations and transition into the team. This plan gave me a sense of direction and helped me identify areas of impact I can have as I’m still ramping up.

A few quick wins include:

• set up casual 1:1s with your XFN to learn who they are + understand their work style → BOOM: you’re building relationships with the team and being collaborative
• give feedback during design critique → BOOM: you’re already involving yourself with what the other folks are working on
• present at critique → BOOM: you’re getting feedback to iterate and giving insight to other designers on what you’re working on which helps the team gain alignment

While onboarding as an early in career designer can feel daunting, settings expectations with your manager can help you understand and document your impact as you are ramping up.

7. Track your progress

Dear early in career designers, guess what? Not everything is in the hands of your manager! The way my manager and I structure our weekly 1:1s allows me to frequently reflect on my work and growth. We’ve created a space where I feel empowered to celebrate wins, be vulnerable about my concerns and actively reflect on my mistakes.

Here’s how you can start to measure your progress with your manager…

• what feedback did I give this week?
• what feedback did I receive this week?
• what mistakes (if any) did I make?
• what am I saying no to this upcoming week?
• what went well / didn’t go well this past week?
• what is my long-term goal? (ma’am idk what I’m eating for lunch today)
• what are some short-term actions I can take to reach that goal?
• what progress have I made with my goals this week?

Not only has this been a great way to track what I’ve been working on, but it also gives me dedicated time to think about how my career is progressing and actively reflect on what areas I can improve on with my manager.

8. Don’t be afraid to give feedback

A lot of early in career designers (myself included) join companies with the mindset of only being the recipients of feedback, and need more experience to give feedback. That is not the case!

Everyone has valuable feedback and insight to give, especially to the people in our team we should be supporting the most. Feedback is a muscle you build over time, and you only get better at it with practice…aka experience (nice full circle char)! Literally, what’s the worst thing that could happen? (given that your delivery wasn’t rude or condescending of course). Chances are other people are thinking of the same thing OR they might not and guess what, you just made everyone think twice.

BONUS: Advocate for your users with your team

This is more relevant as you start to jump into your project but I had to throw this one in as a bonus. At Segment, engineers would sometimes sit in user testing sessions. I repeat. engineers sit in user testing sessions with us!!!

Yes, yes I know I had a point about collaboration, but this point is extra special I had to call it out! Remember all those times where you had to persuade engineers on exactly why that button needs to be 8 pixels to the right (okay maybe not this exact example), but at Segment, I’ve conducted user testing with product managers and engineers, which allowed everyone to observe customers pain points and advocate for users as a team, fostering a more transparent and healthy collaboration between design and implementation. PLUS, the benefit of having an engineer there while testing a super technical product prevents me from being flustered when the customer asks a super technical question lol. it’s a win win for sure.

Alright, that about wraps up my Survival tips for Early in Career designers! Thank you if you’ve made it this far 🥺

Being an early career designer can feel overwhelming but I hope this serves as a guiding light through your journey. If you’re excited to learn, be curious, grow and collaborate with a group of talented world-class team, then join us!

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any q̶u̶e̶s̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶,̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶c̶e̶r̶n̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶f̶e̶a̶r̶s̶, curiosity, excitement, and expectations 😉

Good luck!

Shout out to Kate Butterfield, Hareem Mannan, Emma Sims and Leah Haile for giving me feedback on my medium debut and supporting me throughout my journey as an early in career designer, thank you — y’all da best ❤️