Tegus Design Introduction

Joe Steinkamp
Tegus Tech Team
Published in
6 min readNov 19, 2021

Who we are. Why you should join Tegus Design now. Meet our newest designer!

Hi! I’m Joe, the Head of Design at Tegus. I’m honored to share who we are and why we’re excited about Design at Tegus. We’re a small, fast-growing team of four product designers looking to make it easier to find meaningful insights from a vast sea of qualitative data.

We’re at a unique moment where we’re small enough to have massive impact and influence from each individual, but we’re poised for a lot of maturity in the next year. We’re looking for designers to have a huge impact, not only on our product experiences but on our design practice. Let me tell you a little about why we’re so excited about the team we’re building.

First, a little about Tegus.

Tegus is an early to mid-stage startup that is taking off as we’re solving the painful problem of finding deep insights in a sea of qualitative data. We solve this by having the largest qualitative market database paired with a product that shortens the time to insight. Our customers often describe their job is to find more of the puzzle pieces of a forever incomplete puzzle — our goal is to help them find more puzzle pieces, faster.

Also, we keep it really simple on how to build a great company: being ruthlessly customer-centric and employee-centric. First, research is deeply ingrained in our ethos and we take time with our customers very seriously. Secondly, we want to build the best teams of extremely talented folks, then empower them to do great work.

Tegus Design Purpose

Through empathy of our users, digital know-how, knowledge of human behavior, visual exploration, experimentation, and an inclusive process, we can distill complexity into approachable, elegant, powerful solutions. We aim to surpass our customers’ high expectations to measurably improve uncovering rich insights easier, faster, more frequent, and more organized.

Why Design Is Critical For Tegus

  • To continue to lead in our space and to achieve our high standards of making our customers love us to enable our product to sell itself.
  • Customer-led and learning ethos — solve their problems deeply and effectively by shortening cycles of learning through design experimentation and research.
  • We have a service and a marketplace that weave in and out from each other with multiple users all along the way. It’s critical to design holistically to have a cohesive high-quality experience throughout every touchpoint.
  • Creating an engaging power tool that’s approachable while pioneering new territory of qualitative analysis to help our users find more insights faster and structure the unstructured.

Our Values

Better Together

We use design to connect and enable everyone. We are hyper-collaborative with a completely inclusive and highly visible transparent design process. We visually bring things to life to communicate quickly and clearly with others.

Empowered Change Agents

We take initiative and ownership to create the ideal future for our company, our team, our process, our product, our industry, and the greater design community. We use design strategically to make clear, cohesive, and compelling visions to guide us in making a holistic impact. Our goal is to always leave what we touch better than the way we found it.

Compassionate

We go beyond empathy and focus on compassion as we desire to help. We seek to help our users, other designers, our squad-mates, and leadership. We focus on the problems we’re solving and trust each other to be vulnerable and egoless.

Aim High

We have high standards to deliver meaningful and measurable impact. We work smarter to get quality and speed to enable long-term success. While tradeoffs always happen, we think differently and challenge the status quo on how to reach new heights.

Fun Facts

  • Figjam high fives and cursor chat are the coolest of all time (COAT) 🧥.
  • We love dumplings 🥟🥟🥟.
  • We love hosting holiday-themed interactive parties with product and engineering partners. A favorite was digital pumpkin carving 🎃.
  • We’re obsessed with maxing out Figma. We run lessons to memorize the best keyboard shortcuts, be layout wizards with auto-layout, and dive headfirst into interactive components when it was in beta.
  • We’re Slack wizards 🧙 — from workflows to single-purpose channels (like #design-feedback) and multiple designers owning the leaderboard on messages and reactions sent.

Designer Showcase: Tabby Jewett

We’d like to welcome our newest designer that we’re really excited about to share a little bit about her journey so far and how it brought her to Tegus.

Tell us a little about yourself.

Hi! I’m Tabby and I’m a designer based out of the beautiful city of Ventura, CA. I grew up in a small town of 1,200 people in Nebraska. Some say I have an accent, but I don’t think so. I’m notorious for my spelling errors and really dislike black licorice. My spare time is mostly spent with my family, going on hikes, eating good food, playing with our golden retriever, helping out my community, deep cleaning my house constantly, and finally soaking up the sun when I can.

How’d you get into design?

Like many folks, I feel like I happened to stumble into product design. Originally, I started out in school studying film but came out the other end with a fine art major. To this day, I still can’t tell you the nuances between the Rococo or Neoclassicism periods but I learned the fundamentals of design. That landed me at a letterpress company for a couple of years where mixing Pantone inks, setting lead, and working the press was my therapy.

In 2015, I was given the opportunity to join an early-stage software company called Procore. Little did I know that this company would be the catalyst to transform my future. This is where I fell in love with product design because everything was centered around people. I realized empathy was key, and I had a lot to go around. Crafting meaningful experiences with a team of people that equally cared was energizing and rewarding.

And as the second design hire, I was fortunate to be a part of all the key growth phases — from a 150 person startup to a 2,600 person IPO corporation. Regardless of size, I love connecting the dots between design, technology, and business strategy, while still getting on the ground to solve real-life problems for people.

I’m a forever learner and will constantly be trying to cultivate my craft. But these days I’m just trying to keep up with Figma’s updates. :)

What’s your role at Tegus?

I just joined Tegus in November as their Principal Product Designer and I can’t wait to work with this amazing team! I’m still very much a newbie with lots to learn!

Why did you choose Tegus?

I honestly believe Tegus is a ‘best-kept secret’ in the rapidly growing software industry. Just looking at the numbers to start, Tegus is growing at an unprecedented rate. Tripling year over year growth, blowing revenue targets out of the water and acquiring new customers like crazy all in only three years. What’s most impressive is how much they’ve grown by word of mouth from their customers’ great experiences with Tegus.

While the numbers are important, understanding the company’s mission and vision was critical. I needed to make sure that I was inspired every day to get up and work towards it. Through browsing online and looking at Tegus’s marketing site, it was hard for me to really wrap my head around what an ‘expert network’ was and struggle to understand the value. But after Joe, the Head of Design, and Tim, the Chief Product Officer, walked me through the vision of the product I was hooked. I was able to visualize the impact myself and the team could have on the product and in the industry.

Lastly, and most importantly, I wanted to work alongside these people. Each individual I talked with during my interview process was passionate about the company, its mission, and the part they play. There seemed to be little to no ego and my conversations were natural and fun. At the end of the day, we are people working with people building software. I loved the team and wanted to be a part of it. And here I am now. :)

Join Us!

We’re hiring! As mentioned, we’re growing and need folks looking to make a large impact on our product and our design practice. Come join our team and help us take Design and Tegus to the next level. Please check out our career page. Or connect with me, Joe, on LinkedIn.

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