Seven years and counting: My Zalando journey
Senior Product Designer, Andrea Di Salvo, proudly looks back at how he has grown together with Zalando.
To date I’ve been a designer at Zalando for 7 years, 8 months and 3 days. Friends and colleagues typically react in disbelief when I share this fact: “How is that even possible?” or “Andrea, are you alright?”
Yes, design pals, I’m doing great and today I’ll tell you how this came to be.
Making an impact
I started working for Zalando as a user experience designer when I moved to Berlin in the hot summer of 2013. I’d previously been working in my hometown of Milan as a functional analyst in a large IT consultancy where my role was to analyse technical proposals and develop them into features. Many of our clients favoured a waterfall approach because there were a lot of IT systems to sync for a single release.
On starting at Zalando, I was immediately tasked with reining in the company’s enterprise tools as the user experience had grown less consistent and coherent. Dozens of complex systems made up the Zalando machine: from tools that added items to our store and organised their characteristics (such as photos and prices), to those that allowed us to manage the intricacies of our ever-growing logistics centres. Not to mention IT security, fraud detection, monitoring boards, and many, many more. In the past I had shaped small content management systems but nothing on this kind of scale.
Working with a style guide, my colleagues and I set out to assess and understand these functionalities then reduce them to common patterns, creating brand new UI elements and ultimately a custom design language. In a few months, we built the very first enterprise design system at Zalando which laid the foundation for the systems we work with today.
I’ll never forget when a product manager approached me one day to say, “Hey, you people are really changing things here; it’s starting to feel like one coherent machine!” I’d just joined but I felt like I’d already made a huge impact.
Changing the game
Another ambitious project awaited me, however, as Zalando had just decided to replace their external Customer Care tool. The platform — used by our colleagues to answer customers’ questions and solve their issues via calls, emails, and live chats — had become slow and cumbersome.
As this was a rather specific tool, we started off by exploring various screencasts that had been recorded. These showed team members tackling the most common cases they would face, such as answering a call about the late return of an item or applying a voucher to an order. We knew that the solution to our problems lay in those screencasts; we just had to pay close attention.
What followed were an intense few months in which we shaped this new application, its screens, and functionalities. As we covered more use cases, we would reach out to our Customer Care colleagues to test them immediately — this allowed us to iterate quickly, gain concrete customer insights, and generate new ideas.
To this day, I clearly remember the moment when we asked a senior customer care representative to solve a payment case using our prototype. She moved around swiftly, making use of the contextual panels we had tentatively introduced. At one point she exclaimed loudly, “This is a game changer. Now handling all payments will be so much simpler!” Professionally, these are the moments I live for.
A whole new playground
There comes a time when you feel ready for something new, and after the last project ended, I reached out to my lead to weigh my options. Luckily, they’d just introduced an initiative that allows designers to periodically rotate among the various design teams at Zalando. That’s how I moved to Zalon, Zalando’s personal styling service that connects customers to hundreds of independent style experts and sends them looks curated just for them.
Once again I met and became friends with so many talented colleagues who were working hard on this brand new venture. The vibe was now completely different to what I was used to. Instead of a wide open space, we now had a cosy office, instead of longer meetings we had tight deadlines and shared lots of opinions. It was a whirlwind of continuous change, the agile way.
Yet again, as Zalon kept on growing and improving I had the opportunity to widen my expertise while working on stylist tools, our mobile app, and many more engaging features for our beloved customers.
Two experiences in particular stand out for me. The first was a user research study that shed light on our lengthy and articulated customer journey — it included several touchpoints between placing a request and finally receiving a curated box of items. We interviewed our customers at length to identify where we were providing a good experience and where we fell short. Hearing directly from customers about their emotions, issues, expectations, and accomplishments increased our empathy for them across the department and allowed us to fine-tune our personas.
I’m also proud to have been involved in the launch and continuous improvement of our subscription service. Born as a minimum viable product (MVP), the service has now been adopted by 50,000 subscribers. Its customer touchpoints and options have grown, and customers ranked Zalon’s subscription service its best offering — as measured by Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Being able to help expand a small but articulated ecosystem like Zalon doesn’t happen every day. Working on so many facets of the business in multi-disciplinary teams and balancing details with impact has allowed me to further mature as a designer.
Are you ready for the challenge?
So now you may understand why I’ve been here so long.
If you are considering joining Zalando, count on great colleagues you can learn from, along with plenty of opportunities, and the right tools and support as you keep growing. But growth won’t come without stretching your muscles so make sure you’re ready to take on and adapt to new challenges and continuous change.
Three tips from me: Bring your passion, your grit, and be willing to get your hands dirty!
We’re actively looking for senior candidates to join the Product Insights & Design community. If you’re ready for the challenge apply to one of our open positions!
