Designed with Purpose

Design may have been an afterthought to product development in past years, but it’s now widely understood to be a crucial early stage component. The explosion of consumer apps – and their influence on enterprise software – has put the end user at the center of all stages of product development, and design is key to building a product that resonates.

“If a product has a touchpoint with an end user, then there’s a way to be intentional about how that experience ends up working,” says Tome CPO and co-founder Henri Liriani. “Design is the core definition of that process.”

Prior to co-founding the storytelling platform startup in 2020, Liriani worked across several design-focused roles including as the product lead for the human interface messenger group at Meta. Over the course of his career, he saw how the gap between UX and UI teams has significantly narrowed due to the evolution of tools used. In turn, that’s led to the need for closer collaboration at earlier stages and with faster iterations in order to be fully aligned on a product.

“It turns out that having all of that thinking under one roof produces better product outcomes, too, because you can really closely coordinate product decisions and workflows with how something looks and how it works,” says Liriani. “And the truth is that those things aren’t really that separate.”

However, many founding startup teams don’t come to the table with their own design background, and may struggle to recruit and hire designers who are the right fit. Katy Amaya, who works with Greylock portfolio companies to recruit talent, says securing designers from the outset has become an increasing concern for today’s startups.

“We all know that a bad UI design can deliver misunderstandings, it can also bring about confusion and frustration to the customer, so it’s really important for founders to understand that that first designer is really the only voice for design at this stage,” Amaya says. “If they don’t uphold the quality of design, no one else will.”

Amaya and Liriani joined me on the Greymatter podcast to discuss how the role of designers has evolved over time, how it fits into today’s product development cycle, and how to go about building a design team that can set the tone for exceptional product vision. You can listen to the conversation at the link below or wherever you get your podcasts.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Heather Mack:

Hi everyone. Welcome to Greymatter, the podcast from Greylock where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I’m Heather Mack, head of editorial at Greylock.

When many of us think about the foundational roles in a technology startup, job titles like engineer, product manager, or sales come to mind. But in recent years, design has become a much more integral and critical part of startups and at increasingly earlier stages. Past generations of startups could get away with focusing purely on the technical aspects of their product in the initial stages and bringing design teams later. But today’s startups are living in the age following an explosion of consumer apps and the subsequent push for consumerization of enterprise software, which has resulted in a heavy focus on the end user experience. Good design is now a critical part of a company’s success.

So how can startups bake design into the core of their product and how should they approach building a design team? Here today to answer those questions are my colleague Katy Amaya, who’s part of the talent team at Greylock, and Henri Liriani, who is the co-founder and chief product officer of storytelling platform Tome.

Katy, Henri, thanks so much for being here today.

Katy Amaya:

Thanks, Heather.

Henri Liriani:

Thanks, Heather.

HM:

Henri, you’re among the few founders we know with a design background, so I think it will be helpful to our listeners to start off with some context about how the role has evolved over time.

So you started off your career at a few design firms, you were a co-founder at a music sharing startup, and then you spent six years at Meta in product design before you co-founded Tome, which we’ll talk about in more detail shortly. From your perspective, how does design fit the overall aim of a company’s product and how has that changed? Okay.

HL:

Years ago there was often this UI design or UX design split, and that was a byproduct of how long it took to do each part back then, given the tools we had access to. You had someone wireframing all the steps in a workflow and you had someone visualizing all of that UI in some almost photorealistic graphical style like wood or metal or plastic.

And now, given how the style that we use has evolved, the tools that we use to generate these designs have evolved, one person can do all of that much more efficiently. And it turns out that having all of that thinking under one roof produces better product outcomes, too, because you can really closely coordinate product decisions and workflows with how something looks and how it works. And the truth is that those things aren’t really that separate.

HM:

Just to give everyone a sense of how design forward thinking Tome and Henri are, tell us exactly what Tome’s offering is. How does it work?

HL:

Yeah. Tome is a tool meant to take the idea in your head (or the things you’re working on) and just make it really easy to lay that out in a consumable format where we do a lot of the design work for you, actually. So you get to spend most of your time thinking about how is this message coming through and what’s the narrative impact, rather than how finely positioned is this element relative to that element, what font and style should I be choosing, and how is this going to reflect on me once I do end up sharing it.

Instead, really it’s just the quality of the idea that hopefully will be the thing that reflects on you and that you can succeed with there. And so far we’re pretty early on in our journey still, but we’ve just gone from a closed beta to general access in the last month or so and we’ve seen pretty crazy growth, and people pick up the tool to be able to talk about their work online and be able to interview at places and pitch their seed decks and tell these interactive and rich and visual stories in all these different contexts that we actually hadn’t imagined. So, so far, so good.

And I think a lot of that is made possible by a design team that’s empowered to think like product managers and engineers and interact really directly and closely with those other functions as they illustrate these visions and then work to make them real.

HM:

How does design really play into the core of a company’s product offering?

HL:

If a product has a touchpoint with an end user, then there’s a way to be intentional about how that experience ends up working. And I think design at its core is just the definition of that process. So thinking through, even if the only touchpoint is a website, just thinking through the mental state someone is in when they get to that website, and what they might want to see to compel them into the next step, and organizing the information they encounter and process, and walking them through that. And if your product is something that’s really engaging or requires a lot of interaction, that’s even more surface area for someone to think through really intentionally.

So when we think about what a designer is doing to fit into a company’s core product offering, it’s just bringing a bunch of considerations into an intentional thought process of how someone experiences and interacts with the company and its product.

HM:

That’s really helpful context. Now, I want to get to Katy. You work with a wide range of startups in the Greylock portfolio and you help them find and recruit some of their earliest employees. And I know lately you’ve been getting a lot of questions from founders about the design role. They’ve figured out it’s really clear that they need to think about it at the initial stages, but a lot of them are still not really prepared to go about hiring for this role, so how do you help them understand how to begin the search?

KA:

It’s a lot of education. Very few founders are like Henri and have design experience, and they aren’t really prepared for how hard it can be to find that first designer.

As we heard, it’s not a nice to have afterthought anymore but a crucial part of the company. We all know that a bad UI design can deliver misunderstandings, it can also bring about confusion and frustration to the customer, so it’s really important for founders to understand that that first designer is really the only voice for design at this stage. If they don’t uphold the quality of design, no one else will.

Then, there’s the timing of it all. One thing that comes up is founders are not always aware of how critical it is to bring in someone early. When people wait too long to bring in a designer, they are setting themselves up for a very painful recruiting process. At the most basic level, very few designers want to work for a company that doesn’t have some sort of design function in place, because they will have to spend most of their energy trying to convince people of the importance of design and why it should matter, rather than doing great work that advances the mission. And that’s a really frustrating place for anyone to be.

Then, you get into this classic hiring mess. You start getting desperate. Maybe you start thinking about hiring someone who isn’t a good fit. Maybe you bring in someone who is too early in your career. So something that could be interesting to explore and that I recommend to he founders when we kick of the search and while they are looking for that perfect candidate is to think about bringing on a design consultant – someone who can come in and really help bridge the gap between the design and product teams from the very beginning.

HM:

And as you’re talking, I’m thinking, what does this person actually look like? What does their skill set look like? What are their primary skills and qualities they should be looking for?

HL:

Totally. Yeah. I think for this initial stage, I think even starting with a consultant is better than nothing, just from the perspective that someone is there, again, thinking intentionally about what systems need to be put into place and what are the core problems here. And so someone can at least start to put together the beginnings of a design system or the beginnings of a mental model for how to build out the product. And you can find ways to systematize those things. You want someone who can come in (whether they’re a consultant or an actual first full-time hire), and think through that way and lay that foundation.

And that’s in addition to the very apt point that you made, Katy, about most designers wanting to spend more of their time exploring and pushing the mission through their work rather than advocating for their ability to contribute at all.

I think another component of that is that someone has come in with a starting point that can really extend out into different directions. Just as an example with Tome, we spent a lot of time on this horizontal layer of the product that created lots of space for people to come in and vertically work on individual features. And I think early on that kind of pattern might seem really familiar from an engineering perspective, but it’s not often thought about too much in the same light in the context of design – but it totally applies too.

Thinking more a little bit about how we want this person to be shaped, I can’t emphasize that systems thinking component enough, because you’re making so many different decisions that you need this rhyme or reason continuing through all of them. And to be able to recognize the patterns of decisions you’re making and try to orient them towards being better ones is what the systems thinker can bring to the table.

On top of that, of course everyone at this stage has to be pretty scrappy, has to be okay with building things and then tearing them down overnight. And I think the newer thing in the past, I don’t know, five, 10 years in this field has been the importance of prototyping and being able to put living, breathing experiences into people’s hands so that you can viscerally feel how an experience would come out to an end user. So I think those are really important ingredients.

And then maybe the last soft point here would be someone with enough independence or confidence in themselves to be able to disagree with you. And especially if you’re a founder, you bring in someone that is there to lay this foundation of design thinking and help you translate your vision into a visual graspable thing. You’re going to want that person to have a lot of agency and a lot of room to play for themselves and you want to let them disagree with you as well.

HM:
And as far as when you’re evaluating someone’s portfolio, how is this demonstrated?

HL:
We think about this across a few primary skills. Just visual design, color type layout, interaction design. Animating and interpolating between states. And problem solving, which is having a human problem in mind that’s pretty relatable that you’ve scoped out and being able to stay close to that as you come up with solutions. We look at those hard skills and you can pretty easily see the visual interaction design stuff come out of the top layer of a presentation or a portfolio that someone might send you.

And as you’re evaluating that, depending on your level of familiarity as an individual, you might compare it to other experiences that you felt really great using. Maybe if you really enjoy how it feels to interact with apps on your phone and you play with or look at the designs that this person is sharing on their portfolio, you might think about how you feel in reaction to that. And I think that that often can be a reasonable substitute for really understanding what the depth of their execution skills look like.

KA:

But I would just add to that – and this is true of any role at any company in its early stages – an early designer needs to have humility. They have to have the ability to collaborate and take constructive feedback on their design work. And that should be something you can really suss out in interviews. And also they need to have an autonomy and ownership mindset and have self-confidence in their design skills and they should be able to communicate this to product teams. So in the past they may have relied on their manager to convince people that their design has an impact, but now they need to be the one doing the convincing.

HL:

And I think especially at these early stages, you might find characters out there that really spike in one area and are world class at that. But I think what you might be looking for in a startup context is someone that is, again, scrappy and also well rounded. I mean you really will benefit from this person being able to speak the same language as engineering and for them to be able to lead their own endeavors to fruition.

Just as an example at Tome, we went quite a while without a PM, almost 18 months into our product roadmap, and even now we only have one PM and four full-time product designers. And the designers are often able to fully articulate the end state of the product they want to build through an interactive prototype and then spec out in detail how engineering should think about building it and then that becomes a really tight collaboration.

So for us, our designer’s ability to interface really closely and productively with engineering has been an irreplaceable component of our process. It’s worth calling out, just because I think so much of the time designers and engineers are sitting quite far apart and there’s this phenomenon you hear about sometimes where there’s a spec being thrown over the fence and then someone takes it and builds it, and then there’s this inefficient feedback loop of it being not quite what the designer may have wanted. And then there’s a back and forth that happens and you don’t really have time for that in a startup. I think you want to just be in the smallest feedback loops possible between all the people building.

HM:

Yeah, absolutely. And I want to hear more about how you were able to build up the design team with the product teams at Tome, but let’s back up a little bit.

Katy, talk about how you actually helped these founders think about recruiting. I mean they’re very early stage people. Each role that they’re looking for is different, but having that system in place to even begin their search, how do you advise them there?

KA:

When I start working with hiring partners, I always advise them not to wait too long to start recruiting a designer. If you know you need someone 8 months from now, start looking today because it can take several months to land that hire, and you can run the risk of slowing down product launches. Definitely tap your own network, whether that is people you used to work with, your advisors, or even leverage your investor network. One thing I’m always happy to do with our founders is do what we call structured talent hunts, because I find we often know more people than we realize by simply going through first connections.

The best way to start the process is the same approach you would with any role you are trying to recruit for, starting with what are the strengths of your team now and what do you need to hire for?

So the first thing to do is to identify the role of a designer on your team. Are you looking for an end to end designer, or someone who has a strength in one particular area? Is someone who has domain knowledge critical to the success of the role? You’ll want to think about what strengths will make them successful at your company. For instance, someone who can come up with a general design strategy – and then execute – important for your team? Or maybe you have someone strong in this area, and you mainly need someone who can take the team’s vision and take it into a high-fi product mockup.

So these are all the things you want to think about, and then find a thoughtful way to interview them to identify their strengths.

HM:

Yeah, absolutely. And I want to hear more about how you were able to build up the design team with the product teams at Tome, but let’s back up a little bit.

Katy, talk about how you actually helped these founders think about recruiting. I mean they’re very early stage people. Each role that they’re looking for is different, but having that system in place to even begin their search, how do you advise them there?

KA:

When I start working with hiring partners, I always advise them not to wait too long to start recruiting a designer. If you know you need someone 8 months from now, start looking today because it can take several months to land that hire, and you can run the risk of slowing down product launches. Definitely tap your own network, whether that is people you used to work with, your advisors, or even leverage your investor network. One thing I’m always happy to do with our founders is do what we call structured talent hunts, because I find we often know more people than we realize by simply going through first connections.

The best way to start the process is the same approach you would with any role you are trying to recruit for, starting with what are the strengths of your team now and what do you need to hire for?

So the first thing to do is to identify the role of a designer on your team. Are you looking for an end to end designer, or someone who has a strength in one particular area? Is someone who has domain knowledge critical to the success of the role? You’ll want to think about what strengths will make them successful at your company. For instance, someone who can come up with a general design strategy – and then execute – important for your team? Or maybe you have someone strong in this area, and you mainly need someone who can take the team’s vision and take it into a high-fi product mockup.

So these are all the things you want to think about, and then find a thoughtful way to interview them to identify their strengths.

HM:

Once they figure out what they’re looking for, then comes the really hard part of finding these people and then evaluating them. And maybe this would be helpful if Henri, you could tell us how you went about this at Tome. What did it look like as you were building up the team?

HL:
As far as breaking this down into sourcing and evaluating, for sourcing, it really makes sense to look at other companies if you’re doing it from scratch. Looking at other companies that are building things that you think are similar to what you might need.

So for example, if you’re building something that’s very interactive and very communication heavy, you might look at popular consumer apps. You might look at products that have required the sort of craftsmanship or thinking that you see as an end user in them already. And look at companies like that and just see if anything’s going on, if folks are in the middle of a transition.

One thing that I learned that was pretty counterintuitive (at least to me) was that we’re like a tool for work and there aren’t a lot of people that are working already at a tool-for-work-company that want to join your slightly different tool-for-work-company, but there are people that are, let’s say, in the consumer product world working on social for example, but do want to find a way to apply what they’ve learned to a different context.

And so I think the interesting key there was finding folks that have a skill or something to bring to the table that will really help you in your mission, but there’s so much also for them to grow and bite into that’s unknown about what you’re doing. And I think that helped us find folks that could really learn and bring something new to the table rather than only finding folks and cycling through a lot of the same people in the same industries.

For Tome – Tome is a heavily visual and interaction design-dependent product. Because at the end of the day, what you’re getting as an end user is something that is largely designed for you, and the process of putting a Tome together is so interaction heavy that the ability to think through all the different states that you might encounter and how that all feels while you’re both thinking and populating content in the canvas, I think all of that really puts a heavy strain on those hard skills that I mentioned around visual design, interaction design, and systems thinking.

So when we put our team together, initially I was just doing a lot of the design work myself, but the quality bar (given the breadth of the surface area) was quite low I would say. And what was happening as we brought on each individual incremental designer is that they could take a piece or a large area even and really develop that far more deeply just because they could focus on it and they could think about how to improve the most important parts of it.
And over time we built a team that had different strengths. I think about them kind of like a basketball team almost. Like they’re playing different positions and they all can cover a lot of the same bases but do their individual special strength in a uniquely great way. So we have someone on the team that’s super specialized in interaction design and prototypes their own live code versions of the product even to visualize where we want to go, and give people links to that. And I just don’t think we’d be anywhere close to where we are as a product if they weren’t off exploring these alternate realities for the product and then sharing it every week with the broader engineering team and giving people links to these interactive repos that they’ve built that show us what the product could be if we built what they were thinking.

HM:

Do you ever get inspiration for the product from interesting use cases that you didn’t anticipate?

HL:

Yeah, totally. And interestingly enough, a lot of the use cases that we’re seeing emerge right now are coming from the product design community too. A lot of “interviewing for a company” folks lean on Tome because you can really quickly put something together and it doesn’t feel like you’ve invested a ton of one-off energy for this conversation with a potential employer that might want to see a permutation of your portfolio. We use our own team and the community around us, and folks using us as a sounding board to try these ideas with. And whenever it feels like the product has become good enough to meet the personal bar for a designer on our team sharing their work or for someone in the community doing the same, it feels like a milestone in the right direction. It feels like we’re able to let someone do their best work in an area and that in turn, the feedback we get from that really comes back and shapes the product.

HM:

Great. Now, you’re talking about all the things that you’re doing right, so let’s talk a little bit about maybe things that people might do wrong. Aside from waiting too long, which you said, what are some other mistakes that you’ve seen teams make during the candidate search process?

HL:

I think it’s hard to imagine a world where you can start a design practice at a company without someone that is really close to the founders and really experienced themselves. And I think that you can handle that a bunch of different ways, but at the end of the day, you need to be able to develop this deep relationship with this person, which is probably why the timeliness of it matters so much. It’ll probably be hard to develop that relationship with 50 people compared to much earlier on. And then you have someone that is positioned as a translator, almost, between the founders or the founding team, and anyone new brought on to work on the design that can turn that intent into actionable language and have a say in how it continues to evolve from there.

And like we talked about before, I think they really have to come in with their own principles that you believe are going to lead your product in the right direction for your mission. And that’s I think what this ends up coming down to a lot of the time. You probably won’t be able to find that person cheap. Just being honest here. I think that you probably need to really carve out some space in your option pool or however you’re handling this for that person to come in and really set the bar for them to have this impact in the first place. And I think you might be surprised in some cases at how great of a long-term relationship that can set you up for.

HM:

And have you ever heard of candidates deciding not to go with a company just because of the way in which they were being interviewed or the initial projects that they gave them?

HL:

Yeah. I mean there was this whole take-home work conversation and I think it’s a really tricky one because you don’t really get that much incremental signal out of a take-home assignment and you do create this investment. And if that person is great, they probably have more options. Imagine if they have that number of options times that number of take-home assignments. They’re probably not going to be able to even put their best foot forward there.

So I think there’s a lot about your interview process that signals to a design candidate how you’re going to do everything as a company once you actually join. How thoughtful is this group of people? How far ahead and how systemic are they in evaluating qualities consistently? And what do they ask of people? What kind of relationships do they set up with employees? Do they have a good balance of give and take or are they mostly give or mostly take kind of thing? So I think all of those can come through in an interaction like that. And maybe your goal as an interviewer is to tailor your process to give you the kind of person that you want, which might vary depending on what you’re doing.

HM:

And building on that a little bit more – this question’s for both of you – it’s ultra competitive right now to land founding designers. What are some of the main selling points that founders can use to leverage their offering to their first designer? Especially if they’re at a very early stage, it’s not proven, everyone’s already often concerned about working with a startup in the first place.

HL:

Yeah. I think another component of what you might be looking for in this person (and a way to pull the right person in) is finding a fit with your problem statement. And if you are, let’s say, exploring something like Tome. I’ll just use that as an example. It’s like if you’re talking to someone whose eyes light up and they get really excited when they think about helping people express ideas or helping people visualize something, and they think about all the stuff that they might enjoy building, like interactive tools or modular systems or whatever they think is on the path to that, you’re definitely going to want to find someone who’s excited to come in at this ground floor.
And for that type of character, that is a selling point: the fact that no design work has been done and the fact that they’ll be able to work with you as a founder to establish all of this. And that almost ends up being the raison d’être for this type of person; they get to be the one that establishes this foundation and they can take that experience with them forever, wherever they go and they can easily point to this example of their impact in something that hopefully a lot of people are using at the end of the day.

So I think a lot of that can be really personally gratifying. And I think with a lot of crafts like product design, many of the best people doing this are doing it because they just get a kick out of building something and enjoying it or enjoying how other people use it. So giving someone that opportunity and really trusting them with it, I think is the cell of the work itself.

KA:

So, those are really good points, Henri, and the only thing I would add to this is make a competitive offer. You want to look at the market data and anchor to a percentage so there’s consistency across your teams, but you should also be prepared to go above and beyond for extraordinary talent. The goal with your early team is to find and hire A+ talent. They need to be legit. And when you’re lucky enough to find them, make sure you give them an offer that’s exciting.

HM:

And putting yourself in the candidate’s shoes (Katy, this is a question for you), what kind of questions should they be asking? What should they be thinking about when they’re evaluating the company as someone that they would want to work with?

KA:

Yeah. This is a really good question Heather. Obviously I probably talk about this several times a week to folks that I’m speaking with. They ask this question often. But obviously you’ll want to make sure the mission speaks to you. And I always advise talent that they need to make sure they’re taking intelligent risks.

Sometimes going to an early stage startup can feel like an irrational thing to do. And so how do we eliminate the risks? And a few questions that they should be asking themselves is, is the company solving a problem customers care about and do they have a differentiated approach? Are people willing to pay money for this? Also, who are the founders and what are they about? What are their backgrounds and track records and do they have strong moral codes? You’ll want to research their investors and board members and figure out what their track records are. Is there evaluation in alignment with their progress and stage? I think that’s a really big one right now.

And then lastly, the founding team will set the culture for the rest of the company. So I always tell folks, make sure they meet as many of the founding team members as possible and make sure they have good values that really resonate with them.

HL:

And just to build on that, I think through the interview process and through whatever other touchpoints you can gather this from, modeling out what you think this company or their leaders’ decision-making formulas are is a pretty interesting approach, because you’re going to be living through that decision-making formula all the time, whether it’s a relationship with new information and how that gets handled or a dependence on quantitative analysis or qualitative analysis and where the biases might be there.

Often at this really early stage, you’re going to have really imperfect information that you have to make product decisions with, and that makes the formula really important because you don’t have this really clear story painted for you by lots and lots of evidence, and you have to rely on your best guess and your best interpretation of the signals you do have. So figuring out how the founders and the founding team behaved with limited information can pretty much dictate how your experience will feel as you’re in the trenches building with them.

HL:

I just want to highlight a point that Katy made earlier: what are your signs to run for the hills as a designer when you’re initially talking to these companies? And I do find that for whatever reason it ends up being pretty binary in that either this company has a really successful experience hiring and building a design function, or it’s really struggling to break through that. And I think that perception of time spent advocating for the things that matter is definitely a big component. And I think that just the company having figured out what it wants design to do with that company is another big component too.

For us, we’ve decided we want design to be at the beginning of every product thought process and we do an hour critique every day that manifests that. And even if that sounds like a lot, when I share that with candidates, they kind of get excited. They’re like, “Oh, design is figured out maybe at this company. There’s a way for us to play.” And that might be preferable to most people than coming somewhere and nobody really having a clear idea of what you doing your job well looks like, and for that to be on you to define and explain to everyone.

HM:

What about anything that would be okay for other roles but wouldn’t work for a design role such as hiring someone who’s in another country with a huge time difference or any sort of things like a language barrier or just any other things that we might not think about if it was someone like an engineer or a sales team?

KA:

I can talk about the time difference because this actually comes up often. And in my opinion I’m somewhat against this unless the designer or the person has done this before and has had success. Just that time difference can be really hard for teams, even if you’re fast prototyping or trying to iterate on different things, sometimes you’re waiting a day to hear back from folks and it can just slow things down.

HL:

Yeah. I just think your proximity, whether it’s physically or mentally to this initial person, is really important. So I think being able to speak the same language somehow and ideally be in the same room for lots and lots of time up front is so key. It might even be more key for what you’re doing than spending that time with engineering or other functions that are really close, because you’re taking that first step from an abstract desire to build something into figuring out what it would look like, or how it would manifest in an actual product environment. And that process is so abstract that you want as much time to be able to interact with each other as possible. So I would definitely recommend finding a way to be in the same room together if possible. If not, just having lots of time on Zoom or whatever you might do to solve it.

HM:

Yeah, makes sense.

HL:

For us, we really wanted design to be both motivated to dream up whatever best future product realities they can think of were and to be empowered to go and make them real and also as a result of that, to hold them accountable to making them real. So that creates this incentive loop of, “Well I should only really prototype and draw the things that I can actually realistically explain to someone who could build them.”

And I think that as a result, has brought design and engineering a lot closer together. And what we see now at Tome is that designers will often prototype things next to code-level quality, and then sit next to an engineer and actually make that happen with almost no gap in terms of expectations of what the end product ends up being. And the dirty work (or the legwork) required to get there is a table with lots of workflows spelled out in it and milestone planning and test planning.

And a lot of that stuff isn’t a usual part of a designer’s role or responsibility, but I found it to be a pretty compelling sell for people that are looking for an opportunity to really shape a product experience and not be a part of an assembly line process where everyone has a predetermined contribution to a process and everyone’s subject to the outcomes of that process. And instead these people can be the lead actors in some way to make their vision a reality.

HM:
That’s great. Because of the result of all that hard work and back and forth, you’ve created this product that is so easy for someone like me to just pick up and articulate any thoughts or ideas I have with visual storytelling tools without having to think about the things that I wouldn’t know how to do otherwise.

HL:

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, the team would be really excited to hear that.

HM:

Yeah, I encourage anybody, any listeners who have not experienced the magic of Tome to check out the website at Tome.app, it’s an excellent storytelling and presentation tool for work made by all these brilliant designers and product managers.

Well Henri, Katy, talking with you both, I’ve learned a ton. I learned a lot about how important design is, and how integral it is to the early teams, and how crucial it is for a company to get it right at the early stages. So thank you so much for joining me on Greymatter today.

HL:

Thanks Heather.