The job interview I had when I was in the hiring process to join Mainteny, was almost all about leadership questions. It’s out of what I thought about, but I really enjoyed it. During my journey at Mainteny, we have reached one of our goals to get paid customers 🎉
1 designer + 1 internship
There was 1 designer that has been working for a year. She was an intern there and continued as a full-time designer and at that time it was unexpected that she left the company for personal family reasons. There has been 1 intern designer left. From the skills perspective, he has good thinking, writing and graphic design but still lacks technical UI design skills which are normal for a new early career. However, the company is not ready yet to tackle it with a huge and very tight deadline.
I advised the C-level company to hire more senior designers for early-stage startups but I understand their reasons, it’s because of budget, etc. I proposed to keep the intern as a marketing designer so he can have more space to learn UI/UX Design rather than to get things done very quickly as a new early career.
My 1 on 1 questions with him when the CEO asked me to give him feedback while also I was as a new employee:
Design and handoff Issues
When I’m joining, the dev team and the CTO hand me the list of their current issues, here’s the list.
I was checking the UI library and all components. We also adopted the MUI (Material UI) library. It was actually amazing for a new designer to work on this whole project including customizing the UI library, it was just there were many inconsistencies here and there, but it might be also because of the very tight deadline. Some components were redundant and were not effective and were placed not in a dedicated file.
I also asked the previous designer to had 1on 1 call about her feedback and her perspectives on the current situation/issues on the design before she left, here’s what I got:
Player-coach with 4 freelancers
Based on a very tight deadline condition, the company hired 4 freelancers who are experts in design, not as the new early career. So we learned from each other here. The mentoring does not really happen as what I did to the intern designer before, as they are also freelancers, hence, they are not really focused on growing here at Mainteny, but more on getting things done. One of them even works at a big tech in Europe. Their position here is to focus on design rather than on their self-improvement. However, 2 of them seem a Lil bit struggling with the technical work, such as auto layout and I didn’t mind helping when he asked. Also, still lack consistency and need more attention/willingness to work on small details such as, when choosing the proper icons for every data label, but I understand that the condition was very hectic as well, need more time to figure out which icons that need to be used.
For example like this:
Based on this misconception about the icons, I suggested and helped directly to replace the icon in the next phase and remind the team also the leaders that we had a very hectic situation, and we need to have more time and effort in the future for this similar works.
As a design lead more like a player-coach, I fixed and maintained the current customised design system and moved it all into the dedicated page while making the UI component group to be more consistent and simplifying it. Here’s the UI component that I fixed based on collaboration with the dev team. After I read the ‘current design issues’ document that I mentioned before, I got the point of what this dev team needed (which can be different from other companies/teams):
And here’s what the lead front-end developer says. I’m grateful to have a chance to work with them that can value other people’s work. This is also because of collaboration with the dev team, they are very supportive.
I added rules to maintain the design system to be more consistent here with Notion.
More user-centric and collaboration
I initiated creating a group/channel on Slack of #ideas and #users-feedback. We currently already have a channel for #UX and #market-research that they have built, but still, the CEO or business dev team reports or tells about the user’s feedback on the channel randomly. It could be on #engineering, #allmainteny. Rarely even on #UX channel and #UX channel itself is too broad. It could be about Figma updates, UI suggestions, etc.
This really helped and now the CEO always updates the user feedback on #user-feedback channel, so I can compile it easier using the affinity map and make the prioritization initiatively to decide which one feature or fix we can build.
User feedback + prioritization link here
Now we can collaborate to decide which one features together. This might be common in a large tech, though. But it doesn’t mean it’s not important to apply this to early-stage startups.
I also check regularly the works of the freelancers, while maintaining the component here and there. I’m grateful once again to work at Mainteny as they gave me a chance in this challenging and fast-paced environment while they are very supportive of each other 🙏🏻
Hiring Designers
I contributed to the hiring process. We used to have a plan to hire a full-time designer. I contribute to filtering portfolios and applications to be moved to the next stage which 1st interview. Of course, other teams can recommend anyone if any. I did some interviews alone or both with CTO during the first phase and also during the third phase (after the second phase, the design task challenge) together with the CTO and or also with the lead front-end developer.
I provide a list for onboarding New designers, roughly on Notion specifically about our design habits in detail at work. So less confusing, it’s like ‘What I hope I know before joining Mainteny’. I would like to create a slide for this instead of a text list, but I didn’t have time yet at that moment.
*This writing can be updated more, but so far here’s what I can tell on this blog.