Dive Club
Posts
🤿 truth seeking

🤿 truth seeking

designing the fastest growing startup ever

Ridd
December 05, 2024

Imagine joining a startup as the 2nd designer...

Then within a few years you become the VP of Design at the fastest growing company ever 😮

That's the story for Diego Zaks and this week's episode is a deep dive into design at Ramp. So far it really seems to be resonating 🙌

We get into the weeds about:

Why velocity is the key to quality
The impact of “truth seeking pods”
How Diego creates a culture of collaboration
What it takes to be a great founding designer
The #1 trait Diego looks for in design candidates
How Diego has changed the way he gives feedback
How designers are empowered to make strategic calls
a lot more…

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

🤝 WITH GENWAY

I’ve been loving this new product called Genway—it uses AI-powered interviewers to help you gather rich, qualitative data at basically an infinite scale.

So I’ve been using it to interview Dive Club listeners all over the world!

I tell the AI what I’m hoping to learn and then it has a dynamic conversation with each person. Genway then automatically organizes all of the key insights for me.

I learned more in a 2 week study than I had in a year and half prior. Needless to say I am totally hooked 😆

So if you want to take your research to the next level, visit this secret landing page specifically for Dive Club listeners to get your first 2 months free 👇

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS

What makes Ramp’s design culture unique

1 — Designers are the ones who make the tough calls

Diego learned a difficult lesson in a previous design leadership role…

“I made myself the breaking point for where ideas come from and how people make decisions”

Diego Zaks

As a result, he has quite intentionally built a culture where designers don’t “look up” to leadership in order to make strategic calls 👇

This is especially true when it comes to product prioritization.

“Creating focus and choosing the right things to work on is the most important job that you can do at a startup”

Diego Zaks

That’s why Ramp only has ~20 product designers for a company of 1,000+ employees. Every designer owns a substantial portion of the product (sometimes being solely responsible for a $1B+ product line 🤯).

Diego keeps the team small intentionally because it forces prioritization. Designers can’t possibly accomplish every single need so it’s up to them to choose where to focus.

If there’s no prioritization then there’s little ownership of the decisions. You’re simply taking orders at that point.

So Diego’s role now revolves around keeping the high level picture in his head and giving designers the right level of context for each project. It’s then their responsibility to take that context and make the best decision they can in the moment.

2 — Being right 52% of the time

Successful designers are able to make notes of where they have low confidence in a decision… but still make the decision and ship it.

That’s because Diego views velocity as the key to quality. Building product is a race to have users tell you where you’re wrong.

“The actual quality and simplicity that matters only comes from putting things in front of real people who are going to tell you all of the tiny nuanced ways that you are wrong”

Diego Zaks

But this only works if you minimize the blast radius of your mistakes (which they do through strategic rollouts and weekly demos with power users).

They might not spend 4 months iterating in Figma… but over those 4 months they’ve already shipped and fixed the product 4 times. This makes it cheaper to take risks.

Keep in mind… this is a $7.65 Billion dollar company we’re talking about here. Typically as companies grow, people only want to take winning bets. So everything slows to a halt. But Diego believes the way to win is by making more, smaller bets and being right 52% of the time.

3 — Evolving the culture of collaboration

As Ramp has scaled over the years Diego noticed something… the formality of CRIT steadily increased as the team grew.

All of a sudden designers were making these fancy presentations and spending 20% of their time on the deck and story.

So they created a new avenue for feedback called “Truth Seeking Pods”.

These are groups of 3-4 designers that work on different product surface areas. Each week they get together 2-3 times and present their work through the framework they used to arrive at the output. These groups are tight knit (they even have their own swag and names 😅). That creates a level of trust required to give and receive real feedback. “Be kind not nice” as Diego says.

“…deconstruct the decisions and the frameworks that someone used to get to a suboptimal solution”

Diego Zaks

This word “framework” is key. Diego really emphasizes the practice of deconstructing how you arrived at a decision vs. solely evaluating the output. This is the backbone for how feedback works at Ramp.

4 — Slope > intercept

Ramp’s scale means the company is changing drastically every year.

So when it comes to hiring, Diego isn’t looking for people who have the desired skillset today. He’s more concerned with finding people who can learn any skill required quickly.

So his go to interview question is asking what you’re best at and what it took to learn that skill. It could be mountain biking, video games, or anything at all really… he just wants to find people who aspire to be one of the best in the world at something.

“It’s rare to find people who obsess over becoming great at something”

Diego Zaks

It reminded me of Soleio’s answer when I asked him about hiring at Facebook back in the day 💭