“I started as Facebook’s fifth product designer, then watched the team grow to six, then fourteen. Culture there came from the people we hired and the rituals we protected, not a manifesto.”
“I used to think building design culture meant hiring great designers and getting out of their way, but at Cursor and in my own work I’ve learned you’re really designing the organization, not just the product. The culture congeals around what you reward: shipping, learning fast, and the willingness to make messy decisions in public.”
“I used to think culture came from rituals and offsites, but building FigJam from nothing taught me it comes from who gets to have ideas. We made the team bottoms-up: share the insights, set the monthly goal, and let anyone prototype. That agency, plus being able to roast me in a meeting, is what made it stick.”
“At Casetext I built the design function from scratch next to the CEO, and at Humble Bundle I inherited production artists and turned them into product designers by automating the bottleneck work first. Culture follows behavior: I start by changing what people actually do all day, then the mindset catches up.”
“I started my first two months at Thinkific on a listening tour, interviewing designers and stakeholders and watching how work actually happened. What I saw was designers siloed with their PMs, so I made customer learning visible through Project Listen: four customer interviews a month, centralized, and opened to product, research, and engineering.”
“I start with principles, not aesthetics, because style follows philosophy. At the Timberwolves and Vox, the culture solidified once we wrote down what we said yes and no to, then let people argue with it. A design culture without an argued-over document is just a mood.”
“The hardest part is proving craft matters before you have the people to prove it. At Base and now X, I started by protecting small surfaces where designers could ship fast and show taste, because great people join when they see a culture that cares, not when you say it.”
“I built the Universe design language from a few adjectives and a mood board into something that directed every product decision, and that taught me culture starts as a shared way of seeing before it becomes a process. At Visual Electric I tried to keep that alive by hiring for taste and flexibility, because when you're small, the people you bring in are the culture.”