All of our Design articles

Canva’s Path to Product-Market Fit — How a Two-Hour Founder Date Led To a $42B Design Platform
Cameron Adams goes deep on finding early evangelists, the unconventional tactics that led to massive growth, and more.

How Gusto built a $9.5 billion company by identifying a burning problem
Tomer London is the co-founder and CPO of Gusto, the $9.5B payroll and HR platform serving 400K+ businesses. Inspired by his dad’s clothing shop in Israel, he set out to build better tools for small business owners.

The Unsung Ingredient in Stripe, Square and Linear’s Success: Taste
Tactical advice for weaving craft into your product and operationalizing taste.

Lessons in Product Scaling and Storytelling from Figma’s CPO
Figma CPO Yuhki Yamashita offers up his playbook for the gnarly phase of product building that arrives after a startup clinches product-market fit — and sets its sights on the next phase of growth.

How Figma taps into taste, simplicity, and storytelling | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO at Figma, ex-Uber, Google, Microsoft)

How to leverage intuition, customer support, and raw effort | Colin Zima (Omni & Looker)
Colin Zima is the co-founder and CEO of Omni, a business intelligence tool that has raised over $26.9m. Prior to starting Omni, Colin was Chief Analytics Officer and VP of Product at Looker, which was acquired by Google for $2.6b.

An org-design masterclass from a Square GM | Saumil Mehta
Saumil Mehta is the GM of Square’s flagship point-of-sale business, as well as CRM, Square Staff, and Square Online.

The go-to-market guide for open-source companies — Douglas Hanna, COO Grafana Labs
Our guest today is Douglas Hanna, Chief Operating Officer at Grafana Labs. Grafana Labs is an observability stack built around Grafana, a leading open-source technology for dashboards and visualization. Douglas is a seasoned revenue leader, previously leading operations and GTM strategy at Zendesk.

Why everything we’ve been taught about quitting is wrong — Annie Duke
Our guest is Annie Duke, a retired pro poker player and First Round’s Special Partner focused on Decision Science and author of the bestselling book, “Thinking in Bets.” In today’s conversation, we’re talking about her follow-up to that book, titled “Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.”

The Design Leadership Playbook: How to Hire, Onboard & Manage a High-Impact Design Org
From the high-level perspective of what makes for a great design leader, to the tactical suggestions around the slide that needs to be in your portfolio presentation, Twilio & Segment's Hareem Mannan shares useful advice for every stage of a designer's career.

Take your design org from good to great with these principles from Segment to Twilio — Hareem Mannan
Today’s episode is with Hareem Mannan, who was a product design leader at Segment for nearly four years, and joined Twilio as a Senior Director of Product, Enablement & Design following the company’s acquisition of Segment.

Building a hybrid go-to-market motion — GC Lionetti’s lessons from Confluent, Dropbox & Atlassian
Today’s episode is with Giancarlo 'GC' Lionetti, the former CMO of Confluent and VP of Self-Serve Growth at Dropbox.