Mig Reyes - Harsh truths that designers need to hear

Summary

In a candid conversation, Mig Reyes, VP of Product Experience at Duolingo, discusses the evolving terminology and responsibilities within the design industry. Mig emphasizes that 'UX design' is perceived as an outdated term and stresses the importance of design having a central role at companies like Duolingo. He shares the unique culture at Duolingo where early career talent is a priority, with a high standard expected across all levels. The conversation dives into the necessity of visual design excellence, the benefits of a design-first culture, and how proactive communication and learning are vital for career growth. Mig offers insights into how design leadership should merge management with deep product involvement and highlights the importance of fostering a supportive, helpful community among designers.

Highlights

• Mig Reyes calls 'UX Design' an archaic term within the industry and discusses the transition toward 'Product Experience'. 🚀
• Duolingo invests heavily in early career talent, emphasizing the significance of coaching and high performance expectations from the get-go. 🌱
• Reyes emphasizes the necessity of visual design skills as part of the foundational expectations for designers. 🎨
• Communication, both in terms of quantity and quality, is highlighted as a crucial skill for advancing in a design role. 📢
• Managers at Duolingo are expected to excel in both people management and deep product expertise. 🏷️
• Successful design reviews at Duolingo focus on showing work through prototypes and concise presentations. 📊
• Reyes illustrates the importance of creating a learning culture where designers feel safe to try and fail. 👥
• Visual Design is increasingly emphasized in hiring, particularly in consumer-facing tech companies like Duolingo. 🖍️

Key Takeaways

• The term 'UX Design' might feel outdated, and companies are shifting towards 'Product Experience'. 🚀
• Design at Duolingo is ingrained in the company culture, with design not just having a seat at the table but helping to build the table. 🏢
• Early career talent is nurtured at Duolingo, with expectations for high standards in visual design from the outset. 🌱
• Proactive communication is key to career growth and team influence – share your thoughts, ideas, and goals! 📢
• Reps and hands-on feedback are essential for learning and improving design skills at all levels. 💪
• Building a supportive community in the design industry is crucial – help others to help yourself grow. 🤝
• Visual design remains crucial in hiring for consumer tech positions, often defining initial hiring decisions. 🎨
• Design leadership should engage deeply with the product and maintain high standards for craft and execution. 🖌️

Overview

In Mig Reyes' insightful conversation, he delves into why he believes 'UX Design' is becoming an obsolete term. Instead, the focus should be on 'Product Experience', capturing a more holistic approach to what designers truly do at companies like Duolingo. He highlights that at Duolingo, design is not simply an add-on; it's a fundamental part of the company's core, aiding in strategic decisions and contributing to the company's structure and culture.

Duolingo sets itself apart by nurturing early career talent with a unique focus on bringing new graduates into the fold and setting high expectations from the start. Design managers at Duolingo are groomed to know product intricacies and lead with a focus on both people and product excellence. This strategy is key to fostering a culture where learning is constant, ambition is nurtured, and design leadership is visible and methodical.

Reyes stresses the enduring importance of visual design in the hiring process for tech companies, advocating for a strong portfolio that showcases this skill. His approach to design education involves frequent feedback and continuous involvement with the product, preparing designers to bring tangible, metric-moving design solutions that align tightly with business goals. This conversation serves as both a call to action and a guide for designers aiming to enhance their careers in today's evolving landscape.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 03:00: Introduction to Episode and Guest The chapter discusses the evolving perception of UX design within the industry, noting that the term itself might be outdated. The conversation shifts to the speaker's mandate upon joining Duolingo, focusing on their strategic approach to enhancing design quality. It highlights the prevalent desire among designers for a significant role in company decision-making processes—a wish that's realized at Duolingo, where design plays a foundational role in shaping the company's direction.
• 03:00 - 11:00: Redefining Design Culture at Duolingo The chapter discusses the evolving role of design in business, emphasizing the need for design to take a more prominent seat at the table. It highlights the expectations from exceptional design managers, including a deep understanding of components, being precise about design details, and having a clear vision for the product's direction. The importance of creating a strong design community and culture is also explored, relevant for both newcomers and seasoned designers alike.
• 11:00 - 17:00: Emphasis on Visual Design and Execution The chapter titled 'Emphasis on Visual Design and Execution' features a session with Mig Reyes, the VP of product experience at Duolingo. The discussion revolves around the unique aspects of Duolingo's design culture, effective strategies for succeeding in design reviews, and candid insights into the design industry. Reyes shares honest, sometimes uncomfortable truths that are essential for growth in design, providing a learning opportunity for designers looking to enhance their craft.
• 17:00 - 22:00: Building a Feedback Culture The chapter discusses the change in name from UX design to product experience at Duolingo, exploring both the external perception and the internal rationale. The focus is on how this shift reflects broader responsibilities and integration of various functions such as product writing, research, and design.
• 22:00 - 28:00: Empowerment in Communication The chapter 'Empowerment in Communication' discusses the internal evaluation of the term 'UX' within a design team at Dolingo. It covers conversations involving senior designers, design managers, and the chief product officer, who collectively question whether 'UX' accurately represents their roles and contributions. The lack of alignment reflected in the meetings highlighted a need for a reassessment of communication and identity within the team.
• 28:00 - 34:00: Overcoming Hiring Challenges The chapter titled "Overcoming Hiring Challenges" discusses the antiquated nature of user experience (UX) in some contexts, highlighting a transition from traditional UX to more integrated and user-centric approaches. The discussion acknowledges a shift from simply drawing boxes and passing designs to others, towards a philosophy where everyone involved in product development actively contributes to creating an exceptional user-centered product. Emphasis is placed on user centricity as a fundamental and essential element of this process, reinforcing its importance as a default assumption in developing remarkable products.
• 34:00 - 35:00: Community and Support in Design In the chapter titled 'Community and Support in Design', the discussion revolves around the concept of design maturity within organizations. It emphasizes the importance of having design integrated into decision-making processes, highlighting that in mature design organizations, all roles—whether in product management, engineering, or design—are aligned with the mission of improving user experience. The chapter touches on the significance of collaboration across different teams that contribute to the product's development, indicating that the unity of purpose across roles is essential for creating excellent products. This realization led to a natural progression towards defining team roles that inherently involve product engagement, with minimal consideration for other options.

Mig Reyes - Harsh truths that designers need to hear Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I think this is almost an uncomfortable thing to say in the industry, but I do think UX design is a is somewhat of an archaic term. You were almost kind of given like a mandate out of the gate from leadership. So maybe you could talk about that a little bit and what your strategy has been to raise the bar for design at Dualingo. Something I hear all the time when designers and design leaders I interview, they tend to like say, you know, Meg, I really just want to work at a company where design has a seat at the table. We don't have that problem. design help build the table at Dualingo. Instead, what we have are open
• 00:30 - 01:00 seats where the business is saying, "Design, step up. We want you at the table." What are some of the specific behaviors that you would hope to see from an exceptional design manager? I've got to know the names of our components. I'm going to articulate the details of why something feels off by a few milliseconds all the way to here's where we're headed as a product. What does make a really great design community and culture in your mind? Whether you're a new grad right out of school or the 12-year veteran that helped design all of Duolingo, you present work to the
• 01:00 - 01:30 executive team five times a week. Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid, and this is where designers never stop learning. This week's episode is with Mig Reyes, who's the VP of product experience at Dolingo. And I love this episode because he shares a lot of truths that maybe are a little bit uncomfortable to hear, but I think the design industry needs to hear them. We also go deep into what makes Dualingo's design culture so special, how to succeed in design reviews, what MIG
• 01:30 - 02:00 looks for in hiring, and a lot more. But before we get into all of that, I was curious to learn why MIG changed the name of the org from UX design to product experience. So there's what the internet saw and what we actually are feeling internally at Duolingo. So it it goes a little bit like this. I have the privilege of managing and supporting and leading many functions uh product writing, product research, product design and yet we were all under this
• 02:00 - 02:30 umbrella of UX and there were not a ton of meetings for this. There was not a lot of alignment building. It was really asking a few people on the design team and then the exec team, hey, does UX actually feel like who we are and what we're doing at Dolingo? And everybody, everybody, the the senior designers, the managers on design, chief product officer was like, no, not really. We're actually how did we even land on UX to begin with is what we call ourselves. So
• 02:30 - 03:00 for us, a couple reasons we rifted on. One, it just feels super antiquated UX. And you know, maybe there's a little bit of a bias here. A lot of us come from a world where UX really just meant drawing boxes and passing it off to somebody else. We really think that all of us should be way more involved in the product. And then we kind of paused there and realized what we're all doing here is making an incredible product, an incredible product with users at the center of it. But for us, user centricity is just a given and an assumption and it's doesn't have to be a
• 03:00 - 03:30 conversation. And you can tell companies low design maturity if they still have to advocate for the user. us we are design has the seat at the table we all know both if you're a PM engineer or designer the user matters so what are we building together what are we all paid to do literally what is the mission to build excellent product and so when the titles of our teams were already product research product writing product design together we're all making the product experience so for us that was like the first idea we had we tossed around maybe not that many other options we couldn't
• 03:30 - 04:00 think of anything else and then I just DM' different execs hey thinking of changing our name It's a better reflection of what we do at Duolingo, which is we care about the product. What do you think? They're like, cool. Yep. What's the next agenda item? So, low stakes. It was just, I posted this on LinkedIn and the entire internet got pissed at me. And I'm And it's just like, how could they remove the user from everything? It's like that's we never said that. You guys put those words in our mouth, but that's cool if that's how you think about it. So for us it's we care about the this is a long-winded way of saying red product
• 04:00 - 04:30 matters and so does the user for sure but we're all here for the user to build really good product. So whether you're a designer, a researcher or a writer, you're making the product experience better on behalf of users and so we're all in on product experience. Real quick message and then we can jump back into it. All right, picture this. You're in design crit. You're getting a bunch of feedback from everyone on the call and you're taking notes as fast as you can because that's what's going to fuel that next round of iteration. Sound familiar? Well, thankfully those days are over.
• 04:30 - 05:00 All you have to do is run Granola in the background the next time you're talking with people on your team. That way you can relax a bit, be present in the conversation. Granola feels like a notepad, so you can still jot ideas down, so you don't have to be 100% reliant on AI or those creepy meeting bots. You can kind of think of it like Apple Notes, but it transcribes crit for you. You can even have a crit template to pull out specific action items or capture all of the questions you were asked. And I'm never starting a meeting
• 05:00 - 05:30 without Granola again. And I strongly believe that designers everywhere should be using it. They're offering 3 months free for you and anyone on your team. All you have to do is go to dive.com/granola to get the special offer. I've taught thousands of designers Figma, so I've made as many prototyping noodles as just about anyone. But now that I'm building my ideas in Lovable, it is really hard to go back to the old world. Nothing compares to sending developers a real
• 05:30 - 06:00 functional preview link. And it's so easy with Lovable. Like really, really easy. You can add screenshots, describe anything you want to build, and it happens like magic. I'm having as much fun building my ideas in Lovable as any other point in my career. And they just launched Lovable 2.0. So you can start building today. Just head to dive.club/loable. That's l ovable e. Okay. Now on to the episode. I can't remember who I was talking to, but it was not long ago. I was on an episode and I said effectively I would not apply
• 06:00 - 06:30 for a job that was UX designer because that immediately communicates an oldworld way of thinking. And maybe at its core the definition is correct, but it doesn't really matter because the perception has changed around those two letters. I think I agree with you and I think this is almost an uncomfortable thing to say in the industry, but I do think UX design is a is somewhat of an archaic term and I think I think it was Jacob Nielsen who went on my LinkedIn and said you're wrong and we should fight. You got a Jacob Neielen comment saying you're wrong. That's the gold
• 06:30 - 07:00 standard. That's like it doesn't get any higher praise than that. And it's like hey thank you. I I read your books, but also I've also built product here with other people and none of us resonate with the title UX designer. And going even before Okay, so at Dualingo, we've never had the title UX designer. We've always been product designer. At Instagram, where I worked for three and a half years prior to Duolingo, it was never UX designer. It was always product designer. And the thing I I'll like peel the curtains back on in hiring for consumerf facing companies, whether it's
• 07:00 - 07:30 Instagram, Dualingo, Airbnb, Coinbase, all my friends at other consumer companies. We almost get nervous when we have designers with UX designer titles come to interview because you're going to think about a few things but not all the things, which is visual design, business metrics, building things with engineers. A lot of what UX design symbolizes or or communicates to a lot of hiring managers is I'm pretty far from the work and I just want to do my end to end flow. You will never see a UX
• 07:30 - 08:00 designer job opening at an Airbnb, a meta, etc. because the product matters and the title has been product designer for more than a decade at some of the most reputable consumer companies in the world. Dualingo expects to be one of those companies. I appreciate you coming on and being willing to even talk about it because it is something that I've been feeling and it feels weird to say, you know, like weird even put Yeah. putting it on the internet, you know, you just invite backlash, you know, my god, post this on LinkedIn, like you'll they'll headhunt you, you know? Uh I I
• 08:00 - 08:30 hang out on the UX design subreddit from time to time almost just because it's like a window into the complete opposite world of Twitter really. like it's like actually helpful to see that okay there's like this real bubble that's happening here and I don't know just the other day I I felt bad like somebody was coming on they had like 20 years experience and we shared a portfolio and basically I was like I cannot get a job why can I not get a job I looked at the portfolio and you know there there was a visual design bar that wasn't being hit but it was the title was like
• 08:30 - 09:00 UI/Uxcessibility and I was like you know you're not going to want to hear this but I I think a large percentage of the industry is writing you off just from that way of defining yourself. I would double down and underscore what you said. I think having been a hiring manager for more than a decade at consumer companies, when we see job titles that say UI/Ux, I go, "Do you know what you're doing?" Um, yeah. Which is it? It is funny. The the UX design subreddit is I is maybe not the place
• 09:00 - 09:30 you want to grow your career or learn. In a lot of my peer groups and even on my team at Duolingo, friends from Instagram, other other companies, we also will kind of scrub through UX design subreddit or blind or other anonymous forums where, you know, you want to confide in your peer group. Uh I think we're having all the wrong conversations in those places. I think, you know, it's 2025 and people are still debating is it UI/UX, UX versus UI? And it's like we're all building products though. So when you're ready to talk about excellent prototyping, high visual
• 09:30 - 10:00 design, really thoughtful design details, and then really understanding revenue, daily active users, all in the same conversation, come on over. You'll up your chances on getting a job at a a big publicly traded, you know, tech company if that is your goal. But there's still merit to that in startups where we care about revenue, metrics, but also craft. And so there's two worlds in the industry. the people that have the jobs that are doing the work and they're oriented around building products, businesses, and doing great things for users. And then there's the people that are on these Reddits going,
• 10:00 - 10:30 "What's our title?" Or, "Here we go, another person changing the title." And it's like, is this really how you we want to spend our time? Um, moving our industry forward. And so, I I do encourage a lot of people to to go there for entertainment value, but it's not learning value. I think that's a probably a good way of saying it. And I love the phrase moving the industry forward because that to me is really the difference. It's like you're either defending the old world and trying to justify it or you know racing at the front. And I ask people all the time that come on the show what matters like
• 10:30 - 11:00 what do you look for? And some derivative of the word curiosity is like always the first thing out of people's mouth because they're looking for designers who are just trying to be at the front and figure things out and experiment and push boundaries in interesting ways. You know, for all the people that have told you curiosity matters, I would agree. I think AI is here. Year over year, month over month, technology evolves. And if you're not someone that's curious about what our role together with technology is, you're going to have a hard time finding design work. And so for everyone that has given
• 11:00 - 11:30 me grief over the post, I don't know what to tell you. We're here to be curious and here to challenge assumptions. And that's how great products are built. That's how great teams are built. I appreciate that. And it is kind of interesting because, you know, I view it as significant. you've wrapped it up into this kind of almost quick decision. So, let's back up a little bit and talk about some of the longer term strategy stuff that you're trying to work on at Duolingo because from our earlier conversation, you said you were almost kind of given like a mandate out of the gate from leadership. So, maybe you could talk about that a
• 11:30 - 12:00 little bit and what your strategy has been to raise the bar for design at Duolingo. I love this topic and it was a big reason why I decided to go to Duolingo in the first place. I'll start by saying I I was really happy at Instagram and didn't want to leave. The team there is unbelievably talented. I felt a lot of support from all the senior executives and especially the design leaders. And so when Duelingo came around, we call him Simei, Ryan Sims. He's our now chief design officer. He said, "Look, man, the design team got
• 12:00 - 12:30 really big pretty quickly. And at this point, I'm probably not doing justice to all the design leaders and design managers who are on the team. I need someone to take care of them." I think for the first time in our company history, we need a dedicated head of product design and I'd like you to consider it. And he sat me down and laid out a few things that maybe we can talk about. Number one, our team is incredibly early in their career. Number two, we have process. They're probably breaking at this point cuz we're going through rapid growth. And number three, because we're becoming a grown-up company, we're public now. We need more
• 12:30 - 13:00 leadership. And we don't have the problem. This is this is something I hear all the time when designers and design leaders I interview, they tend to like say, you know, Meg, I really just want to work at a company where design has a seat at the table. We don't have that problem. Design helped build the table at Duolingo. Instead, what we have are open seats where the business is saying, design, step up. We want you at the table. And so that kind of hints at what you're kind of pushing on, which is we need more leadership and seniority on the design side at Dolingo because we invest in early career talent so
• 13:00 - 13:30 heavily. So, I got to do Dolingo and we had a an amazing group of managers, yet none of them really had a a clear vision or were held to high standards in a way that I'm used to being held. So, I had enough encouragement from the exec team to go make the product design leadership team something we're all proud of and and have them push on the IC's, push the business forward, push the product. That's what we want from all leaders at Dolingo. So, I got in and pretty quickly had frank conversations with every manager. Here's where we're headed right
• 13:30 - 14:00 now. We're really good at taking care of our people, doing one-on- ones, and that's the management side of things that you're really good at. We need to really honor the two other parts of our job title, which is product and design. And this is something for what it's worth, rid that, that I think we're still underindexed on in the industry, leaders that are deep in the product and leaders that actually articulate and hold design to a really high bar. Um I think design management in the industry has perhaps devolved into paper pushing, running performance reviews, you know,
• 14:00 - 14:30 doing a lot of handwavy organizational things and not enough leading design, leading product. So that was the change I wanted to bring to Duolingo product design management. Let's get good at product. Let's get good at talking about design because the way we're going to earn trust into being in more executive decision-making rooms is no one will be able to talk about craft as good as us. And like that's who we are as who we should be as design leaders. So I laid that out as a vision for the design management team with all new
• 14:30 - 15:00 expectations. You're going to be good at coaching people into more senior levels. You're going to get good at really articulating product constraints, understanding the metrics really well. And then let's talk about craft. And so it's a very simple thing. Product design management. Well, let's get good at all those three things. Some managers were like, I see you. It's not where I want to be. So thank you. I think I'm going to explore new opportunities. And this was I expected that. I expected people to make a hard decision. And for the other managers that stuck around, um they said, "Thank you. Let's go." And I
• 15:00 - 15:30 also converted high potential IC's who really wanted to be managers into a manager. And so I essentially in year one rebuilt the entire design management team. The thing that is true of every manager on our team today, at one point in their career, they were an excellent IC. I really think that to be a great manager, it is a hard job. You have to love the people side, but you earn credibility from the business and the IC's from having once been an excellent IC in your career before. Now, that
• 15:30 - 16:00 doesn't mean just because you're an incredible senior IC, you'll you'll automatically be a good manager. But the art of knowing actually what you're talking about, being able to jump into Figma if it push came to shove to to jam with an IC, that's what I was looking for because we're a small company. We're only 900 people. So, we're not going to be big tech with hundreds of people in an org. You're going to be in the work. Uh, including me. I'm the head of the whole function for product experience. I'm I've got to know the names of our components. I'm going to articulate the
• 16:00 - 16:30 details of why something feels off by a few milliseconds all the way to here's where we're headed as a product in, you know, in the next several years. So, it's hard. I'm asking for a lot. I I absolutely recognize that. But that is the standard I want to hold for the management team. Here's why I focus on management first. You get good and build an incredible leadership team, everything else will follow. So I can scale myself through an excellent leadership team. But more importantly, we can lift up all the designers and all of the IC's, the researchers, the
• 16:30 - 17:00 writers by having incredible managers that are trusted with all the other managers, trusted by the executive team. That just didn't happen when I got here. We were not well trusted with the exec team simply because we were too far away from the work. So now today, um, we have an amazing leadership team that we're all really proud of. We go up to bat for each other. We push each other. We grow each other. all in spirit of helping everyone else on the team. And so that was kind of this big vision. I like it. And I'm sure it also inspires a new subset of designers who maybe all of a
• 17:00 - 17:30 sudden are interested in becoming managers too because like that was always the blocker for me. Like I saw management as the separation from the craft and the removal from the pixels. And I was like, well, I don't want anything to do with that, you know? And so I I I appreciate the merging of those lines. I've had um senior IC's come to me and say, "Now that I know what management really could be, I actually am more interested in a path to maybe being a hybrid manager in IC or maybe a full-time manager one day." And there have been managers on my team who have said, "This is the first time I actually
• 17:30 - 18:00 understand how I can use my design skills in a management role." But yes, I mean this is true of every function at Duolingo, whether you're an engineer, a PM, you had to have been excellent at your craft because our philosophy is if you're going to manage anyone else or lead anyone else doing this, you got to know what you're talking about and you have to have a high standard and know what excellence looks like and feels like for you to guide anyone else toward it. Let's get one level more into the weeds here. What are some of the specific behaviors that you would hope to see from an exceptional design
• 18:00 - 18:30 manager? You should know every item on your road map, why it matters, and what it means to the business. I think knowing what we're building, who we're building for, and why we're building it, you better be able to repeat to anybody in the seauite in the elevator why. So, just knowing the vision of where we're headed as a team or an org, you got to you got to know quite deeply. On the design side, I expect you to be able to evaluate your entire team's body of work. you should consider yourself the studio head of your team and be able to bravely flag where work is falling
• 18:30 - 19:00 short. So if this project is not doing well, you better be the first to call that out, not some executive. And that's how I know you're doing an incredible job as a design leader. You are proactively flagging where work is falling short. Then you're inspiring the team to get to a better outcome. It's not just going, "Rid, this is bad work. Fix it." It's, "Hey, Rid, I notice we're going in this direction. Let me articulate because of this detail and the context of where the product is heading, how you can make this work better. And so I really expect our
• 19:00 - 19:30 design leaders to be excellent coaches, mentors, and teachers. And that that I'm actually pretty unwavering on. You have to be a support person. You have to be a peer that we can go to to go to go you have high standards, but I feel safe to learn from you at the same time. It's a really hard balance to strike. excellent communicators that can go down to the detail of the craft and then back all the way up of where we're heading as a company. I expect you to be able to kind of go up and down in those waves as a as a design leader. Depending on the
• 19:30 - 20:00 seniority of your management role, I expect other senior people to look up to you. And I don't think we say that in the in the corporate world too much, but I do remember even when I was at Instagram, our career ladder said, uh, if you're trying to be a director, senior people look to you for guidance. Senior people want to work on your team. I'm bringing those same expectations to Dolingo. I want the most senior people in this industry to go look at our team and go, "How the hell do I get on there?" And one way we're going to get there is from leaders and managers that are supportive, caring, kind, but also
• 20:00 - 20:30 have an insanely high standard for the work and for the team. Thoughtful articulation, high sense of judgment on what our product means and what it does. And then, you know, teach people and teach people how to get there. I probably want to go into each of those individually a little bit later, but as you're talking, I'm kind of curious. You know, a lot of this probably has a bit of a timeline for you to see meaningful results. You know, you're making big sweeping organizational changes. Maybe some of them still feel work in progress. How do you, as the design
• 20:30 - 21:00 leader that's trying to make this happen, figure out if it's actually working? like what are the signals that you looked at where you're just like gosh, you know, we're 2 months in. Is this having the impact that I was hoping it would? One thing that has really simplified the way I look at things, and I learned this from uh Brett Westerbelt. He's the now VP of design for all of Instagram. He really pushed his leaders to just first and foremost look at the work because the reason you're building an excellent team is to build excellent
• 21:00 - 21:30 work, to build excellent product, to do excellent design. I can't control if daily active users go up or down all by myself. I can't control if we make more money off this experiment versus this experiment. What I can control is how good was the work that helped at least try to move a metric. Is the work getting better every single month? Now, this is a bit of a subjective thing, but one thing we've really understood as an exec team at Dualingo, you are hiring leaders for their pace, their bar for excellence. So for me as I'm number one
• 21:30 - 22:00 I'm aligning with the CEO the entire seuite all the execs of every other function. What does good look like for a company? Is my definition really good? Your same definition as really good. Once I got a really good picture of what good work means at Dualingo I'm then evaluating all the projects and what I'm then doing is taking a look at the work and then having conversations with all the IC's and all the design managers of of how the work is and my responsibility is how good am I giving feedback. so that I can see the work getting better
• 22:00 - 22:30 given the emphasis on the work. And I think a natural response for a lot of maybe first- time design leaders would be okay well we need to bring in ultra senior talent and make sure that the seniority bar is really high because each person has to be able to execute at a high level and have this you know really rich background in craft and yet twice now you've mentioned the emphasis on hiring junior talent. So, can you touch on that piece of the strategy? Whether you're an L1, which is like a new grad designer, to an L7, which
• 22:30 - 23:00 you're a VP level designer, every single person has the same high expectation for craft. We don't modulate it based on how junior or senior you are. You just you're here because you're going to do good work. What's been cool, and honestly, Rid, what made me hesitate about taking my job at Duolingo until I learned to love this and now I'm I totally love this is the density of early career talent. It's interesting to share that roughly half of our hiring forecasts every single year is specifically reserved for early career talent. Meaning from from university or
• 23:00 - 23:30 school to your first ever job, we're hiring intentionally new grads largely because we want to invest in the industry. This is not a cost-saving thing. We pay all our early career people quite well. in instead it's instead of only fighting for the same senior talent that every other hiring leader in the world is fighting for, grow them, develop them. And it also speaks toward the mission we have for our product. We're here to teach. We're here to grow others. You're here on Duolingo, the product to learn. We want
• 23:30 - 24:00 that philosophy in our company. You're you're going to come to Duolingo to get your butt kicked in all the most fun ways and you're going to learn. So, we really invest in junior talent or early career talent. But the expectation for them is the same. Your craft has got to be awesome. So you can imagine it is a high stress environment at first for your first few weeks, quarters, months being an all new to the corporate world designer. And then you start to realize, oh, you know what? It's actually not that bad. And again, I have a manager
• 24:00 - 24:30 who will support me, take care of me, guide me. And so I'm trying to think about it from both lenses of build an excellent leadership team who will take care of the crew and then bring in hungry unbelievably ambitious high potential designers who you know given good opportunity and coaching can meet the expectations. We're always going to know like okay if it's an L1 designer put the right scope of project on their plate don't give them an entire redesign. So we what we try to do is
• 24:30 - 25:00 hold you to the same high expectation but change your scope as you get more senior. Still I I would definitely love more senior people at Dolingo. Uh but the reality for us and what we're committed to is investing in the future of the industry. And so what's also nice is that we can shape the perception and the attitude and the approach of how designers enter this field where one invisible hard thing to sus out when you interview senior people is are they jaded? Will they bring in baked ways of working that they are un unwilling to
• 25:00 - 25:30 change if they get to do Duallingingo? So it hiring senior people is such a mixed bag and we all want them. But here's a really cool counterpoint. There have been designers at Dualingo who have been here 7 years, 8 years, 9 years, 10 years, 12 years, 11 years. So our retention is unbelievable. These same people are now directors, executives, senior IC's. We developed them here. Some of some of the designers here, they've only ever worked here and now are are leading the way for us. So I I even asked Luis, our CEO, hey man, what's your take on just having so many
• 25:30 - 26:00 junior people here? He said, I know it's a long game, but this is how we work as a company. We take the long view, so we're going to invest. And is it more work upfront? For sure, but we owe it to the industry to pay it forward and and develop people. and some of the best people on our team rose up through the ranks of Duolingo versus a lot of senior people we've brought in and had to unfortunately say goodbye to because they never wanted to they it was just hard to figure out how they fit in. So deep deep deep commitment to early
• 26:00 - 26:30 career talent because we think it's just the right thing to do for the industry. Can we talk a little bit about the development process? like if you hire someone tomorrow, what are the specific ways that you would expect that person to grow in their first maybe year at Dualingo? Here's here's a philosophy I feel very strongly about. You don't treat a junior person like they're a junior person. You treat everybody with the same super high expectations and then you tailor your expectations based on what they give you. If you want to
• 26:30 - 27:00 get to every next promotion, I'm going to treat you like you're already there and then I get to learn the gaps you have and then we make a coaching plan for you on those gaps. And so we kind of throw you into the fire right away. So here are concrete examples. Whether you're a new grad right out of school or the 12-year veteran that helped design all of Dolingo, you present work to the executive team five times a week or have the opportunity to present five times a week. So, you present your own work. You talk to us about what metric impact you
• 27:00 - 27:30 think you're going to have. You show the prototype that you made. Your manager is not going to do it for you. We throw you right in front of the CEO, head of product, head of design, and go talk about your work. And that is totally scary. I get that. But we again, it's we're not going to slow roll it. We we think we hire smart people and I think we want to get out of the way. And so, see where they end up after these first few rounds of high pressure and real work. like we're trying to ship real product work and then from there tailor it in reverse. Now we will do other things too just to make sure it's not a
• 27:30 - 28:00 total chaos show. One again I go back to the managers. Are you thoughtful in growing their career? Do you have a coaching plan? Do you talk to them about their career and their skill gaps? Not just once a quarter or every performance review. I'm talking weekly. Are we creating structures where it's safe for people to make mistakes? So one thing we've done at the company is this new format called hot trash. And hot trash is an environment where PMs, engineers, designers, everyone in the company can hop into a room and just show silly
• 28:00 - 28:30 ideas and go, "What if we did this?" And even the execs are in the room and it's like, "Wa, cool. What if we did this?" And we build. So I think so much of it is just feeling safe to learn. And then I'll try to do other things too. Bring in outside leaders. So, you know, whether it's um Ian Silber, head of design of OpenAI to No 11, head of design of Figma, I've invited them to come do Q&As's with my team to just go talk to us about what it's like in your companies just so that they know it's not just a Duolingo thing. This is an industry thing we're all trying to learn. So, I think it's yeah, creating a
• 28:30 - 29:00 culture of learning all around these people. And even for me, I'm I'm not done learning. I'm I actually for all intents and purposes feel like a rookie myself in a lot of things. So, it's creating that culture of um it's okay to mess up as long as you're showing every single day you're getting a little bit better. I mean, that was a very robust answer. It's pretty cool. And I it's very obvious that you're doing a lot of things to support junior talent. And even just listening to you talk, I mean, the timing for that strategy has never been better just because the industry is
• 29:00 - 29:30 reinventing itself so quickly. Like going back to the beginning of the conversation, it's like my goodness, the tools that I'm spending so much time working with right now are just as new to me as the person that you hired 8 months ago at Dualingo. And so in so many ways, there's like this leveling of the playing field where all of a sudden the value of moldability is pretty easily able to outweigh that lack of experience when everything's so new. I mean, it's wild for me to see that some of our L1, L2 designers at the company
• 29:30 - 30:00 are running circles around people I'm interviewing externally because of their adaptability, their curiosity, the high potential and and craft that they all exhibit. I came in to Dolingo with skepticism because of how early career our team is. And I'm now looking backward going, "Holy I'm so proud of my early career crew that I'm actually asking some of these early career designers to teach some of the senior designers other skills that they don't have." It's this full circle coaching culture that we have for each
• 30:00 - 30:30 other that I want want to build more of. I guess another aspect of moldability is, you know, it's not just that the process and the practice of design is potentially more rigid in a senior designer, but they also have certain expectations about what a design culture should even look like, where you're kind of given this blank slate on an individual basis for each person. And I would imagine that almost in some ways allows you to have a slightly more opinionated take on what a good design culture even is. And I know you've written about that in the past for Instagram. So maybe you could talk a
• 30:30 - 31:00 little bit about what you believe through the lens of what you're seeing at Duolingo in terms of what does make a really great design community and culture in your mind. You said a word that I I really feel strongly about. It's community. I think as a company gets bigger, it's so important for each other to know what we're working on, how we're getting there, and that we're learning together. What culture is not our happy hours, ping pong tables, foosball tables. That's just stuff in an office. Culture to me is what do we say yes to? What do we say no to? What is
• 31:00 - 31:30 our standard? And how do we help each other meet those standards? And I know that sounds very intense, but what it really is is a commitment to the work and each other. That and that's the culture I want. And that commitment to each other means we're learning and growing. So we do once a month we'll do these things called design showcase where we're just doing showand tells doing deep dives on the weird cultural things of each of our teams, making fun of ourselves. We're doing case studies in front of each other all the time of like, whoa, I just learned how to run a meeting with the CEO and everyone here's
• 31:30 - 32:00 what I learned. Like the silliest little things I I think people don't realize those are all learnable things. So, we have a culture of just sharing constantly. Every Monday I have a Monday update where I use it as a moment to try to share a top of mind that we can all be learning from from each other. But the the culture, here's a couple important things I think of culture. Leadership definitely has to set the tone. If I'm absent from the work, I'm not in the rooms, I'm not talking to the designers, you're gonna already have this sense of leadership is too far
• 32:00 - 32:30 away. So number one, I want all of the leaders to be with the team. This is our team, not your team, but our team together. And so it's first and foremost on the managers and leaders to set the tone for quality and set the tone for community building. But I also tell all the IC's, especially the junior IC's, this is your team, too. So if we're not doing something, you have full permission to start a new event or program or something. So earlier I said we got the heads of design of OpenAI, Figma, other companies to come hang out with us. That's all from a junior
• 32:30 - 33:00 designer that I just instead supported. So we have a designer Loesh. He had asked me, "Hey, does anyone know any growth designers in the industry? I'm on the growth team. I just want more resources." I slacked in a thread. Hey, how about I get some growth design managers to come to your team and we'll do a Q&A with them? We did that. So, shout out to Christina who's um a design director at Instagram. She came over to give a talk. And then Loesh was like, "Mig, that was so cool. Could we do that again?" I'm like, "Yeah, do it. Make
• 33:00 - 33:30 this a whole program. Whatever you need, I want you to design the program. Put together a schedule of the top design leaders in the industry you want to meet. I'll email them if it if it helps. if it, you know, helps to have a senior leader reach out to another senior leader, I'll do that for you. You put in the work on bringing people to our company and I I'll invest. And so that's what I mean about bottoms up culture. It's like if you want to work on a badass design team, be a part of making it badass. And so we we really try to empower our team to teach each other, make culture with each other, and not
• 33:30 - 34:00 only wait for the managers and leaders. I love that. And I also want to highlight something that you said. You you use the word learnable. Maybe we could use that as a launching point to talk a little bit about the design reviews which do feel like a pretty big piece of this culture where you're putting your work in front. It doesn't matter if you're a junior like you're not going to have a manager go to bat on your behalf like if you made something show it off kind of thing. So in what ways is that piece of the puzzle learnable? And are there specific things
• 34:00 - 34:30 that you're equipping younger designers with even to succeed in those moments? And I'm going to eliminate two answers that are the obvious ones, which is like give the proper context and know your audience. So, building on top of that, how do you set designers up for success in those moments? I don't think there are many more tried and tested methods of learning something other than reps. And we really believe in reps at Duolingo. What we do for a new PM and a new designer, regardless of level or
• 34:30 - 35:00 tenure or seniority, you're going to start showing up at product review right away. So product review is one of the more important meetings we have at Duolingo. It happens five times a week. Every single day we'll have a mini product review where it's rapid fire and you'll line up in the room and just flash work and go, I want to do this. What do you think? Approved. Next assigner. Want to do this? What do you think? Approved. So that one's a little faster and lower stakes. And then every Tuesday and Thursday we have a full product review where each review is only 10 minutes, by the way, not a full hour, 10 minutes per product review. And what
• 35:00 - 35:30 we want is a designer and PM to tag team show work right away. We do not want handwavy long decks. We don't want long docs. We just literally want a prototype and show us the work. And that is for senior people really weird because they're used to making all these like overly done, longly written docs. And for junior designers, they're like, I've never done any of this stuff before, so what the heck is this? To answer your question, number one, we give everybody lots of reps. And the expectation is you're just constantly coming to product
• 35:30 - 36:00 review and we expect you to get better over time. The second thing we do is just give you hands-on feedback right after your product review. I mean, one is rep, but two is the coaching. And this is the really important part that I think we're still getting better at at Duolingo. After a product review, we do a debrief with all the execs in the room. We talk about every single review every single day. And so we'll go, "Okay, let's talk about Rid's review. He showed this new streak feature. What kind of feedback?" In addition to the review feedback we gave, what are like the meta feedback we should give Rid and
• 36:00 - 36:30 his team. All right, maybe Rid was a little too long-winded. We didn't need to see this part of the doc and we don't actually trust the metrics evaluation that he had. So, let's maybe coach his team on that so that he can show up better next time. We will then DM you directly or tell you and your manager and your PM partner directly, hey, awesome job today. Couple of extra notes for you after we did a debrief. And so rather than reading everything hoping you're going to get ready to do it, jump in. It's going to be a little scary at first, but after each successive product
• 36:30 - 37:00 review, plus hands-on help afterward, you start to dial it in and fine-tune your approach, your presentation style, and also more importantly the the work itself. We also do have a lot of documented things that work. We have a litany of principles. You know, we prefer to keep it short, keep it brief. um no explainer UI, no wizards and taproughs and clickthroughs and tool like we have some of these fundamental things that we'll just pass along to the team. But for the rest of it, you got to be brave and try and expect that for
• 37:00 - 37:30 junior people to new directors that join the company as well. Let's take a different approach to the reps idea. Let's do it. And I'm going to shine the spotlight on you now because you've also went through a ton of reps as the person sitting in the design review chair. In my head, it kind of looks like Shark Tank. I'm not sure what it actually looks like, but that's what I'm picturing you at. You're in that middle Shark Tank seat. And you know, you've sat there quite a few times, many times a week, not just at Duolingo, but this was probably a big part of the role at
• 37:30 - 38:00 Instagram, past roles. So, given the amount of reps that you've had in the Shark Tank seat, how have you evolved the way that you give feedback to designers? I love this question. It's also rarely spoken about when we talk about leadership. Leadership um education part of leadership is giving guidance and it it's like it's a given that you're just good at it. But it's not it's like giving hard feedback to someone. It's an art that you learn. Product feedback, design feedback, it's
• 38:00 - 38:30 an art that you craft and you learn. I'll tell you how I even became an official product reviewer at Duolingo and then answer your question about how I refined it over time. When I got to Duallingingo, the P priority zero of my onboarding plan with my manager Simei was, "You have to get calibrated." Big bold letters. You have to get calibrated because if you are not calibrated at how we work at Duolingo, you're going to have a hard time being a reviewer, which we expect you to be one day. So, what I did was I was added to every single
• 38:30 - 39:00 product review meeting from week one of starting my job, and I shadowed all of them. I just watched and studied, but I did active shadowing. So on the side, I had a private Slack channel with my boss. It was me reading every pitch from every team that was going to present a product review that day and me also giving feedback and predicting what feedback the CEO, head of product, and Simmyi would give in a thread before the
• 39:00 - 39:30 review starts. Then we go through the review. Simmyi will go back to the thread and check in on my answers. Here's what you got right. Here's why we said this thing. An additional consideration you missed out on MIG was this. I did this for about four weeks straight on my onboarding at Duolingo to the point where I was really starting to predict what leadership was going to say. So by my fifth week at the company, I was minted an official product reviewer uh for the company. But it was being very active and engaged way before a review would happen just to really try
• 39:30 - 40:00 to purposely understand the level of craft, the level of product thinking that is required to to be successful at Dolingo. So it was very hands-on and now we're trying to scale that u process to future PMs and future design hires where we literally tell everyone shadow product review and have active conversations with your manager on what you thought was going to happen. Why do you think MIG said this in the review? Let's break down the feedback. And I will also go out of my way to new people to go, "Hey, by the way, good job on
• 40:00 - 40:30 your first review. Here's also why I said this again to help calibrate everyone else." So, there's that. Um, how I got to be a reviewer at Duolingo. I would say my feedback giving skills really I started to take seriously when I was at Instagram. All the design leaders there at Instagram are held to a really high standard, both in their understanding of craft and product, but also how to give feedback on it. So, something I learned how to do and refine over time is being very succinct,
• 40:30 - 41:00 direct, and only giving feedback on what really matters. One pitfall a lot of leaders fall into is they'll just kind of vibe for a while of like things they're feeling, and then they leave the room and the team's like, "So, what do I what do I do? what which of this do I need to act on? I've learned over time, and I'm honestly right, I'm still trying to get good at this. Get down to the single most important thing that would help make the project better. Everything else that designer can learn through more reps, more design time on their own, what's the thing that I know that
• 41:00 - 41:30 they could never or they'd have a hard time getting to on their own. That in and of itself of finding the most important thing is really hard. And when you can do that, I think just being concise, crisp, direct, and not sugarcoat. I think a lot of leaders will say, "Oh, this is so good." And you know, maybe if you try this. No. Hey, look, you're I don't think this is going to meet the goals of the the project, and here's why. And so, the second thing I would say is get good at saying why. What you don't want to build in a design and product culture is designers and PMs
• 41:30 - 42:00 going you and asking for approval and then leaving. That is not teaching people how to think. What you want to do is give the feedback, especially if the work's not there yet, and then say the why so that when they're when you're not in the room, they start to get to these outcomes more on their own. I've gotten really intentional about saying why a lot more. And in a 10-minute review, it's I will admit it's really hard to go in depth and go beyond a brief piece of feedback. So, I'll I'll still follow up on a DM and say, "Here's why I gave you
• 42:00 - 42:30 that feedback." really breaking down how you think about a problem, then give the feedback is has been really helpful. And the only way I got good at it, as I said earlier, reps, I I I sucked at giving feedback for a while. Um, but time, you know, review over review of just trying to dial it in. And then also asking my my peers like um you know, there's three people I've really looked to in my time at Duolingo. Jem, our head of product, Liz, one of our heads of product, and then Sime, my manager. I'll ask for feedback. How'd I do when I gave that
• 42:30 - 43:00 feedback? Was this clear? Did I come off too harsh by the way? Or sometimes they'll say, "No, you were too soft, actually." So, you get feedback on giving feedback with each other. And and this maybe is the nugget of what I'm trying to talk about. There's got to be a culture around giving good feedback. Giving good feedback has to matter unanimously across the the leadership team. I felt some conviction because you used the phrase like maybe if you tried. That's totally me. I'm totally like maybe if you tried person. So, uh yes, noted. I want to
• 43:00 - 43:30 make sure that we're covering everything in the communication bucket before we move on. So, this could exist outside of the design reviews. It doesn't really matter, but what other communication patterns in your mind separate the most successful designers that you've worked alongside from the people who maybe struggle to build a little bit of influence inside of a design or? I have lots of thoughts on this because getting really good at communication is is critical to being influential. I think a lot of designers will tell me they
• 43:30 - 44:00 struggle because of a few reasons. They're introverted. It's not part of their personality. They're not a good writer. English is not their first language. There's a lot of reasons that will hurt our confidence in communicating. The thing that I actually feel more strongly about is that you just do it at all. I think too many designers are underindexed in in just saying anything to anybody. and and the most successful people I've seen in design are proactive. They communicate a
• 44:00 - 44:30 lot. Even if they're not polished, unpolished, but frequent is much better than polished, but rarely. And over time, again, because of reps of doing it over and over, you will eventually become a more polished communicator. I I can't stress enough that making sure everyone around you knows what's in your head is one of the most important things you could be doing to grow as a designer and a design leader in particular. So just doing it at all, I think I know it sounds weird, but just not communicating is one of the biggest flaws. And not communicating enough is what I actually
• 44:30 - 45:00 tell people and and when I try to coach other designers is if you think you're doing enough, you're probably not doing enough at all. Overdo it. And by overdoing it, you're probably doing it just enough. So I think the proactiveness and the attention to doing it over and over. Now, what I mean by that is give team updates uh or give project updates to your manager, give project updates to your team. when something's going wrong, raise your hand and say so and don't wait for someone else to flag something's wrong. I think just a sense of ownership and saying, "Hey, I'm I'm seeing this. Everybody, is anyone else seeing this?" Those people
• 45:00 - 45:30 become influential simply because they show they're caring about the right things simply by saying it out loud. So that I I can't stress enough that you don't have to be a brilliant blog writer to to be a good communicator. It's just proactiveness and doing it constantly is is like the first best thing any anyone can ask for. A great communicator will start to articulate thinking in a way that other people can mirror the thinking and start to scale themselves.
• 45:30 - 46:00 So this is what I actually want out of all my design leaders on our team is be a good communicator so that you can scale yourself and get all 10 of your designers to start thinking like you versus say something out loud so that they do the order. I really think writing is one of the biggest levers we have in in growing people. So, I'm a big proponent in pushing people to to write regularly, share regularly. You don't have to speak at all hands. If that scares you, you don't have to do that. But you got to find ways to get decision makers to know what you're thinking. And
• 46:00 - 46:30 like that's that's how I really try to break down what communication is is just get the right people to know what's in your head. That's what matters. how you do that, whether it's a DM in a meeting, in an email, figure out what's comfortable to you, but ultimately what matters is the people around you that matter needs to know what matters to you. So, it's it's just encouraging to do it at all is the first thing. I'm a big believer in the power of video to explain my thinking as a designer. So, when it's time to give feedback, I'll drop a Loom link in Slack and another
• 46:30 - 47:00 link to a Figma prototype and then feedback will be scattered everywhere. And I mean, it's a mess. So, I'm building the product that I've always wanted to exist, and it's called Inflight. You can kind of think of it like an Async Crit. It's an easy way to share a video walkthrough along with an interactive prototype or whatever you're designing, and then AI interviews the people on your team to get you the feedback that you need and organizes everything for you in a beautiful insights page. So, right now, I'm only
• 47:00 - 47:30 giving access to Dive Club listeners. So, if you want to be one of the first to use inflight, head to dive.comclub/inflight to claim your spot. I think it's very obvious from a design leadership standpoint, but even just like putting myself in the position of, you know, the little IC designer with some kind of an idea. Just putting it out there is the way to be a magnet for the one, two, maybe three other people that are like, "Oh, that's kind of a cool idea." and all of a sudden you have mobilized people, you know, and that that idea of like, oh,
• 47:30 - 48:00 I'm actually just scaling myself, you know, there's more inertia behind this little nugget of an idea all of a sudden. Communicating widely and proactively is how you make more opportunity for yourself as a designer. You want to get to more senior roles, have bigger project opportunities. We got to know what you care about. We got to know what interests you. And so when I'm a manager trying to find the right designer to put on a very important project, what I'm looking for are who's a fit for this? Who cares about this problem? You tend to have better output
• 48:00 - 48:30 when you have a designer who cares about the problem. And the only way I know is if a designer is broadcasting their goals, their hopes, their desires, what they're worried about, what they're mad at, what they're excited about. And the designers that find ways to comfortably share what's in their head, whether it's through writing or meetings or etc., Those are the people that are then become top of mind and first in line for opportunity. Even when a manager wants to do this as fairly and as with as much justice and fairness as possible, creating visibility is something you'll
• 48:30 - 49:00 hear a lot about in career ladders. Creating visibility means get your ideas out there. It doesn't mean brag about your work in front of the execs. It simply means, hey everyone, if there's ever an opportunity to make a design system for this thing or clean up these parts of our app, I really am so stressed about it. I'd love to be the first to clean all this up. That's communicating and that's just expressing where you want to go. So, I can't agree with you enough that it really is not just for leaders. It's for IC's and not literal IC's. I think at Dualingo, IC's are actually the most important role at
• 49:00 - 49:30 the company where we're going to have fewer managers simply because we believe what makes the company go is excellent IC's. I think I'm going to take a left turn before I let you go here and let's touch on the hiring piece a little bit. There's probably a lot of people right now even listening that are just like, man, it's tough out there, you know, like they might be are looking for the next role. Maybe they're still in between jobs. Maybe they're having trouble getting to the end of an interview process. So, I'm curious if off the top of your head, do you have any advice that you think more designers need to hear for today's landscape? We
• 49:30 - 50:00 could talk about this topic for another two hours. I really think hiring in in tech and in design is broken. I want to first start by saying if you're looking for a new role, it is hard out there and the whole Dolingo crew is rooting for you. It's hard. I've been a part of the side where I had to do layoffs and I didn't love it. I've been now as a hiring manager knowing just how saturated and dense the market is. So, just first a shout out to all of you looking for work. It is tough. Um, and
• 50:00 - 50:30 whatever you know the Duolingo crew can do for you, we're here for you. And I think one thing and really why I'm excited to be a part of this is to just help others. And so I do want to share stuff that I think um is different from what I think we're being taught to find a job. So here's a few things. I'll start with silly hot takes. I don't want to see pictures of you putting sticky notes on the wall. That's not what we're hiring for. Don't really need to see screenshots of your Fig Jam. I don't need to see 30 slides of buildup and UXR
• 50:30 - 51:00 and all and personas. The insights matter, but ultimately in the first stages, especially for an interview, the output matters. And I can't underscore this enough. I think especially as you know, we were riffing on the UI UX debate. I think too many designers are trying to be a million things in their first shot at getting a job. There is a funnel here. And what we really want first is do you execute well? The word designer is in your title. We will say,
• 51:00 - 51:30 "Oh, we want craft." I'm going to just say straight up as a leader, here's what craft means to Duelingo. Your visual design is very good. You have a good prototype. You have interaction design details that make us go, "Wow, that's nice." You have built and designed work that looks like it belongs in other people's hands. Visual design actually really, really matters. And it is not that visual design is the only thing that matters. But here's where it's frustrating on the other side. Let's say we go through somebody's case study, 20 minutes go by with a lot of leadup and
• 51:30 - 52:00 sketches and then the there's one slide at the end of what they shipped. Tada. It's not well executed is a huge letdown. And so I I really think there is an significant underindexing right now on the execution of the work, the visual design of the work. And I don't know how else to say it. And when we turn down candidates, when we do rapid portfolio reviews, if your if your visual design's not there, we're closing the tab. Yeah, you got 8 seconds. You got seconds. And if your visual design's not there, we close the tab. If your
• 52:00 - 52:30 visual design is good, we then investigate, what was the product challenge? How was it? Cool. Now, I'm interested. So, we reverse funnel it. Start with visual design. If you're off there, you're out of the the running. And then we we slowly go, all right, there's interest here. Bring them on to an on-site. Here's where I think designers are going wrong in interview loops and what advice I would give. Way too much context. Again, lots and lots of buildup. All we want to see first and foremost is the work. And then we've
• 52:30 - 53:00 actually made a change at Dualingo. When we do first calls and portfolio reviews with candidates, many companies will do a 30 minute 45minut portfolio review before you're allowed to go on site. We do a 30-inut chat. You are allowed only three to five slides only. No text is allowed and you can only show highfidelity final output on these three to five slides. Here's why. We're consumer company and the people that use our apps are real people like you and me. Real people are not reading 10page
• 53:00 - 53:30 decks. Real people are not reading 10page documents. Real people use the work, see the work, and look at the work. So this is also how our product review process is at Duolingo. Show the work. We don't want to read the deck. Show the work. So, I have told designers, I don't want to see anything other than highfidelity prototypes on up to five slides. And every time I get to a call, the designer's like, I don't know if I did this right, but here it is. And I'm like, you did it exactly right. And here's why we do it this way. One, we're showing you how we work at
• 53:30 - 54:00 Duelingo. Two, we want to just cut to what really matters in the first stage, but three, we want to make it easy for you. Finding a job sucks, and it's so hard. did so much work to put all these hours of work into making this narrative in in meeting number one just how do you how do you execute and so designers are like this is weird but I only spent like 30 minutes on it. It's like boom it's exactly what we want. So, we want to show you that, you know, speed to idea, speed to prototype really matters. And I think designers right now are just way
• 54:00 - 54:30 too long-winded on the stuff that doesn't matter in a portfolio review, the execution. And then from there, what does matter is what was the product and business challenge and why does your design meet that goal? Tell me about the metric movement in that goal. But what I want is a healthy conversation like we're co-workers right now talking about the work. But from there, you know, we will do the usual chats of how do you collaborate? Let's do a Figma exercise together. But I cannot understate enough how much visual design matters in especially consumer tech. And by the
• 54:30 - 55:00 way, this is not unique to Duolingo at Instagram. If you were a UX designer, we chances are you weren't even getting a call. But if you were a product designer, we're first going to look at your craft, your visual design. Heavy emphasis on visual design at the likes of Block, Cash App, Instagram, Airbnb, Duolingo. I don't know how to tell this U UX design subreddit that visual design truly matters. I you made me laugh earlier because you defined craft as visual design which I feel like as an industry we're just like too scared to do like we just have it in our DNA that
• 55:00 - 55:30 visual design is devalued. There's not thinking in visual design. So it's like well we'll call it craft and put it on a pedestal and all of a sudden it's different and celebrated and it's like no no we just rebranded visual design. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. At Duolingo, what's going to earn you trust and respect if you have the word designer in your job title is excellent execution and excellent visual design. And we're not afraid of saying that. You are paid a ton of money and given a ton of responsibility to yes be a visual designer who can think of metrics, understand user flows, build full
• 55:30 - 56:00 products and prototypes end to end, negotiate stakeholder. Yes, it's a big job. But don't be afraid of saying you're really really good at visual design. What about the early career people? Like obviously my expectation is like you don't you know it's a reps thing you know you just have less reps like I don't know how else to really get good at visual design other than reps. Is that still the dominant variable that you're looking for when you're evaluating probably a long list of early career candidates? The upcoming class we
• 56:00 - 56:30 very much hold you to a high standard for visual design. Of all the skills we're all learning. the thing that has been like pushed further down the road map of a designer's career growth seems to be visual design. We're trying to raise that back up. So yes, even for all our early career L1 L2 level designers, we're we're saying both in the job description and the performance calibrations criteria, your craft is elevating, your visual design is getting stronger, and it's already starting at a strong point. So, how we filter out um
• 56:30 - 57:00 junior talent is who's the one that had the best visual design out of all these and who seemed the most coachable, who could start to understand business context as it relates to what they're visually designing. And I will maybe just layer on a couple other things. When we say craft, it is 100% visual design for sure, but also interaction design, um you know, micro details, but also simple writing. Whether it's simple copy in the product itself, we really care about brevity and being concise in product copy, but also craft in how you
• 57:00 - 57:30 present. When you show work, it better be simple, clean. You craft means you know the right thing to talk about at the right time. So, we do have an expanded version of craft, but we're also unafraid to say that at the heart of it, it how's your visual design? We look at the portfolio. We got millions of tabs of portfolios on the screen and we immediately X them out if the visual design's not there. Well, Mick, we've covered a lot of ground. What's the most important thing that we haven't talked about yet? This is a tough market. It's a tough industry. There's a ton of people in it. We're all learning
• 57:30 - 58:00 together. What I would hope and what we're trying to do at Dolingo is to just look out for each other. I think something we try to do in our interview process is even if you don't get a job with us, you felt like you became a better designer and a better leader through our interview process. So, we'll do things like for every director that I interview, if they're far enough along in the process, I will show them my my own interview deck that I got my job with at Duolingo to go, you don't have to copy this, but I know how hard it is to find design leadership jobs. Let me
• 58:00 - 58:30 at least give you one additional perspective on how to approach this interview just so that if it's not with us, it's with somebody. And so what I can hope for right now in this time where it's a pretty confusing time in our world, there are few jobs, budgets are slashed. The thing I really want is just a supportive community. U both inside your company and and here whether it's on dive club or on forums, it's we got to help each other and teach each other. I think this is how design will remain a relevant industry is when we all treat it as a craft, like a a
• 58:30 - 59:00 practice, a job that we can all get better at. I wouldn't be where I am today in my career if I didn't have other people look out for me. And so you can also do this when you're mid-level or junior in a career. There's turn around, look behind you, and realize someone else is trying to be in your shoes. So I think that that is kind of the spirit at Duolingo and just something that's kind of pushed me in my career is just be helpful. You don't have to be the best, but you can be helpful. And that's the fastest way to grow, too. If you can identify one person that's one rung below you, you will grow so much more quickly by investing in that person than you would
• 59:00 - 59:30 otherwise just looking up. Completely. I I feel like I've become better at my job simply by helping other people learn their job because I learned my own blind spots and things I didn't know about myself that I can now focus on for myself but also teach other people. So yeah, I at the end of the day we it's a small industry. We all know each other. So best thing I could say is just be helpful in this place. Well, Nick, you've definitely been helpful today. I appreciate you coming on and sharing just a lot of things that I guess I've wanted to get on an episode, you know,
• 59:30 - 60:00 like you you you spoke a lot of truths that sometimes it's easy to kind of just dance around and just leave unsaid. So, I appreciate you today and uh just even learning more about Dualingo culture. It's really awesome. You all are doing things in a fresh way that it's just really cool to see. So, thanks for sharing it with us today. Thank you. And likewise, you're building up a community of insights, people, um, leaders that you're kind of honoring the thing we just talked about. You're helping people, too. So proud to be a part of this. Before I let you go, I want to
• 60:00 - 60:30 take just one minute to run you through my favorite products because I'm constantly asked what's in my stack. Framer is how I build websites. Genway is how I do research. Granola is how I take notes during crit. Jitter is how I animate my designs. Lovable is how I build my ideas in code. Mobin is how I find design inspiration. Paper is how I design like a creative. And Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now,
• 60:30 - 61:00 I've hand selected these companies so that I can do these episodes full-time. So, by far the number one way to support the show is to check them out. You can find the full list at dive.comclub/partners. [Music]