Fostering a culture of growth and design excellence

Hiring good designers for an enterprise software company is a perennial challenge, especially if your corporate website has all of the constraints of the typical corporate website.

Once you hire a good designer — how do you onboard, grow, and retain them?

As one of the Design Managers on the team, I contributed to the content strategy and design. In my spare time, I was the lead developer for the site, contributing over 250k lines of code.

Creating a home on the web for our small, yet growing, design team was one way to compete with cool startups who were able to lure top talent.

On one hand, yes — this was just a few websites — but it became so much more, a tool and place for us to learn and grow together.

Along the way, I learned a ton about management, engineering, marketing, and how hard it is to design for designers.

hat initially started as a landing page for our first Design meetup grew to a monorepo that held our entire DesignOps library, including our Department Handbook and Design System documentation.

I learned how to use Firebase Authentication and created an "internal only" brand guideline section of the site.

I also connected to external tools and services like Cloudflare to manage domains and even a MailChimp integration to automatically generate a newsletter archive.