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Scaling the Logixboard Design Team

When I joined Logixboard as the founding designer, it was just me. By the time I left, we had a team of 8 designers with clear career paths, strong critique culture, and effective collaboration patterns. Here's how we built it.

Starting from Zero

I joined Logixboard in December 2019 when the company was around 10 people. As the first and only designer, I was responsible for everything: product design, brand, research, and eventually building the team that would scale with us.

The first year was about establishing foundations—both in the product and in how design would work at the company. I needed to build credibility, demonstrate impact, and create space for design to grow.

Hiring Framework

As we started hiring, I developed a framework for evaluating candidates that went beyond portfolio reviews. I was looking for:

  • Craft skills — Can they do the work at the level we need?
  • Problem-solving approach — How do they think through ambiguity?
  • Collaboration patterns — How do they work with engineering and product?
  • Growth mindset — Are they curious and eager to learn?
  • Cultural add — What perspectives do they bring that we don't have?

The interview process included portfolio review, design exercise, and cross-functional interviews with engineering and product partners. I wanted to see how candidates communicated their thinking and how they responded to feedback.

Performance Profiles

One of the first things I established was clear performance profiles for each level of designer. These weren't just job descriptions—they were frameworks that helped designers understand what was expected at their level and what growth looked like.

Performance profiles made growth conversations concrete. Instead of vague feedback, we could point to specific skills and behaviors at each level.

The profiles covered:

  • Scope of work — What size and complexity of problems do you own?
  • Autonomy — How much guidance do you need?
  • Impact — How do you affect the team and company?
  • Craft — What's the quality bar for your output?

Design Crits

Design critiques became the backbone of our culture. We ran them weekly, with clear structure:

  1. Designer presents context (2 min) — What problem are we solving? What constraints exist?
  2. Designer presents work (5 min) — Show the design, explain key decisions
  3. Clarifying questions (3 min) — Make sure everyone understands before giving feedback
  4. Feedback (10 min) — Structured around specific aspects of the work
  5. Synthesis (5 min) — Designer captures key takeaways

The design system provided shared vocabulary for these conversations. When we talked about spacing or color or interaction patterns, everyone was working from the same foundation.

Five Design Tenets

We established five tenets that guided our design decisions:

  1. Clarity over cleverness — Our users are busy. Don't make them think.
  2. Show, don't tell — Prefer progressive disclosure over instructions.
  3. Consistency enables speed — Patterns reduce cognitive load for users and designers.
  4. Data-informed, not data-driven — Use research to guide, not dictate.
  5. Ship to learn — Perfect is the enemy of good. Get feedback from real users.

These tenets gave designers a framework for making decisions when I wasn't in the room. They could ask themselves: "Does this solution align with our tenets?" and have a clear answer.

Collaboration Patterns

Design doesn't happen in a vacuum. We established clear collaboration patterns with engineering and product:

  • Discovery — Designers participate in problem framing with PM
  • Design — Regular check-ins with engineering for feasibility
  • Handoff — Specs in Figma with engineering questions resolved before dev
  • QA — Designers review implementation against specs
  • Retro — What worked? What didn't? How do we improve?

What Didn't Work

Not everything we tried succeeded:

  • Brand/marketing silos — We struggled to maintain consistency between product design and marketing. This was a gap I never fully closed.
  • Tool proliferation — We experimented with too many tools early on. Standardizing on Figma + Linear + Notion eventually helped, but the transition was painful.
  • Documentation debt — We didn't invest enough in documenting decisions early on, which made onboarding new designers harder than it needed to be.
The biggest lesson: process and culture can't be copied from other companies. What works at Airbnb or Stripe won't necessarily work at a 50-person startup. You have to build practices that fit your context.

Outcomes

By the time I left Logixboard:

  • Design team had grown from 1 to 8 designers
  • Clear career paths from junior to senior to lead
  • Weekly crits that designers actually valued
  • Design system that enabled consistency and speed
  • Strong collaboration patterns with engineering and product

Reflection

Building a design team is different from doing design work. The skills are related but not identical. I learned that my job wasn't to have the best ideas—it was to create the conditions where the team could do their best work.

The hardest part was letting go. As the team grew, I had to trust others to make decisions I would have made differently. That's not failure—it's scale. A team of 8 designers will never work exactly like one designer, and that's okay. The goal is consistent quality and shared values, not identical output.