Building beautiful products with Primer's Head of Design | Monika Ocieczek

GOOD morning 👋 

58 days until Christmas, but who’s counting?

I’m bringing a new type of interview to the newsletter, one where I go behind the scenes with design teams I admire a lot. One of those I’ve admired from afar over the last 1-2 years is Primer. The level of design work coming out of there considering what a gnarly complex problem they are solving is incredible.

I was fortunate enough for Monika, Head of Design at Primer, to sit down with me and answer questions to get an idea of how they work and hire.

Monika is a design-obsessed product generalist and fin-tech enthusiast who loves building new things. She is currently heading up the Product Design team at Primer–she joined as the 9th hire, when the product was at a white-board stage, fully remote during covid. Now, 4 years later, Primer is a multi-product, payment infrastructure company, past its B-round.

Previously, she co-founded Gimi, led the product team at Tink (before Open Banking!), and led innovation labs for SAS and Danske Bank. With a business degree, her approach to product and design is inspired by behavioural economics.

In this mail:

• Q&A: Building beautiful products with Primer’s head of design, Monika.

Q&A
Building beautiful products with Primer’s head of design, Monika.

1- What’s your management style? How are you as a person and leader?

I’m a wait-but-why kind of person, and I will leave no stone unturned in pursuit of understanding things and finding clarity. It’s an annoying trait, but over time, I’ve embraced this as a management style. It’s tempting as a manager to provide your people with clear solutions, particularly when you think you know exactly what to do in a given situation, design or HR related. But by asking questions, I’ve come to better understand how people think in the first place, and I can inspire them to challenge their own line of thinking–and arrive at better questions and solutions. It’s certainly not the easy way out, but I hope that my legacy will be this annoying voice in their heads; How would Mon have challenged this? Why did you make that assumption?

I also approach my management style iteratively. It’s subject to change, constantly evolving depending on the context and its effectiveness. Some time ago, I defined a 10-question survey that’s now used across Primer to evaluate managers, which captures the dimensions that I wanted to excel at. The outcome of that survey in combination with our internal OKRs (more on that later) is how I evaluate and reflect on my management style every 3 months. Be nice and trust your people hasn’t really proven to be very effective, because it sets the wrong expectations. Right now, the headline is Optimise for growth, business and individual.

2 - How far out do you plan in detail, and how has that evolved over the years?

I never plan anything in detail! I don’t think I’d do particularly well in a context where detailed planning is needed. Working at an early-stage start-up, detailed planning feels like a false sense of security. However, I’m obsessed with all other types of details! 

Product designers at Primer work according to the product teams’ roadmap. They don’t need me to plan resources. When we are missing a designer in a team, that’s when I take on the IC role.

Managing people and a team means a lot of ambiguity; people can resign any time and there’s no predictability in hiring. You can get lucky and find the right person and sign the contract within 2 weeks. Other times I’ve been sourcing and interviewing for months. I need to fill in the blanks when and where needed and give people the opportunity to rise to the occasion when opportunities are presented.

I like a constant state of low predictability and uncertainty, it keeps me on my toes.

3 - What does the design team look like? Are product and design part of the same org? And who do designers ultimately report to?

My product designers are embedded in their respective product teams, and one product marketing designer sits in the marketing team. We’re not mainly a design team. The focus is product, and design is one enabler of great products, along with the PMs, engineers, data and marketeers.

This is important, because it allows designers to cultivate ownership, and it allows them to contribute at the strategic level. I’d hate to have a centralised design team that PMs request time from.

However, we collaborate a lot. We share a design system (Goat!) and conduct a weekly design critique and product testing, in addition to our weekly sync.

The number of designers changes depending on the number of product teams. We’ve gone through reorgs, eliminated teams, new teams have been formed, and lately 4 teams were combined into a group. It doesn’t make resource planning easy.

All designers report to me. However, designers spend more of their time in their product teams, so the PMs are in a way responsible for their time and priorities, while I’m responsible for their performance and growth.

This structure allows designers to be involved in the definition of product, and enables them to cultivate product knowledge and ownership (which you don’t get when design is one centralised team that is just asked to execute).

We’re a small company, approx. 100, so there’s just one design team, and only a handful of designers. Product teams are led by a PM, and a technical team lead/engineering manager.

4 - Where does design sit within the organisation? Does the CEO understand the value of design?

I report to the CEO and founder, and I was hired in month 5. Hiring someone like me that early is unusual, particularly for a B2B fintech—although, my title was ‘product lead’ back then. I had a generalist role, doing everything from marketing and branding to product design and PM work. Over time, I focused more on design and user experience, which has been prioritised and valued from the very beginning and is deeply rooted in our DNA, our values and our way of working.

The value of design has been proven again and again, so I doubt there’s still a lot of room to debate. However, not all business leaders know how to unlock that value. In some cases, that value is something that is consciously de-prioritised for the benefit of other strategic initiatives and investments.

5 - How do you measure design performance?

My general opinion on measuring design in isolation is that it cannot, and should not be done. Design, at least the way we do it, is a fully integrated part of product.

We can measure the performance of our product and user experience in many ways, and that’s how you measure designers, engineers and PMs together. You can also measure design improvements, like e.g. improved conversion after a redesign. But trying to isolate the business value of design as a function would be like trying to measure the business value of engineering.

I suspect that the executives that try to force short-term measurable metrics on design are the ones that fundamentally don’t understand design. If you care about good design, you’ll know it when you see it. You know it’s a long-term investment; good design decisions accumulate over time.

I believe, as a CEO, you want to look at your product and think; this looks, feels and behaves like some of the best products in the world.

We do however track 4 metrics internally, which I believe gives me and my team a clear indication of how we are doing as a team, particularly over time. It’s just an internal survey done by all designers and everyone working with a designer, checking our performance against:

1. Design Quality—this is completely subjective, but I need to know whether designers and PMs are happy with our output, and I need to know if we’re improving or declining!

2. Speed and reliability—PMs need to rely on their designer, both in terms of speed of delivery (design can never be a bottleneck!) and how reliable they are (our way of working should be predictable)

3. Contribution to innovation—this is really important! PMs tell me whether designers are just executing on a design brief, or if they’re contributing to innovation. It tells me whether they understand the product, our business strategy, and how to create value. It ensures designers also know they are evaluated on this metric.

4. Comfort & Confidence—as a balancing measure, I need to ensure my team is growing their confidence over time, and feeling comfortable enough that we can assume the work is sustainable.

Doing well across these 4 areas is how design creates business value through our contribution to product.

When defining OKRs for the whole business, the bigger company objective is broken down into the teams: basically, we ask ourselves, how can our team contribute to the success of the business? That’s usually through improving on some of the 4 areas above.

So, this quarter we will e.g. increase our contribution to innovation.

Another important aspect we shouldn’t forget is talent attraction. If I'm not able to attract the best designers, we won’t do well across those metrics.

Design OKRs are not something like Increase user satisfaction (that would be an OKR for a whole product team) or Task completion time (that’s an attempt to force design to measure something just for the sake of measuring it).

6 - How do your design review meetings work?

They are informal. On Monday we all share what we worked on last week, by collaborating on a Pitch presentation. It’s a fast update, it allows everyone to stay up to date with what everyone else is working on, enabling designers to collaborate. I always have questions and some feedback!

On Thursday we conduct a design critique. It’s an hour and a half, designers share their work more in-depth. It’s an opportunity to practise presenting work, as well as analysing designs and providing feedback.

We went from critiques where most of the focus was on the UI, to much more sophisticated discussions about product functionality, business value and cross-dependencies and opportunities. When designers have a design system, a more mature product with well-established interaction patterns, and have acquired good product understanding, conversations can be elevated to a more strategic level.

7 - What’s in your design-team tool stack?

Simple: Figma. In addition to Figma, we use Notion for documentation, Pitch for presentations and HotJar for user session recordings—we rarely venture further beyond that. Fewer tools is better in my opinion.

8 - What is central to your approach to design that leads to such a great and successful product?

Good design is based on a few things:

1. Technical skills: common design patterns and product mindset

2. Soft skills: psychology and empathy

3. Analytical skills: Making sense of feedback

4. Taste and opinionated conviction

But this all assumes that the designer has a good business understanding. Assuming they have that, then:

Technical design skills are mainly about knowing, and being able to apply common design patterns and having product intuition. Design systems are all mostly the same, there’s a common way to represent everything from buttons to tables and modals. Learn Material Design and Human Interaction Design, and study how other products apply them.

There are also established design rules, like the well-known UX laws. Good designers know these laws intuitively, and also know when to apply them.

Most of product design has already been designed somewhere, e.g. why would you try to design a new onboarding flow? It’s been done a million times, and there are few variations, but users will expect a common onboarding flow.

If you have a design system and established patterns for repeatable actions, you can copy and paste a lot when designing a new feature. But, you’ll also need to understand when to use which common design pattern, and when not to use a common pattern… that’s product intuition which designers should cultivate by using and analysing products.

Psychology is a major part of design. Individual humans are unpredictable, but humans in large numbers are very predictable. The more you learn about your user persona, the better you’ll be able to predict how they will behave, and how they will react to your design. Study and learn human biases, and read up on my favourite topic: Behavioural Economics.

Humans are not necessarily irrational when making a seemingly irrational decision; we just fail to understand and measure everything that they evaluate, consciously or subconsciously.

Feedback. Qualitative and quantitative. I’m obsessed with feedback, but, you need to learn how to draw your own conclusions from it, and you can’t expect constructive feedback from others. Making sense of feedback is your job! Embrace it when someone says “It’s bad.” without being able to articulate why. Articulating what good looks like, and what needs to change in order to make it good is a skill.

Taste and opinionated conviction. I don’t believe there’s a repeatable design process or any rules in the world that could turn everyone into a good designer. You need taste, which comes with strong opinions and conviction. It takes a lot of practice, striving for excellence, to cultivate good taste; the ability to identify and create good things, as well as evaluate things and being able to point out why it’s not good, and what needs to change to make it good.

I look for people with taste and encourage subjective opinions. Nothing great was ever created by A/B testing or following the design process (the design process has somehow become an excuse for bad design?). I want to work with people who care deeply about details, and who have a vision. The world’s best architects, chefs, car makers, fashion brands are all great because the creators had taste in addition to technical knowledge. And no, there’s no framework for taste.

9 - I know you have a high-bar for design at Primer. When hiring for the team, what do you look for? (that maybe others don’t), and, what does your interview process look like?

There are a few things I avoid when interviewing, particularly an over-obsession with the design process. I don’t like it when I review yet another design portfolio that follows the same, overused structure based on the process, the ones that always includes sticky notes. Besides it not being a very user-friendly structure, it tells me the designer is not thinking for themselves.

If I could choose, my ideal portfolio would be simple but well designed. Work would be displayed with one or two visuals: either this is what I designed from nothing, OR this is before, and this is after. I won’t read more than one or two paragraphs under the visual, so make sure it’s relevant!

During portfolio reviews, I look for:

1. Great visual skills (I would never hire a designer that can’t design their own portfolio well, and you’d be surprised by how many are sloppy)

2. Relevant work (we’re designing a complex B2B tool, for payment experts, that’s very different from consumer apps/websites/e-com and unfortunately, in my experience, designers who only designed simpler products struggle with the transition to higher complexity where it’s not all about simplification).

3. Impact, which isn’t necessarily demonstrated by numbers. Designers who can create a whole product from scratch, or designers who can redesign a whole product captures my interest! I’m not looking for designers that spend months researching and re-designing one screen just to increase some conversion rate by a few points (that’s very valuable at larger companies, but at Primer, we need large impact over a short time).

We have a specific technical stage (take home task, feedback round and final review) where we evaluate technical skills, and finally a cultural stage interview where we evaluate cultural fit.

I try to gauge some of this already during the first interview stage where I meet the candidate. Great communication is a must, and I absolutely hate it when designers show up to a first interview and expect me to interrogate them. The designers that make a great impression are the ones that are more interested in our product and vision than our workations and team structure. The questions they ask tell me everything about them, so I avoid asking questions as much as I can. I give a lot away on our Notion page which I always share with candidates before our call, and yet, many show up unprepared!

The technical stage is interesting. I often hear from designers that our take home task is the hardest one they’ve ever done. Yet, it’s a good example of the work they would be doing at Primer, which is why it’s such an important step.

The designers that approach it casually, don’t understand the complexity of it and design something too simplistic will understand how they won’t meet the standards at Primer. I’ve had designers self-select out of the process at this stage. We don’t expect working solutions (honestly, not a single designer has presented anything remotely close to something we could actually implement…) because at this stage, you simply don’t have enough context. You’d be surprised at the huge difference between how much designers can achieve in 6-8 hours–some design a banner, and some 3 different, working prototypes! Me and a PM who joins the review, evaluate their analytical skills, if they are thinking big enough, if they have a product mindset, if they understand and don’t shy away from complexity. We evaluate their ability to reason and design on the spot as well as take on feedback. And of course, visual skills.

At the cultural stage it’s just a conversation with another designer and engineer from the product team. I rarely see designers rejected at this stage, because the cultural aspect can usually be determined at an earlier stage. But we have a very high bar when it comes to open-mindedness and curiosity, ownership and sense of responsibility, as well as drive to learn and grow.

So what I look for isn’t simple, so many aspects need to be right. The numbers in my application tracking system tell me I reviewed over 600 candidates this year, and I’ve only just made 1 hire.

Let’s move into industry-wide advice, away from Primier, what advice would you have for designers looking to excel in their career? (which should be everyone!)

Designing is like talking–if you don’t have anything interesting to say, better stay quiet. Think first, then talk (or design).

Visual artefacts in Figma aren’t the solution, it’s just how you communicate the solution.

But visuals are such a very powerful language, and designers who argue their value is more than just ‘pixel pushing’ are missing the point. Likewise, there’s little point in pushing those pixels around if you have nothing to communicate…

There are broadly speaking 2 types of designers; Translators, and Architects. The translators translate written communication to visual communication, typically briefs from PMs to Figma views and flows. Architect designers have a design and product vision, as well as the technical knowledge needed to work end-to-end, and they collaborate with domain experts and technical peers to bring their vision to life.

Bonus question - What is the future for software design?

I strongly believe we’re moving towards a unification of design: global design patterns based on a global design system. It’s not boring! It’s convenient and effective, and exactly what we want from our business tools. Any product that is heavily branded in pursuit of uniqueness or memorability is doing so selfishly, at the expense of customers’ ease of use (I cringe at products with chunky brand-coloured buttons, often purple or pink for some reason?)! This is why we love products like Notion, Cron and Linear, and I believe we’ll see more of this minimalistic, compact, well-crafted product design that follows standard interaction patterns, with predictable flows and navigation. The not-in-your-face-UI will be a software quality stamp and the new design differentiator.

Please check out more about design at Primer here - https://primerio.notion.site/Design-at-Primer-b8750ee0cfa14e478fbbd20613525d28 

Thanks, Monika, for all the amazing insight. 🙏