How GitLab design team work remotely with Christie Lenneville & Taurie Davis ft. Sunitha Bisoyi

Sunitha

Hey guys. So welcome to another episode of Be remote podcast. So I’m your host today Sunitha with our two special guests. They are Christie and Taurie from Gitlab. So Hi guys.

 

Taurie

Hi. Nice to be here.

 

Sunitha

So could you please introduce yourself to our audience?

 

Introduction

 

Christie

Sure, I’ll start, my name is Christie Lenneville. And I’m the vice president of user experience at GitLab. And that means I lead the team that focuses on product design, user research, and documentation, technical writing.

 

Sunitha

Amazing.

 

Taurie 

And I’m Taurie, I’m a Product Design Manager here at Gitlab, I work with the foundations team. And that team really focuses on the foundational user experience, the visual style, some of our technical tooling, as well as more high level UX problems that span across the platform such as our navigation.

 

Sunitha  

Amazing. So that’s great to know. And so here goes our first question. So the first one, this is more of, you know, a personal question. So when you are not thinking of design, what is it that you do the most?

 

when you are not thinking of design, what is it that you do the most?

 

Christie 

Well, this is Christie, I spend a lot of time with my kids. I have a four year old and a 10 year old. And they take up the vast majority of my non-working hours. But when I’m not playing with them, or taking care of them, I really enjoy reading, listening to music, and playing music.

 

Sunitha  

That’s cool. Over to you Taurie.

 

Taurie  

I live in the Pacific Northwest. So we’re really close to the coast and the mountains. We have a small wine country here. So me and my partner just like to get out as much as possible, go hiking or camping, visiting restaurants, pre COVID. So doing things like that, trying out new things.

 

Sunitha  

Amazing. So what are the places of visit mostly over the weekends? What are the best places to visit in your place? I guess you’re from Portland, right?

 

Taurie  

Yeah. I’m in Portland. So it’s a huge foodie city, we have tons of different restaurants of all different types. It’s really hard to drill down and pick just one. But also, breweries are huge here, and a number of wineries. So there’s really something for everyone.

 

Sunitha 

That’s great. Thank you for that, Taurie. And I have a few work related questions for you guys. Yeah, so here’s this question to Christie. So if you have a genie, or a magic wand, and you could change something, you know about things that could work in a remote design team, right? What would those be?

 

Christie  

Yeah, I’ll start. But um, Taurie has such a great experience here, her answers probably going to be better than mine. Um, yeah, I think that the biggest thing for me would be everyone feeling more confident about reaching out to their peers. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that in an in person setting, you can see the people around you, you can kind of get a sense of whether they’re busy or not what they are working on or whether or not this is a good time for you to approach them with a question. When you’re remote, you don’t know. And so you I think you always worry that maybe you’re going to interrupt somebody, maybe you’re going to be a little bit of a pest, which by the way, I found is not true. People don’t feel interrupted, and they don’t feel like you’re pestering them. But it’s that internal feeling like oh, what if I’ll just try and figure it out myself?

 

Taurie   

Yeah, I think if I had a magic wand, and I could do anything, I would probably get rid of COVID. So we can all meet in person. And like, we used to do this every nine months where everyone, the whole company would come together. I feel like this would help with what Christie is talking about a little bit because we would learn personalities, a bit more in depth, like how we each communicate even further than we already do remotely. And we haven’t been able to do that. So if I truly had a magic wand, get rid of the pandemic and then we would all get to meet more often. And that would help just strengthen bonds and make people feel more comfortable communicating. Not that we’re not comfortable communicating , but just kind of making that even more explicit.

 

Sunitha   

That’s good to know. Interesting answers. Yeah, actually, you both spoke what’s on your mind as well. Right? So even I honestly feel team members are not so well connected now remotely, compared to before where we all used to work together at the office. Right. So that emotional connection aspect also comes into play. Right. So it’s a valid point,

 

Christie  

I can tell you one of the things that we’ve done to help address that. And I think it’s made a big difference, because when I joined GitLab, almost three years ago now, the first thing that I did is I went and spoke with everyone in the department, one on one, and I said, Hey, first of all, tell me what, tell me what’s going great. And we hope we don’t change because that’s always my big thing is if something’s working, don’t meddle with it. But my follow up question was, what do you think isn’t working? Well, and this was a topic that a lot of folks brought up. And so we introduced something called Design pairs. And that is, every six months, designers are assigned to each other. And that’s your go to person for asking questions, ad hoc design reviews, conversations, really whatever you want. We rotate it every six months to give everybody exposure to more people in the department and really help them build those relationships. We do try to be mindful of time zones, so that it’s easier for people to get in contact with each other. But then we really leave it freeform. after that. I got a lot of questions at first, but like, how are we supposed to interact in these design pairs? And my answer was, however you want. If you want to be mostly async, you can do that. If you want to meet once a week over zoom, you can do that it’s up to you and what is comfortable for you. And it’s made a big difference. And one of the things that I have heard designers who’ve been in the department for a long time now three plus years say is, yeah, I the people who I’ve been paired with, I still go back to all the time, I feel really comfortable and close to so we we’ve continued to do that. And I think we’ll continue to do that over the long term.

 

Sunitha 

Wow. That’s really good work. And I’m just curious to know, what is it with six months?

 

Christie 

Three months wasn’t long enough. At least that’s how we felt nine months or 12 months starts to get too long. Because again, we want to give people a broader exposure to other folks in the department. So it was somewhat arbitrary.

 

Sunitha  

Well, that’s a very good initiative. Yeah, amazing. So you said it’s been three years since you have started that right? That’s right. Okay. Cool. Nice. So yeah, let’s move to the next question. Okay, so how have you both started at Gitlab? And, you know, how did that experience help you in your personal growth?

 

Experience at GitLab

 

Christie   

I think Taurie should start on this one. She’s got a great one.

 

Taurie 

I’ve been at GitLab for five and a half years, just about my role has really changed throughout that time I started as a product designer, growing in the IC path. And then about two years ago, I switched over to product design manager for the foundations team, because I really had a focus on design systems and building the design system for GitLab. And kind of more about those foundational aspects of user experience. In terms of how the work has helped me in my personal growth, I really think that the broad technical scope of GitLab has just increased my technical knowledge in general, which has been great. And then like, shout out to Christie for building an awesome support system within UX when I first joined, we were nested under front end, we’ve now built out an entire department. So I’m really surrounded by a number of leaders who have all brought in different kinds of ways of working and industry standards that we’re now using. And so that’s just built up my whole UX, like knowledge in general. So yeah, just going from the small team of like, I don’t know, maybe there’s five UX years to now we have a department of over 60 I think so. It’s been a journey for sure.

 

Sunitha  

That’s great. That’s really great to know. Yes,

 

Christie

I’m gonna tell you what Taurie won’t tell you because she’s very humble, isn’t she? She actually wrote a book on design systems. This lady knows what she’s doing, she’s great. So I already mentioned this, but it’ll be three years for me in February having been at Gitlab and it’s been an amazing experience and like it’ll feel boring, but I have to echo some of what Taurie’s said what’s helped me in my personal growth is the amazing team that we have, I always tried to hire people and promote people who are smarter than me, Taurie, and I learn from them. And man, I learn, I learn from literally everyone in the department, not just from my direct reports, who are directors and senior managers and managers, but I learned from our individual contributors all the time, they’ve helped me be a better leader. They’ve helped me be a better UX practitioner. And I just feel really, really fortunate to have had the experience.

 

Sunitha  

Wow. So I really second you on this, because always learning not just from our seniors, or, you know, our managers, but also from those who work with us entirely in the team, right, there’s always something or the other to learn from them. Right. And that helps us grow as a leader. And, you know, exporting the profession is a very good skill I can tell you, right?

 

Taurie   

Yeah, absolutely. And everyone can be a leader. So everyone can have traits and bring forth skills and share them with everyone. So it’s great to just learn from the entire team.

 

Sunitha  

Right, right. So moving to the next question. So um, yes, I would like to start with Taurie. So what are the biggest mistakes you think, you know, remote design managers usually make?

 

what are the biggest mistakes remote design managers usually make?

 

Taurie  

Yeah, so remote design managers. I think that in terms of remote working in general, I think a mistake that new people make, so maybe not necessarily related to a design manager specifically. But being able, like if you’re going into remote work for the first time, and you’re not familiar with coming up with your own schedule, or routine, and there’s two sides of that coin, really where one, it can be hard to focus for some people. And on the other side of the coin, it can be hard to step away from the computer. And it’s really different. And that’s personal for each individual of like, what side of the coin you fall on, and figuring out what your own routine can be at home. Or if you’re working in a co-working space, or whatever it is to either reduce distractions, or step out of the house when it’s done with your workday. So you can kind of separate between the two. But I find that everyone is kind of on that spectrum in some way. And it’s determining which one you are, and then how you navigate that for yourself. So yeah, I don’t know if Christie has an answer specifically for design managers. But that’s more just the biggest mistakes for remote workers, I find that just figuring out what your own personality is and how you work with that.

 

Christie  

Yeah, I think when it comes to management, one of the things that I’ve seen that remote presents a particular challenge around is identifying and dealing with problems early. Because you aren’t sitting right next to your team. There’s a different level of effort required to make sure that people are performing, engaged, and that they have good relationships with their cross functional teams. And most people don’t want to be complainers, right? So your individual contributors will wait a long time before they come to you and say there’s a problem here. So as a remote manager, you have to be really tuned in and really thoughtful, and see when things are starting to move in the wrong direction. So you can step in, help them get back on track, because it’s much easier to solve problems early than it is after they’ve been festering for a long time.

 

Sunitha 

Yes, I do agree on this. I did see a few of my team members, you know, slowing down on their progress, or, you know, hesitating to get back to me in case they have problems. Yes, this is a valid point. I do agree. Awesome. Cool. So moving to the next question. So many people who are especially not in the profession, they assume UI UX design and product design are the same, are completely the same, right? So is it true? And if not, what could be the difference? Like I would like you to tell our audience, what is the difference?

 

Difference between product design and UI/UX design

 

Christie    

I can start um, this is a really hard question to answer. Because what I’ll say is, look, I mean, realistically they are just titles. There are so many different titles for people who are all doing similar work. So if someone has the title of UI UX designer, I do not assume that they are not doing product design work. That’s not there, the title is whatever the company decides to give you. Now, philosophically, there’s a difference. In product design, my expectation is that designers are thinking about the overall end to end experience of the entire product. It could start, that experience can start outside of the product, it can start with your support team, it can start with your marketing website, it could include emails that customers and users are receiving. And as they’re solving problems, they are thinking about those problems really holistically. Traditionally, in UI design, that’s really more focused on the interaction of the interface. And there is a time and a place for that. So what I would say is, you know, product design is the macro, while UI design is the micro, product designers do UI design. Not all UI designers do product design. And sometimes that’s okay. Sometimes companies have broken these skill sets out and have people really focus in deep on one particular area. And that’s not a that’s not a problem. It’s all super important. And at the end of the day, what you want is a great experience that includes a really elegant UI. So now we’re talking about like, how do you get there? Is it one person? Is it multiple people? And I’ve been around long enough to know that there’s never a one answer to anything. But that’s how that’s how I see it. Taurie, I’m curious how you see it.

 

Taurie  

Yeah, no, I completely agree. Different companies define these differently. Like, again, they’re just titles, I completely agree with what Christie described as the philosophical differences. I don’t, if I’m like going out and looking for a role, I don’t necessarily worry about the distinction, I would, I would look at what the company is asking of me. And if that fits with where I want to go in my career, because different companies are going to use those terms differently. And then there’s other terms that people are using, too. So it just depends on what they’re asking for. And if that’s what you want to be doing. Yeah, in terms of philosophical Chris, I’m not going to go into that Christie described it,

 

Christie   

I will bring up something interesting and related, which is that UX is a wildly broad skill set. And it is not my expectation that every single designer is an expert, is excellent in absolutely every single aspect of UX, I will be the first person to tell you that I am not excellent at every aspect of UX. So instead, what I try to do is build teams where we have good balance. So if I know that I have some really great strategists on my team, but maybe at the end of the day, the UI as they design aren’t quite as elegant, not bad. But maybe they could use a little more refinement, that I might try to supplement that with someone who has a really exceptional UI designer. They understand strategy, and they can do the same things. And they can get there. But maybe that’s not their wheelhouse. You think that because there’s information architecture, there’s content design, there’s user research, and all of these things to expect it. Like there may be some unicorns out there who are exceptional at everything. And I’m not going to say there aren’t. But that’s really hard.

 

Sunitha  

I agree. Yeah. So, just a curious question. So when there is a whole lot of difference between these two professions, philosophically. There are situations where I’ve seen candidates taking a backstep, you know, thinking they weren’t put into the role which accompany you know, the role, which they open, but maybe it ends up that the company themselves are not clear if they want a product designer or UI, especially, or UX. So any thoughts on that? Like, does it really happen or is it just that I’m mistaking it this way? Go ahead.

 

Taurie  

Yeah, I mean, part of this is like growing in your career and learning what interests you and what you want to do and then that gives you some information to bring to interviews to ask company questions to get more insight into what that company is looking for. Or if they’re open to understanding the skill set that you bring forward. I, yeah. There’s so many companies that say they want one thing, but they just don’t know exactly what part of UX is necessary for a particular project or team or when they have it, especially if the company is building out UX for the first in the first stages of building that department. So yeah, just as you become more equipped with what your own skill set is, and where you want to grow, then you can kind of ask follow up questions to see if that is in alignment with where you want to be. Christie, I don’t know if you have anything to add there.

 

Christie   

Yeah, I agree with everything you said. And I’ll add to that by saying, if you find yourself in that position, inadvertently, don’t assume all is lost. What I have seen work really effectively is to start introducing those things to your job that you know, are helpful that you know, will push your company and the product forward and give your company exposure to that. Now, what I have not seen work well is to come in full force and say, you’re all doing it wrong. We have this huge process, we need to follow every one step No, no. Pick this thing in the moment that you think is going to be most helpful from a strategic perspective and say, Hey, I have an idea. Let’s give it a shot, it’s going to take two days. And at the end of those two days, I think we’re going to be in a much better place. Can I get the time to do that? And then show the benefit of that. If you can show it with numbers, that’s ideal. If you can’t, if you can show it with just efficiency gains or better understanding of your users. That’s also helpful. Now you got buy in for at least that one new thing. Next time. Let’s go and just include that in our process. And oh, hey, there’s this other thing that we could try. Remember how well this worked? Well, this is going to make it even better. And then you start to build enthusiasm and appetite for the types of activities that you know are going to really push you forward as a product team. I’ve done this myself.

 

Taurie    

Yeah, this happens all the time, right? Like we do it all the time. Even even if the department is built out and you have a good support system, and everyone’s assuming best intent, you still have to come to the table with objectives that, you know, show that you’re benefiting the company, I had to do that with a design system, for example, like that’s pretty normal for the role of being able to, to give data to inform why you think we should be moving in a certain way. Sorry, I cut you off. 

 

Christie    

No, it’s totally fine. And it’s super gratifying when you take a team that doesn’t understand much beyond UI design, and you start shifting them towards real design thinking. And then they get excited about it. And they’re enthusiastic, and they want to participate. And Oh, that feels good.

 

Sunitha  

Agree. Amazing. Good to know that. Thank you so much, Christine and Taurie. So here comes questions related to remote work. Right. So um, so how did you know the remote team transition take place? Right, that I guess it’s been eight plus years?

 

Transition to remote work

 

Taurie  

Yeah, Gitlab started as a really small team in one like a kitchen, basically, it grew out of that. And then it’s been remote ever since. So we basically say Gitlab has been remote forever. We’ve, we’ve started a documentation, our handbook, in order to help facilitate remote work. So for most of us at Gitlab, myself included, like it’s just always been remote. It’s just what we’ve what we all know. And so that has worked really well, because everyone comes in has a similar experience where we are before we get familiar with the handbook, everything is documented. So if it’s, you know, some you can read it in your own time. So you don’t have to be up at 2am or something for some meeting or anything. Like just all of our flows and processes were built around that.

 

Sunitha  

So did you not find it different? Because I’m sure it was not common more than five years ago, right.

 

Taurie  

Yeah, so this was my first fully remote role. And I love it. It completely works with the way that I mentally work. So it wasn’t a super hard transition for me, but kind of going back to my previous answer about two sides of the coin and whether you know, you’re someone who has a hard time pulling away from work or you’re someone who has a hard time focusing, that just depends on the individual person.

 

Christie    

What I’ll add is that Gitlab’s entire culture is centered around remote work, everything that we do is geared to make remote work work. The biggest thing that I see that I think would be great for any company, whether you’re remote or not, is the amount of documentation that remote work inspires. So think about the times when you’ve worked in an office. And you’ve got a new project, and you gotta start from scratch. And where do you start? Well, usually, that’s not documented well, it’s, it’s you know, tribal knowledge. And the different teams are working in really wildly different ways. And then as decisions are getting made, you know, three people meet, and they make a decision. And then suddenly, that’s the decision. No one else knows that they’ve made that decision, because no one’s documented it anywhere. I give up, we document everything. So it’s the company processes and how we work. It’s also the decisions that we make around our product. So as designers, the designers are capturing their thought processes, the rationale, the different things that they explore in issues, and 99.9% of those are public issues that anyone in the world can see. But that means that everyone in the company has access to that same information, that same thought process. That means that messages also don’t tend to get inadvertently skewed. So we’ve made this decision. Here’s why we made it. We didn’t document that. And then a telephone game happens and 10 people later, it’s we’ll just go do this thing. Well, why? Well, nobody knows. Just go do it. That was the decision. No, that decision is documented in an issue where you can go back and really understand the context. And then you can ask questions. If you think the decision’s rationale wasn’t great, you can bring up new points. So to me, that’s one of the biggest benefits of remote. But I think in person companies should do more of it too.

 

Sunitha    

Right. I totally agree with you on this, documentation, when it comes to working with remote teams is very important. Right? So there was a point where I was not, you know, aware, I was so much into doing the actual work that I wasn’t focusing on, me and my team weren’t focusing on documentation stuff. But later, we realized a few people down, or new team members, they find it, you know, they come up with something different or new. Right. So we’ve, that’s when we realized the need to have documented stuff. Right? So it’s a very valid point.

 

Christie    

Yeah, when what happens in three years, when it’s time to make a change to the thing that you design, everybody goes, Why do we do it that way? And if people have left the company memories failing, go, I don’t know. But if you’ve got if you’ve got a documented now, you know, you remember,

 

Sunitha  

right, amazing. So I’m moving to the next question. I mean, having experienced for such a long time working with remote teams, so is it there? Is there anything of any such employ activities that you, you know, maintain within the team to help with the culture?

 

Cultural and team building activities

 

Taurie  

Yeah, we do. We do regular what we call coffee chats, which are just scheduling one on one time to talk about whatever. And previously we would come together every nine months to see each other. Since we haven’t done that we’ve done some more different team building exercises or activities within different teams. So like the UX department did, what was it? Christie like a goat. It was women who had a bunch of goats and we got Yeah, that’s it remote go rescue was really awesome. We were just all on the Zoom chat together. And this woman who has a bunch of goats came on and, you know, was just awesome, showing us her goats and giving us good facts. So team building activities like that. Anything else comes to mind, Christine, I’m forgetting.

 

Christie  

Um, let’s see. So we do still meet. We have a weekly UX meeting where we all get together for half an hour over zoom. It’s not required, no one has to show up. But we also record it so if you can’t show up, it’s available to you and everyone is encouraged to participate. And to actually let me say it differently, everyone is encouraged to drive the meeting. So all of our meetings have written agendas, every single one. We are all responsible for populating that agenda, both prior to the meeting. And during the meeting. So prior to the meeting, if someone thinks there’s something important for the UX department all 16 of us to discuss, they are warmly invited to go add that topic to the agenda, and we will discuss it. And as we have the meeting, we take notes about what people say, the responses, and if you want to add a response, one of the things I really like about this is some people are shyer, they’re more introverted, it’s hard for them to break into the conversation. Well, if you want to break into the conversation, add your name to the agenda, with a high level take on your point. And then we’ll get to your point, we’ll say okay, and now, Taurie, looks like you have something to say and Taurie can come in and really contribute to that. So to me, that’s it. There’s a lot of the fun stuff that really helps to build that team culture. But even the things that we do as part of our regular workday helped to build that culture.

 

Sunitha    

Okay. So part of your team building activities, you include informal activities, as well as more of what is related to work, and everyone’s invited. And they are, you know, they are free to take notes, right?

 

Christie   

Yes, in fact, they’re, they are encouraged to take notes. What I’ll also say is, basically, anyone’s invited, so yeah, we invite the entire UX department, but if product management wants to come participate, they are more than welcome to be there. And there are no limits on who’s invited to participate.

 

Taurie   

Yeah, we have a team meetings calendar, where all the regulars like, maybe UX has a team meeting and product as a team meeting, and maybe a back end team. Those are all on one calendar, so anyone can really see and join when they want to, or when it makes sense.

 

Sunitha  

Okay, got it. So informal activities in the sense, I’m curious to know, is it like any online games? Or, you know, offline meetups, as you mentioned, once in nine months, or is there anything else that I could learn to include? 

 

Taurie   

Yeah, recently, our team did. And we did this with Christie as well. And as a separate group, we did a one slider activity where we all put down like it’s in our handbook, so I can send it to you after this. So we have like a number of questions that you answer, like, maybe what do you like to do in your spare time, like your hobbies, but the funnest part, the most fun part is all the photos that everyone adds that really gives you a glimpse and everyone’s personal lives. And then we took like an hour and did that with the whole team. And then a few months later, we did an hour of online games. When we play we played among us one time, Christine played like a draw, like a drawing game. So yeah, we do things like that to kind of, you know, just fill up the team bonding aspect.

 

Christie   

Yeah. And oftentimes for fun things, folks will invite their kids to participate as well as I always write my 10 year old daughter to come and play games with us. She did the remote, go rescue. We try to be very family friendly. We’re all working in our homes. And so one of the things that we’re really diligent about is making sure that people feel comfortable bringing their lives to work. So you get a dog that barks during a meeting. Nobody cares if your cat jumps on your desk and covers your face up during the meeting, which happens all the time. No one minds, Oh, and here’s a cat.

 

Taurie    

Cats on my desk right now as we speak. Her name’s Alex. Listeners won’t be able to see my cat. But she’s here.

 

Christie   

Yeah. We did things many, many times. Nobody minds. And actually when people apologize they say, Oh, I’m so sorry. We all say no, don’t apologize. This is part of your life. And we actually enjoy it. It’s fun to see the pets.

 

Sunitha  

It is so sweet. Amazing. So moving to the next question. So you know, we have different team members with, you know, different pace of work and productivity, right. So how is it that you keep yourself and you know, even working with them, keeping them motivated and engaged while working from home?

 

Taurie    

Yeah, one one thing that I try to take pride in as a manager is looking at the goals of my reports and matching those with company objectives. And I feel that if I’m engaging my reports and really helping them find opportunities that fit with them and where they want to grow then the motivation is there inherently because they feel supported, they feel like they’re making progress in their goals. It’s aligning with where the company is going. So yeah, I guess that would be my answer.

 

Christie    

And this is true no matter what, right? It doesn’t matter whether you’re remote, not everybody’s meant. Everyone has approaches and different productivity levels. And, frankly, that changes in all of us over time. So I personally have times when I am more productive, and then other times when I’m a little less productive, and that’s just part of being human. So I think we try to remember that I think, I think the big thing here is, when you actively see someone becoming disengaged, in a way that is not typical for them. That’s the time to know that especially as a leader, you have to reach out and find out what’s going on. And I said, especially as a leader, because it’s not just limited to leaders, we work with each other, we care about each other, whether I’m your leader, or a peer, it doesn’t matter if I can see like, something’s not right. Reaching out in a supportive way to say, Hey, I haven’t heard as much from you lately. Everything okay? How are you doing? How’s it going? That’s the type of humanity that makes people want to work, want to do a good job, want to stay at a company and build relationships over time?

 

Sunitha    

I agree with that. That’s amazing. So yeah, moving to the next question. So what are the best aspects of remote culture? Because today, you know, I’m asking more about remote culture, because our audience today is more on the BeRemote podcast, right. So, this is the last question of, you know, the remote work related category. So what is it that you find the best about this kind of culture and which are to be changed? I mean, which are not so good?

 

Best and worst of Remote work

 

Taurie  

For me, the best part, I think I like it. I don’t think I could go back to non remote work for life, particularly at GitLab what works for me is the async nature of the remote work. And that works for me, because I can benefit everyone way more if I can take a step back, think about a problem, and then come up with something afterwards, rather than like a split second, you asked me something. And then here’s my off the cuff response. There’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of different topics, there’s a lot of connecting pieces. And the async aspect really allows me to like, alright, take a moment, let me think about how these all connect together, and then come back with a response that is going to be way more helpful. So I think that has completely helped me in how I’m able to communicate and just inform how I work at GitLab. Worst is a lot harder, because I just love remote work. One difficult thing I guess I would say is the time zones can be challenging. The async nature does help with that. Because I’m on the West Coast, I tend to have early meetings depending on when you wake up, like normally I have meetings at seven or 7:30am, which is pretty early for a lot of people. But that just means I end a little early. So it’s fine. But that can be challenging sometimes. Christie over to you.

 

Christie  

What you brought up is the best aspect for me. Taurie and I, I think you have similar personalities this way. I am not best when I’m when I’m expected to be immediately in the moment. I am an introspective person. And I really value being very thoughtful about the things that I say. And so having the opportunity to step back and think about the impact of what I’m about to say and to Taurie’s point the connections that I need to make between different pieces of information is really helpful to me. Also, being able to be home with my family more, not having to commute is an amazing benefit. I’m a terrible commuter. It stresses me out. I don’t like it. And also being able to get up in the middle of the day and do a load of dishes or a load of laundry when I need to like there’s so much benefit to that. Like Taurie, I will never go back to working in an office. This is it for me. In terms of the challenges, I’ll be honest, I know. Taurie has it worse on the time zones because she’s west coast. I think I’ve got it easy there. That to me, there are a lot of downsides. But I get why that’s a downside for sure.

 

Sunitha 

Yeah, it’s the same problem with me. I don’t like commuting at all, because it consumes almost one one and a half hours considering the traffic in Bangalore here. So I would love to work remotely for days to come. Right. Yeah. So moving to the next. So this is specially for Taurie. So, you know, there are different stages of a product, right? For example, if it’s a very initial one, I don’t think we will have a design system built. Right. So the audience would like to know, how do you know, build a design system? And when do you think is the right time? When is it exactly important to build a design system for a product?

 

How to build a design system?

 

Taurie 

Yeah, this is like a whole podcast and itself, right, this topic, like they’re, we could talk about this forever. But generally speaking, like, yeah, newer companies don’t typically start with design systems. That doesn’t mean that designers can’t start thinking systematically and how their designs scale as the product scales, like, you can do that at any time. Maybe it’s not a formal effort, or a formal team, or however, you’ve structured your organization. But there are systems that I think that you can start at any moment in the journey of your company. At Gitlab, we definitely didn’t start the design system, it really came from the need of needing to, you know, we have all these product teams, and they’re growing, we’re getting more product teams, we’re getting a much larger design team. So we need something in place that allows designers to use the same components that allows the front end to come in and pull from the same components and really just build consistency throughout the product. So it grows organically normally, in an organization of like, alright, we see a breaking point. And we’re not able to keep all of the connections in place just from talking to each other. So we need to get this documented in a way that’s available to everyone.

 

Christie  

I think that’s a good answer from Taurie. What I want to add is this is the third company at which I’ve led an organization to build a design system. The most important thing that I’ve seen and something that Taurie does, and her team do an excellent job of is making sure that when you build a design system, it’s not owned by the quote design system team. It is owned by everyone, and everyone needs to be bought in and everyone needs to be contributing. The team who’s responsible for the design system, are responsible for making sure that we’re making smart decisions about tooling, that we are making smart decisions about how we scale components, making good decisions about when something is ready to be a design system component, or if it’s more of a one off component, we’re like, yeah, maybe we don’t need that in the design system. yet. Maybe this is the only place we’re gonna use that. So those are shepherds of the design system. When you get to a place where your design system team feels like they own the design system and they are designing components that you designers will use, the designers won’t be using them, they will revolt. And what you will find is that you have a design system that’s worthless, you’ve put a lot of time into something that is not getting used. So good job to Taurie and team, you all do an amazing job of that. And that’s something that you know, other other companies who are thinking about design systems, I would say, Take that away, make sure you structure it in such a way that it is shared ownership.

 

Taurie  

Yeah, exactly. It’s a buy-in strategy of ensuring that, you know, this is for everyone made by everyone. And that also includes engineering and getting engineering right is super important from the beginning. And when we’re building out new components, it’s not just on the design side, we also bring in our front end counterparts to ensure that we’re building it in a way that makes sense and is structured and works for them as well. So yeah, it’s a team effort, beyond just the people who are dedicated to the design system team.

 

Christie  

Yeah, and the people who are using the components, they’re the ones who ultimately know what components need, how they need to work. Now, we’ve got some really amazing experts in our design system team who can think about those requirements and think more broadly than an individual use case. But those use cases are how you know what you need to do next.

 

Sunitha   

Okay, So has the concept of design system been around for, you know, since inception of this profession? Or is it that something came around like within the last decade?

 

Taurie    

Yeah, like it, design, I mean, design systems started as like book books and like branding books and like that it’s very different than when we think about design systems today. But if you think of like the New York Transit System, they had a whole booklet of how they map out different paths. And that was their design system. And it’s evolved into software and how we build products now. So what we see as design systems in the technology space today is different from where they originated from. And you know, if you think about UX, or product designers, design systems certainly weren’t a thing. Forever since that, since that title came into inception. But over the last, I don’t know, five or so years, they’ve exploded. And now everyone knows what design systems are. And, and they’re popular because they’re, they help teams become more systematic and goes back to documentation and consistency and making teams more efficient. So

 

Sunitha   

Agreed. Cool. So we have a final set of questions. So these are more like, you know, yeah, this is for Christie. So is there anything that, you know, you would like to talk about, especially remote work? That like the best things, and the best thing that has happened for you? And, you know, or is there anything that I’m missing to ask you guys?

 

Christie  

Yeah, okay, I’ve got one that I think is interesting. One of the best things about leading a remote UX organization is we’re global. The amount of talent that we’ve been able to source from is incredible. So we’re not just looking in my little part of the world, for the best designers in San Antonio, Texas, we’re looking for the best designers literally, in the entire world who are focused on our area of subject matter, which is developer tooling. And the opportunity to do that means I have worked with some truly incredible designers. So to me as a leader, that’s one of the best things about leading a remote UX team.

 

Sunitha  

Well, what about you, Taurie? 

 

Taurie    

Oh, I feel like I have to copy Christie’s answer exactly the same. Yeah. I mean, we get to learn from I mean, all different cultures as well. And we’re hiring all around the world, it’s really an amazing experience to, to kind of be part of. So. Yeah, ditto, I wish I could give another unique answer.

 

Christie  

And we didn’t talk much about, you know, we focused a lot on design in this particular podcast. But remember, we’ve got a team of user researchers, and also a team of amazing technical writers. I wish I’d talked more about them. But the same thing. Yeah, we’re really world class, folks.

 

Sunitha    

We can work more on that. I’m curious to know more. Right. So yeah, that is a thing. And one last question. So is it that you know, have you ever needed someone to relocate? Or have you found someone, you know, having difficulty in remote work? And is there a way that you deal with them?

 

Taurie   

I don’t think we’ve had anyone have to relocate. Because I mean, maybe that’s happened, another team, I’m not aware of any instances of that needing to happen. Sure people struggle with remote work sometimes when they first start. And that’s where managers can come in and help understand, like, all right, what are you struggling with, and then help them through whatever that may be? And that’s very personal, really changes depending on the person.

 

Sunitha    

Great. Amazing. So is there anything you’d like to tell our audience today?

 

Taurie  

We’re hiring, so check out our hiring page. And thanks so much for having us. I really appreciate it. That was awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much.

 

Sunitha   

I was just about to say, you know, this podcast is going to make at least you know, people in the audience in my design community even more excited to work with you and GitLab. So yeah, that was what exactly talking just spoke. I’m so happy. Yeah, so thank you so much. Christie and Taurie, it was great talking to you today. So you know, all the insights we’ve been wanting to discuss, especially about remote work, have been addressed. So this is I’m sure this is going to really help our listeners. So thank you so much. Looking forward to connecting with you again especially on design systems. Have a great day both of you!