Engineering teams in design-driven companies

We put a lot of care and thought into designing our product.

As a team, we care deeply about how design impacts our user. It isn’t just about coming up with beautiful mocks and having an engineer implement them – it’s a real cross-functional effort. We rely heavily on customer feedback as well as our product, engineering, and design teams.

Design has just as big of a seat at the leadership table as engineering and product. Teams are generally around 5-8 people and they all have an engineering, product, and design lead. This close collaboration with product and design ensures there’s lots of opportunity to prototype and helps us approach problems from a customer mindset. One great example of collaboration between engineers and designers is the shared design system used across all our products. Engineers and designers worked together to come up with a shared language (typography, component library, interactions, etc.) to both accelerate development and make it easier to maintain a high bar for design quality.

Everything we produce is useful, beautiful, and fun. But to us, that’s just table stakes.

Universe opens up the possibilities of the internet to everyone. This is possible not because of some hard-tech breakthrough but because of great design.

At our core, we are a design-driven company. To create new interfaces that unlock creativity, we have to build a new design language that everyone can understand, regardless of skill level. Usability is key for distilling large, complex problems into simple, toy-like solutions. Daniel, our product designer, works intensely on optimizing both form and function.

We take a first principles approach, meaning we start the process of design with a question to be answered, not an expected outcome in mind. And to some extent, that question is always in alignment with our mission – “how can we empower everyone to build the internet?”