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.

We come from a design background.

From our bright purple slide decks to the typeface choice on our website (Pilat and Sohne), every detail at Monograph becomes an opportunity for a considered design project. As a founding team of trained designers, we bring our wide range of experience from having worked in offices (like Figma, WeWork, and Architecture) all over the world. With both a rigorous and playful approach to design thinking, we move well beyond the visuals – designing everything including marketing, our sales process, and even our internal APIs.

Engineers (specifically mobile devs) work very closely with design.

Our Chief Designer, Sid, co-founded Point after working at Apple as an interface designer. Sid works alongside our engineers to brainstorm solutions to different user experience problems and ensure our app always matches up with mockups.

Banking and payment cards don’t have a reputation of providing great user experiences. We believe that in this regulated and commoditized space, design has the potential to be a key differentiator.

The physical debit cards serve as a canvas for us to lean into thoughtful design. As a result, our customers can express themselves with a more creative way to pay. This is why we collaborated with a talented Chicago-based artist, Laura Berger, to develop two of our unique card designs that stand out from the crowd (or on any restaurant table when the bill arrives) and spark conversation.

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?”