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.

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?”

The Design Engineer: A new kind of software engineer

Our engineers partner with Snap’s Camera Platform team to bring these experiences to life through augmented reality. We also work closely with our Design team to build products that reflect our values. For example, we aim to help Snapchatters connect with their real friends, instead of increasing time spent on a certain behavior. We focus on virtuous engagement, and do what’s right for our community instead of driving engagement for engagement’s sake.

In our industry, there are clear boundaries around roles like Software Engineer, Product Designer, Product Manager, etc. – so much so that multi-functional people find themselves at a crossroads being forced into one of these positions while giving up the other. Our Design team has always been composed of both Product Designers and Software Engineers, along with other folks from all sorts of disciplines, so we created a new kind of Software Engineering role – the Design Engineer. Design Engineers seamlessly blend product design and software engineering to take big ideas from concept to reality quickly. This role is responsible for early-stage product design, development, testing, and iteration, helping us choose the right product bets to make, and is critical for setting the course to execute on them.