In July 2018, I joined Customer.io as the third Product Designer in a 40-person team. I’d recently left a start up, partly because of the ineffective design practices that bogged down the entire team as we tried to build an app from scratch. There was no system in place — no shared styles of any kind — which made each n…

This post is the third in a series to document the challenges and joys of organizing and implementing a design system for Customer.io. We started by auditing our design system, which you can read about here. After the tedious process of auditing our resources, UI, and processes, our next step was to create an organiz…

This post is the second in a series to document the challenges and joys of organizing and implementing a design system for Customer.io. If you want to find out why we are building a design system, read the first post here. I joined Customer.io at a time of expansion — over the past year our product team has grown fro…

‘Push’-ing the limits of inter-disciplinary collaboration “Should designers code?” No. …but successful designers do need to understand how code functions — its constraints, its quirks, its unique capabilities — in order to build experiences which enable users to easily get things done. Similarly, developers…

Photo by rachel baskerville on Unsplash Someone new has agreed to join your company, and they’ve signed your offer letter. You’re thrilled! You’re going to spend the next few weeks focusing on making sure their first day is a great one, prepping their onboarding materials, and making sure they’re ready to “hit t…

Using Zapier here at Customer.io has helped our tools, and therefore, our teams, talk to each other in ways that help us be more productive. If you’ve ever cracked the nut on a big time saver, you know how good it feels — we couldn’t keep all those good feels to ourselves anymore. We’re excited to share our integration …

Recently at Customer.io, we released a Layout Starters feature. What began as a hack project at our recent Iceland retreat grew into a full-fledged piece of product work, along with a new suite of documentation. We’re pretty proud of it and wanted to share! This post digs into both UX process and front-end, and comes…

Background Our most recent cycle of work at Customer.io was an eventful one. We were in the middle of hiring for several positions, not least of which was a Director of Product — welcome, Brian! As a result, our product team was really light on personnel. We had: Our CEO, ColinFront-end engineers Kate and NajwaUX …

What winners look like. Team pink from the “Ami-zing race” at our last company get together. Deciding early on who you serve determines whether you’re a product-led company or a sales-led company. If you decide to take on big enterprise clients, a few of whom make up most of your revenue, you’re building a sales-l…

To get Customer.io off the ground in May 2012, we raised $125k in small checks from friends and family plus two angel investors. At the time of that investment, our total capital raised was equivalent to two hundred and eight times (20,833% of) our current annual revenue run rate (ARR). Our strap ratio peaked on our …