I recently re-joined the team at Customer.io to head a new Professional Services team after about a year away from the company. After spending that year leading the Marketing team at Simple Finance, I had a greater appreciation for the struggles that B2C companies face when trying to keep their lifecycle comms as relevan…

The most satisfying part of my role as a Product Designer is when we release something that helps our customers become heroes at their jobs. When I help reveal or amplify people’s superpowers, I feel connected to the meaning of my work. There are lots of ways to do that through new features, better reliability, in…

At Customer.io, we’ve spent the last year turning our styles and coded components into a full-fledged design system. One of the biggest changes is that our work is now guided by a design direction that includes design principles. What are design principles? Design principles are a set of opinionated, actionable…

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 ne…

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 organiza…

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 from…

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-le…

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 f…

Every startup needs money to get started, whether it comes from outside the business or from the founders. But ideologically sticking to either bootstrapping or fundraising can be harmful to your business because of how they impact the way you use capital. Bootstrapping can prevent you from making decisions that h…