Customer.io has teams spread across the globe. That’s awesome, but it can also present unique challenges. With people managers and their teams spanning 5 continents and more timezones than we can count on both hands and feet, we wanted to create a simple way to give and solicit feedback regularly. We use a weekly company…

Customer.io doesn’t have the luxury of spontaneous conversations at the coffee machine or spur-of-the-moment catch-ups over lunch as a remote-first company. For many companies, those little moments are what build relationships and company culture. As our VP of Operations, I’ve planned over ten company retreats with th…

Dunning emails are the messages a business sends to its customers to collect past-due payments. At best, they are a nuisance; at worst, they inspire dread. Email marketers often overlook these messages as a distasteful, if necessary, part of doing business. When I redesigned our dunning campaign, I wanted to create …

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…

‘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 …