Building Design Teams and Learning from Industry Leaders

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Few designers have an instinct for business fundamentals. Those that do are able to position design as a competitive advantage for a business and pave the way for design teams to collaborate more effectively. Kate Aronowitz is one of those rare birds.

Kate has held high level design roles at LinkedIn, WealthFront, Facebook, eBay, and today she’s at GV (formerly known as Google Ventures), where she helps early stage companies find their footing.

We speak to Kate about the arc of her career, about entrepreneurship as a designer (and why there aren’t more designer-founders), as well as some of the stories from the early days of Facebook like how she was one of the first designers to teach Mark Zuckerberg (or as Eli’s 8 year old son calls him, Zerk Merkerbergen) about human centered design.

Bio

Kate Aronowitz is a design executive who has built her career empowering teams at some of Silicon Valley’s most iconic companies. In addition to her role leading GV’s operations team, Kate coaches GV portfolio companies on cross-functional design processes, scale, product development, and management strategy.

Kate has built world-class design teams at eBay, LinkedIn, Facebook (now Meta), and Wealthfront. She joined the first user experience team at eBay before taking her experience to LinkedIn, where she started the user research team. As Facebook’s first design executive, Kate grew the organization from 20 to 200, establishing multidisciplinary design teams in front-end engineering, user research, content strategy, and communication design.

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