Balancing Product Improvement with Website Design and Quality Standards in Team Management

When it comes to design founder stories, Raphael Schaad’s is one of the best. So this episode is the first-ever telling of how Raphael designed and built Cron (which became Notion Calendar). We talk about:

• Sketching on paper vs. sketching in code
• Why shipping quality software is like camping
• How Raphael identified the MVP of the problem
• What it was like building Cron in YC during COVID
• Why you should design dialogues as first-class citizens
• Why Raphael didn’t invest much in the Cron landing page
• The differences between a design toolkit and a design system
• a lot more lessons from a successful first-time design founder

• Raphael’s Twitter
• The OG Cron website
• Screenshot of the Cron dialogues in Figma