Today’s episode is with Hareem Mannan, who was a product design leader at Segment for nearly four years, and joined Twilio as a Senior Director of Product, Enablement & Design following the company’s acquisition of Segment.

In today’s conversation, we deeply explore Hareem’s three pillars of what makes a great designer. To summarize, they are a product quality ambassador, serve as the glue across product areas, and intricately understand the go-to-market motion. We peel back the layers for each of these pillars to excavate why each is critical, and how folks can build up their skills in every pillar.

Next, she takes us through her hiring loop and how she probes for core competencies in each of these three areas. Hareem also flags some of her own mistakes she’s learned from as a hiring manager. From there, she explains her favorite onboarding rituals, like unexpectedly pairing new designers with a solutions engineer, and crowd-sourcing a “Dear New Designer” document that’s become a huge hit on her team.

We then turn our attention to her biggest lessons on leading a high-impact design org. She unpacks the aha moment that her fear of micromanaging had unintended consequences, and how she’s leveraged rituals like office hours and team bonding events to set a high bar for design quality.

To learn more about the “Dear New Designer” onboarding document, visit Hareem’s Medium page: https://medium.com/segment-design/dear-new-designer-1fd006fc7390

You can follow Hareem on Twitter at @hareemmannan.

You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson