Dive Club 🤿

Raphael Schaad, design founder of Cron (which became Notion Calendar), shares insights on sketching, MVP identification, building Cron in YC during COVID, designing dialogues, and lessons as a first-time design founder.

Former Chief Design Officer at Airbnb, Alex Schleifer, discusses creating a culture of decisiveness, leadership in design, preparing for an AI future, achieving craft at scale, and instilling Airbnb's culture in your team. He also touches on the importance of tools in design, storytelling potential in games, and his journey post-Airbnb.

Noam Segal, experienced user research leader, shares insights on conducting better interviews, effective research planning, AI in research, qualitative vs. quantitative tactics, and modern user research tools. He discusses the importance of storytelling, integration of research in the product process, and highlights various tools like Sprig, Genway, and Dscout. Segal also explores the significance of follow-up questions in interviews and crafting compelling research stories.

Guest Helen Tran, early designer at Shopify, discusses designing with a founder mindset. Topics include approaching design leadership differently, constructing hypotheses for product strategy, sacrifices to production skills, designing in a pre-PMF company, and ways to help founders. The conversation delves into Helen's design journey, emphasizing adaptability, strategic impact in early startup stages, and traits sought by AngelList in candidates.

Guest Hunter Hammonds, designer and entrepreneur, shares insights on positioning in design business. Topics include selling yourself on a landing page, converting leads to customers, trimming operational fat for margins, improving sales calls, and more.

Experienced freelancer Nick Pattison shares insights on positioning, sales, and creative direction. He discusses automations for focusing on sales, lessons from running $15k brand sprints, growing creative muscles, presenting work to clients, and more. Learn why he stopped writing proposals and delve into his freelance playbook.

Design founder Dennis Müller discusses the journey of building Amie, a productivity tool. Topics include inspiration sources, traits in early hires, balancing intuition and feedback, innovating vs. familiarity, and personal design clarity. The episode delves into building strong teams, iterative design processes, paying attention to details in product design, website design roots, and envisioning future tech innovations.

Glenn Hitchcock and John Pham from Vercel discuss design engineering, collaboration between designers and engineers, hiring criteria for design engineers, and building with reusability in mind. They also touch on software creation, Framer components, Screwball scramble, and Dead Simple Sites.

Head of Design at Metalab, Michael Wandelmeier, dives into storytelling tactics, opinionated design, ignoring constraints, mapping user journeys, driving alignment, and early hypotheses. They discuss the impact of software, reshaping marketplaces, driving alignment, power of storytelling, crafting engaging presentations, and embracing diverse influences in digital product design.

Adam Mura, Co-founder of Relume, shares how AI is revolutionizing web design. He gives a demo of building a website in 30 mins. Topics include AI's impact on the design process, designer roles, and his journey as a design founder. Relume's Figma and Webflow libraries are showcased, along with insights on where the company is headed next.