Ditto reposted this
We’re looking for our second designer to join our team at Ditto! When I joined Ditto a year and a half ago, I was looking for three specific things: 1. A product that deeply resonated with me as a designer. 2. A specific stage and size of company. 3. A close values alignment and deep trust with the founders. Ditto hit the mark on all three of these. Ditto’s creating a new product category: a platform for end-to-end collaboration and systemization for product copy. I think that the copy in our products has a wildly outsized ROI—but it’s so often an afterthought or spread across a swath of other clunky tools. I care so much about this that I’d previously made an entire framework for UX copywriting and style guidelines. When I found Ditto, it was a perfect match. I also knew that I do some of my best work as an early employee. I wanted to help shape the design culture, drive our processes, and most of all, to help define the product and vision. Ditto hit the mark: we’re a small, high-leverage team that I delight in working with day by day. Most of all, I knew that I needed to be able to work directly with the founders every day. There’s no right answers in design—only ongoing learning and iteration. I wanted to be able to work from a place of shared values, where we each worked to create an environment of deep trust. It’s incredible how much we’ve done to evolve the product and the company in just the past year and a half. But we have a ways to go! https://lnkd.in/dqAYWBd8
Ditto's first two designers and developers were Jolena Ma and me. In the early days, we worked side by side in our SF apartment, reviewing each other's PRs and Figma mockups. By Ditto’s second year, we’d grown our engineering team and stepped back from IC development, but continued to own the design needs of our growing team. A year and a half ago, we brought on Ditto’s first designer, Quinn, and I only wish we’d done it sooner. Formalizing the design function fundamentally up-leveled not only our velocity but also how our company works as a whole. ⭐ What are some design-driven changes at Ditto in the last year? ⭐ 1. We changed the relationship between design and engineering from “handoff” to deep, continual partnership. On projects, this means collaborating from the moment a challenge is identified—long before mockups exist. As a result, technical constraints and scope surprises are minimized, and engineers develop a deep understanding of user challenges. 2. We rebuilt our two-way sync with Figma down to the studs. This required (1) a nuanced understanding of how design files are set up and evolve over time, (2) a systems-thinking lens to treat text as building blocks, and (3) continual iteration driven by testing hypotheses with real customers. 3. We raised the company’s bar for craft tenfold. Craft and quality pays dividends you can’t even plan for (customer perception, trust, retention, deals won), and it can only happen by making the right tradeoffs every day. With Quinn, our design ethos shifted from scrappy (read: cutting corners from limited bandwidth) to true excellence, influencing everything from our new design system to accessibility and QA. 👉 In short: at Ditto, design is deeply embedded in all product decisions and is a primary stakeholder in business decisions. We started Ditto as designers building better tools for teams like ours. Bringing a designer onto our own team has helped us turn that early intuition into a scalable practice, reshaping how the entire company operates. P.S. We’ve just opened a role for a second designer to join the team! Reach out if what we’re working on sounds interesting. 😊