Design
Our mission is to put beautifully designed software in the hands of every developer in the world. We do this by creating a differentiated, inspired and trustworthy brand. And by ensuring that the software we ship is powerful, usable, accessible and delightful.
Team
- Rob Rhyne – Head of Design (he/him)
Product Design
- Tim Lucas – Lead Product Designer (he/him)
- Daniel Marques – Product Designer (he/him)
- Taiyab Raja – Product Designer (he/him)
UX Research
- Megan St. Andrew – UX Researcher (she/they)
Creative Ops / Brand
- Tracey Johnson – Brand Designer (they/them)
Ethos
We know that we’re successful as a design team when we…
- Improve Sourcegraph’s velocity by helping to ship more usable and delightful features in the first iteration. Design often means more time up-front, but this reduces time-consuming rewrites, refactors, and technical and design debt that occurs when changes are made during development or after releases.
- Lead design and collaborate effectively across disciplines We lead the practice of design within our teams, we create a shared approach to the design process across the company, and we build trust with each other and with our colleagues.
- Act with high agency to make our product, processes, and teams better. Design is an inherently explorative and iterative process. We value high agency, and we have to actively create an environment of physiological safety, trust, and transparency to do our best work.
- Advocate for and ship design outcomes that align with our product design principles.
- Support each other in a timely manner As we are remote, and global, and also work in distributed teams, we must make additional effort to work together as a team. We must also aid each other through times when the nature of remote work becomes difficult.
How we work
As a design team, we’re constantly reflecting and improving on how we work.
Design principles
Our product design principles are how we express our shared vision and values while designing for our product. We co-created these principles with members of the design, product, and engineering teams.
Designing in the open
At Sourcegraph, we design in the open. This is an important part of how we work as a design team, and is a key part of how we apply our values to our work and thrive in our globally distributed, remote company.
Designing in the open means many things to us.
- Our work and process is transparent by default. By making our work visible to anyone, it’s easy for us to collaborate with others while building trust within our high agency environment.
- We share early and often. Our design process encourages collaboration with other teams at all stages of the product design process, and designing in the open reduces friction and encourages feedback and shared understanding.
- We create shared understanding. We proactively communicate with teammates from all disciplines and backgrounds. We don’t use jargon and don’t expect others to have a deep design-specific understanding, and we look for gaps in understanding where we can help provide clarity.
Designing in the open is hard! As designers, it’s easy to want to hold back on sharing until we’re happy with what we have. It can be very uncomfortable for others to see the things we’re working on before we’re ready to share. But designing in the open also challenges us to improve our design communication and makes us better at collaborating asynchronously.
Design process
Product design at Sourcegraph is low-process and highly adaptive. Instead of design and development phases, each discipline is involved end-to-end, and it’s likely that one discipline will be more involved than the others at different moments along the way. Similarly, we avoid hard handoffs as much as possible. The PMs, engineers and team members on a project should have a deep understanding and agreement around what will move forward in each phase, and is responsible for shipping the project outcome.
Process
Toolkit
Career and growth
UX Research process
The goal of UX research at Sourcegraph is to connect with Sourcegraph users and gather insight into their behaviors, motivations, and goals. We use these insights to inform and strengthen product and design decisions.