So Trello with "data"?

As someone who's done just this—and looking to replicate in the near future with a new startup (hit me up)—I agree with these sentiments.

I even wroteabout it myself.

TLDR; it's super rewarding, exhausting and annoying all at once. You have to be prepared to have your own opinions and stand up for them, but also be a team player and learn how to coach both other designers as the company grows, and non-designers too.

TrackMaven is looking for a Product Designer and a Front-end Developer, in Washington, DC.

http://www.trackmaven.com/careers

(You can read more about us, what we're doing, and what we're thinking at https://medium.com/ruff-concepts )

Oooh, so you mean Designer News?

For me, an online portfolio wasn't that important. I haven't had one actively for... 5 years? In the early days, it worked out to have one, but as my career advanced, it didn't matter as much as the people I was connected with. And even then, sometimes it was just fate.

1st job — Graphic Designer at a small print shop back home, left after 6 months to go to college

2nd job — intern for a competitive intelligence company doing a lot of Flash work - 6 months

3rd job — Design Intern at AOL, teacher in college suggested I do it because she thought I was one of the better students in class (we had a lot of people who just didn't try/care at my college) - that lasted about a year and a half, with a 3 month break in between

4th job — Graphic + Web Designer for a consulting firm — the internship didn't have availability for fulltime work post college, so I had to take what I could find at the time, with little connection - 8 months

5th job — Designer at AOL — they found my resume in their internal recruiting office and there was an opening in another department, worked with UX architects, business and my creative director on Shopping related websites - 1 year, laid off whole department

(portfolio goes inactive)

6th job — Contract work for RCN — had a hard time finding work out in suburbia Virginia, worked as only Web Designer reporting to Head of Marketing for rcn.com. It was brutal. - 8 months.

7th job — Interactive Designer, small agency — former AOL boss reached out to me about a position at a 40 person agency in Alexandria, VA. Started as a UX Associate to get in the door, was promoted to Interactive Designer after 4 months. First time really working with UX in mind, very intriguing game changer for me - 11 months.

(start using Dribbble)

8th job — Senior Designer, smaller agency — nclud was a resource my previous job used from time to time; they reached out, their work was more interesting and gave me the flexibility to own it (hate working for large companies) - 1 year, 5 months

9th job — Lead Designer turned VP, Design for start up — nclud was bought out by Twitter, rest of it sold to another agency. Lost autonomy, among other issues. Did a hackathon with a Javascript dev friend, met my current boss/CEO of TrackMaven. Was 4th employee. Did all UX, UI, branding, identity for the first 1.5 years. Began hiring team. Now manage a team of 5 (1 front end dev, 3 comms designers, 1 prod designer). Company now grown to ~80, deal with design strategy across Marketing and Product. - just over 2.5 years so far.

Ours are focused across the initiatives of the company. We used to prescribe them more specifically to feature launches, but found that given unknowns our timelines were almost always off and as a result OKRs were almost never achieved.

As a result, we now focus mostly on metrics like:

• % of usage of Actionable features (things that users will use consistently, get value out of, and would have to come back to in order to continue seeing value);
• NPS scores of beta features;
• process enhancements (Incorporate personas into product process for 100% of our features) that benefit multiple teams;
• and culture related ones for the sake of hiring/awareness growth (blog posts, events attended, etc).

On an individual contributor level (because those are only half of the design team OKRs, and we are multi-functional, assisting with business, marketing and product) my team has:

• OKRs that reflect our over all team goals, as it's important to align with other departments in order to achieve key results;
• OKRs that reflect their own personal learning, like attending X number of events/classes, contributing X number of blog posts, etc. It's pretty mixed, both department wide, and with the individual team member.

I'm partial to ours.

http://www.trackmaven.com/ruff

Thanks for the comment Dan — that bug was previously filed and looks like it was overlooked at the last moment.

The design team at TrackMaven has been working hard on this one. We have plenty of new things in our backlog but for the time being, we're happy to have it out in the world! Front-end dev work by Wade Hammes and Marcus Relacion, illustrations by Blake Wilton, and design by Blake and myself. You can also check us out on dribbble.com/trackmaven

Hey Andy! My company TrackMaven, an analytics platform for content marketers, is experiencing ridiculous growth and we're looking to bring on another front end dev. This role reports to me, the head of Design, so I'm looking for someone with an eye for a design, a passion for UX and the skill of code. Check out trackmaven.com/careers for more info on the role!