Designing in big tech

Having now been on the design team at Lyft for eighteen months, I figured I’d reflect a bit on my experience and expectations versus reality. This is usually the tenure at which I leave a job and try something else, but I’m quite satisfied with where I am right now. I’m left wondering why that is — what feels different about this job than my past ones? Am I just getting older and more accustomed to the way of things? Is it because I’ve been working remotely this entire time, which in turn is better for my work-life balance? Or is it because the nature of a large organization lends itself to an overall beneficial pace of work?

Some grounding context: before Lyft, my only design experience was at a handful of startups in Boston, in which the design teams ranged anywhere between three to forty people. In contrast, Lyft has over a hundred designers (nearing a hundred and fifty now). While there are much larger design teams in enterprise big tech, this is the largest company I’ve worked at. Before I interviewed, I knew it was sort of a long shot. I didn’t have experience working in the big tech companies, which immediately put me at a disadvantage amongst all the applicants that were already SF-based working in companies of similar size, solving similar problems. Lyft was, in my eyes, one of the few tech companies that were highly regarded in terms of their design quality — on the same level as an Airbnb or a Slack. You could tell that the company cared about the user experience highly and often relied on it as a competitive differentiator. Being on the design team for such an organization was every designer’s dream.

I interviewed at Lyft in February 2020 and accepted the job offer in March 2020. I then moved from Boston to San Francisco a month later expecting the pandemic to be over in a matter of weeks (but alas). At first, I was frustrated. On my flight to San Francisco, I dreamed of the office opening up and me collaborating with other designers on a giant wall-whiteboard like some comically stereotypical stock photo of a design sprint. I wanted to learn from senior ICs about design craft, animation, prototyping, etc. But all in-person interactions were gone. Instead, I was paying thousands of dollars to live in a cramped San Francisco apartment where I stared at a screen all day. I remember feeling upset because it felt like valuable learning experiences were being taken away from me. I couldn’t casually chitchat with designers over lunch or coffee in-person learn about them and their work. Over time, I started easing into it and got to know a few folks over Slack and a few in-person meetups. I started to focus more on the work and tried not to worry about the “lost” interaction time with fellow designers.

Despite being entirely remote since I started, I’ve learned several things about design at Lyft that starkly contrasts against all of my previous jobs as a designer at tech startups. For one, the design culture at the company is extremely strong. I rarely ever have to justify the value of why we should invest in a better designed experience or why a certain change is needed. At every level, from engineers to product managers to data scientists and business analysts, people “get” the value of design, even if it’s at a conceptual level. This is already a huge difference from smaller startups that are data-driven to such an extremely toxic level of obsession that they ignore basic product or design instincts. Humans aren’t rational and often make emotionally charged decisions when using technology. Numbers and graphs won’t tell you why people are doing what they’re doing, they will only outline a baseline trend to infer from.

Secondly, there is a lot of structure and support for designers. In small design teams, designers are usually spread way too thin, from ranging from being asked to make marketing/creative materials, physical merch, website updates, overhaul the brand identity, redesign UX flows, make illustrations, or create and maintain design systems, etc. At Lyft, there is a dedicated design systems team that handles everything from creating component libraries, drafting up usage guidelines, maintaining documentation, and pushing updates to Figma every week. It’s amazing how freeing it is for product designers, since we can focus on product decisions and design strategy rather than worry about spacing, margins, or interface details.

Thirdly, we have a lot of specialists on the design team. There is a Content Design team that handles everything from copywriting to messaging and communications. They manage to make even the most bland and boring UIs feel fun with playful copy that’s in tone with the Lyft brand. There are specialist illustrators and motion designers on the design systems team who do an incredible job with creating branded experiences in empty states or marketing comms. Our incredible UX Research team has a lot of researchers fluent in several different research methodologies to generate new insight or test design concepts. These specialist roles often aren’t possible (or even needed in a full-time capacity) in smaller startups, and it’s not uncommon for this work to land on the designer’s already-full plate. Having these folks on my team at Lyft makes my job so much easier knowing that I only need to focus on the design and that I have a lot of support for the other stuff.

All of these things were aspects of design that had always been problematic in startups, in my experience. I always used to find myself making slide decks or doing before-and-after showcases of an interface just to convince a specific VP or PM that a particular direction was worth pursuing. It felt like those companies had hired designers because they genuinely wanted to improve their product experience, but had no idea how to actually work with designers or integrate them into their agile-first-engineering-sprint-driven workflows. Creative problem-solving is a non-linear journey, and only large orgs with enough funding or resources to support designers are able to properly invest in it.

Now what’s not so good about designing in big tech? Surely you’ve seen the memes and roast tweets about large enterprising organizations draining the creativity out of all the designers who work there. It can’t all be roses and sunshine, right? Is the golden handcuff syndrome real? Again, my experience is severely limited to one big tech organization, so here it goes.

The first con is that things just take much longer in general. If you have a team of over a hundred designers, the product still needs to feel like it was made by one designer. This requires frequent communication and work sharing amongst not only the design team, but also product and engineering. In a startup, I could independently make decisions and have my work shipped out in two weeks to production. At Lyft, there are several reviews with the aforementioned specialists as well as the larger design team. If I make a slight change to how a list item functions, I have to check it with the design systems team to make sure that it can be componentized or that it’s a valid deviation from the pattern. And with multiple design reviews followed by product reviews, it’s not uncommon for a design I worked on to ship eight months or a year later, depending on resourcing constraints.

Second — there is a fair bit of politics and diplomacy involved. From everything that ranges from proposed redesigns to going up for a promotion, it can end up feeling like a very bureaucratic and soulless experience. Convincing executive leaders of a change in direction or fighting for resourcing / headcount or filling out forms to get approved for new tools can really feel crushing at times. Organizational inertia is a real thing and there is a lot of resistance to change that you have no choice but to fight against if you truly want to do something of value. The startups I worked at in Boston were using Figma since late 2017 / early 2018, and it took Lyft until 2020 (to right around when I joined) to migrate from Sketch to Figma. And it didn’t happen naturally. Plenty of designers had to advocate for it and push very hard to make it happen. Going up for promos can also feel like a never-ending uphill battle, with you needing the right kind of peer feedback or impact on projects to justify leveling up.

Third, the work just isn’t as exciting. Lyft has established itself as a dominant player in the rideshare marketplace and is also planning on bringing many new offerings to the marketplace, but it will likely not be the “first” company to do something. If a company like Lyft is bringing something to the table, it’s usually a polished up and refined version of something that’s already available from a different player. Consequently, there’s less room for design innovation when you’re mostly trying to copy existing models and integrate them into the Lyft ecosystem. After all, we want users to have a level of familiarity with what they’re doing. Smaller startups I’ve worked at would be okay experimenting with some truly “out-there” ideas, but larger publicly traded companies are often beholden to keeping the stock price up, which means less risk-taking. I’ve worked on boring projects as well as interesting projects at Lyft so far, and I don’t mind the boring ones too much (it actually helps maintain some sanity during a pandemic).

So yeah, there’s pros and cons for sure, but overall I’m enjoying the structured approach of the strong and large design team with specialists, as we tend to infuse the design culture across the entire organization. The cons don’t seem to bother me as much — perhaps because I’ve been shielded by the worst of it due to remote work. Overall, my role at Lyft has felt like the most sustainable so far in terms of work-life balance. Every startup I’ve worked at has felt like a jarring experience due to some rapid company pivot, unexpected layoffs, financial troubles, or HR issues. Lyft is in a stable position to keep bringing new offerings in the transportation space and is able to provide just the right level of structure and resources for designers to succeed. Whether I get bored of it or continually try to do newer things is mostly up to me (internal transfers are always an option to explore a different problem space). At the same time, I personally know many former co-workers who have left Lyft because they weren’t engaged by the work or because they didn’t want to deal with the bureaucratic nature of the design team. Everyone feels differently about these things and people have a different tolerance to them, based on past experiences.

But yeah, so far I’m liking my team and the work quite a lot. Another factor that has helped a lot with maintaining a sense of belonging is the strong camaraderie between the folks on my team. The remote working life has strangely made it easier to empathize with the unique situations that everyone finds themselves in, and it results in a strong layer of psychological safety that permeates through everything. My partnerships with product managers and engineers scattered around the world have also benefited from having a deeper sense of understanding about everyone’s personal changes and life updates during a pandemic. Lyft employees are set to return to the office in a hybrid model of 2-days-WFH and 3-in-office-days starting early next year, and I’m curious to see if the pros and cons I’ve outlined here hold up in an in-person environment.