Building a design team
I’m the Director of User Experience at Vend. That means I’m in charge of the design team and delivering a great experience for retailers when they use our product. I can’t do this alone, of course, I’m going to need you.
Vend is a SaaS company that delivers a cloud-based retail management system to help retailers Sell More and Spend Less. We want retailers to succeed. We believe that it’s been a long time since anyone has taken a look at retail and thought about how they could build a product that helps retailers meet today’s demands of retail. Even longer since anybody’s tried to make it a delightful experience. Longer still since anyone has succeeded. We’re going to change that.
We’re building a design team and establishing a design practise within the company’s product engineering department (we call it Solutions) that can not only keep pace with the delivery schedule of the product engineering team (they are smashing it) but to get ahead. We believe that it’s important that people have head-room to be strategic and not just focused on delivery. So we’re growing our design team, to get head-room.
Our design and developer teams have always worked closely. But we’re taking it one-step further. Code is prose, but so often it’s missing the point. We’re going to be at a place where developers are coding what we as designers mean when we place pixels. They’ll understand the systems we’ve designed so they can write flexible, long-living frameworks around them. Our frameworks will be the life-blood of the product engineering team and will allow us to increase velocity (yes, it is possible!) while increasing consistency and quality.
We believe that (Digital) Product Design is a unique and niche discipline. We believe that we’re on the forefront of that discipline and are inventing the ways design and developer teams will be working in the future. So we’re focusing on hiring Junior Product Designers that we can mentor and help develop into modern Product Designers who are operating at the cutting-edge and inventing the future of our industry.
Along the way we’ll revolutionise inventory-based retail as well.
