Ankit is a Staff Product Designer on our Product Design team, and joined us in October 2023. He brings with him a wealth of experience and knowledge from Instacart, and Flexport – to name a few – and is already leading huge design initiatives for us. Read on to learn about how our design team operates and stays close to customers so that we deliver world-class user experiences.

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Can You Tell Us About Your Role at GlossGenius? 

As staff product designer on the growth team, I'm responsible for spearheading an exciting and new growth initiative dedicated to elevating our product for the next phase of expansion into a bigger target market. Venturing into uncharted territory means designing some new core capabilities and features that align with the needs of new users. 

As a member of our small yet mighty design team, I also get to shape our design practice and culture at GlossGenius. For example, I’m involved in efforts like mapping out our user journey, as well as defining the foundation of our information architecture. I also started shaping up our desktop experiences and in doing so, I’ve helped to drive the design system initiative for desktop as well.

Overall, it's an incredibly exciting time where we’re determining some of the core fundamentals for the future of product design at GlossGenius.‍

What Have You Found To Be Unique About GlossGenius?

Two things I find very unique:

There’s a strong culture of bias towards action: As soon as we learn new insights and have a strong conviction, we act immediately to get it out to our users. Our users value such velocity and always share real-time feedback. The tight feedback loop paired with agile action is a rare dynamic. It really drives home the culture of moving fast and customer obsession that we aspire to have here. 

Secondly, our leaders – especially our Founder and CEO, Danielle Cohen-Shohet– partner with us directly. A unique experience I recently had was at design offsite where Danielle was one of the participants. She acted not as an executive, but rather more as a design partner – it was awesome. She brought her perspective and ideas that were inspiring and really relatable as a designer (she gets it!), and this level and quality of engagement boosts team morale and fosters a culture of deep collaboration.

How Do You foster Collaboration and Innovation in Your Work?

As a distributed global team in this remote work era, collaboration can be an operational challenge. I think it's critical to be responsive, transparent, and inclusive. I try to bring transparency into my work by providing visibility into weekly priorities to my team, helping them to understand what to expect, and thus leaving the guess-work out. 

Feedback is an important reality check to my design process. Design reviews with different stakeholders allow me to iterate with diverse perspectives on a problem, thus leading into some truly innovative paths. Additionally, I particularly enjoy jamming on design problems with Product/Engineering partners with tight constraints, as this typically leads to creative and unique ways to solve a design challenge.

Lastly, we celebrate our wins, however small. Our Slack channels light up after every launch, showcasing positive feedback from customers or acknowledgement from our teammates on the work and accomplishments. 

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GlossGenius is Customer Obsessed. What Does This Mean in Practice?

One thing that’s apparent here is that our customers are very connected to us and we consider them (and ensure they are) integral to our product development process. It's a healthy mutual relationship as we’re invested in each other's success. This shows in our culture and processes in small ways and big. 

For example, we recently started rolling out our refreshed desktop calendar experience and we rolled light mode (versus a dark mode for the old experience) and we really wanted to know what users thought about it. I quickly designed a brief survey (thumbs up/down) to collect insights on user pulse. This is a big design change and we anchor ourselves to customer feedback – and their thoughts/input were heard and valued! 

Another example: We’re about to take a big step with our growth initiative and for that we’re launching a design partner program, where we deeply partner with current and prospective customers to really understand some of their perspectives for their needs and pain points. This is not just a listening tour; rather, it’s an interactive program where we understand their needs and follow up with design concepts to showcase and iterate based on their feedback. This level of commitment to customer centricity really grounds us and brings velocity in how we design our product.

How Is Your Team Raising the Bar on Product Design?

Excellence is a strong design value we commit to. We walk the walk by constantly "filtering" our work through tiered design reviews, starting with teammates for early exploration and going all the way to the executive team with the final version. Our work is constantly challenged and refined as we move past each design review filter. 

We also share industry best practices and inspiration to push each other to think beyond what’s functional and create "magical" moments for our users. Recently, we organized a design sprint to super charge this process and generate diverse interaction models that we tested with our users.

By sharing the outcomes of the sprint with the broader org as well as with our users, we were able to energize the team around an exciting vision of product experiences. Simultaneously, we committed ourselves to actually realizing that vision. For us, it's not just about showing the "shiny things" but also committing to making it real!

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What Are You Really Excited to Work on Right Now?

It's an exciting time at GlossGenius, both on the design team as well as company growth-wise. As we venture into the next stage of growth, there are some interesting challenges we need to tackle.

As a design team, we’re rethinking our interaction model and information architecture to position our product experience for the scale and complexity of the users we’re focusing on. We recently ran a design sprint followed by a design offsite to carve out a North Star for our product and design foundation. I’m also shaping the desktop experiences of our product as well as driving the design systems for desktop, so it's a ton of fun, autonomy, and interesting work – a.k.a., the right mix to drive a lot of impact for our customers' businesses.

What Does A Day In Your Life Look Like?

Since I’m on the west coast, my first half is typically stacked with meetings and syncs earlier in the week. I start with a big cup O’ joe (I often get reactions from my design teammates about my big Batman mug). I typically catch up on updates on Slack and mark as unread for things I need to respond to.  

Second half is a fairly clean focus time and that’s when I put on some jams (mostly Drake) and go into deep focus mode. I do not keep a water bottle on my desk, this habit forces me to get up to drink water which gives periodic breaks away from the screen automatically. Wednesdays are our dedicated focus days, so I really take advantage of that and get into a good groove that carries me through to the end of the week. 

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‍GlossGenius is actively hiring across many departments – check out our open roles here.  

Additionally, below is some recent press you may be interested in:

• TechCrunch: GlossGenius Increases Valuation, Raises $28M in Series C Round of Funding
• GlossGenius Named a Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startup 2023
• GlossGenius Named to the Forbes Fintech 50
• GlossGenius Named a 2023 BuiltIn Best Places to Work Winner
• BeautyMatter: GlossGenius and the Power of Customizable Beauty SaaS
• Fast Company: The 10 Most Innovative Retail Companies of 2022