If your company was co-founded by a designer, like Evan Sharp at Pinterest, you might think that design culture would spread naturally through the company as it grew. While it might seem that way from an outsider's perspective, insiders know that it takes a lot of effort to onboard and educate new employees about design process and design thinking. Additionally, extensive support for the design team is needed as it scales. In this conversation, we learn from Kim Fellman, Design Experience Lead at Pinterest, about how her team helps spread a designer's mindset across the company, and how they operationalize design as their teams continue to grow.

Kim Fellman

Design Experience Lead at Pinterest

Kim Fellman: For sure. We're focused on helping our world class team of design professionals do their best work and build off of each other. We consider what the end-to-end experience of being on this team is, from how you're onboarded, planning for your career, staying inspired, and learning new things.

Kim: We are part of the design ops org, with program managers working on product-focused programs or the design experience. We integrate really closely with all of our program managers. I think those who have worked with producers or program managers know that they're the GPS of every project. They are closest to the work, they know where misalignments are happening, where people might need to feel more inspired or grow.

For a team like mine that focuses on culture and morale and development, working really closely with our design ops team is invaluable because we know what teams need and value often before they do because of that partnership.

Kim: When we got started we focused on two things: inspiring cultural programs and then the critical programs for the way that we work. One early win is onboarding - thinking about how we onboard new people to the product design team, and also how we onboard new folks who are cross-functional partners to work with design. We had a lot of different onboarding documents over time that were kind of bespoke for each team. Design wasn't part of company onboarding so over the past few months, we have worked to create an entire suite of documentation that's standardized for our team, customizable.

Our program manager Mia Ketterling runs that program and is doing an awesome job getting people on the right foot, and then we also just reintroduced product design into company wide onboarding to help new hires understand what Design does and how to work with us.

I would say another win is just a lot of really great cultural programs. When we started this team, Mia and I went out and did a huge listening tour, trying to get a lot of qualitative data about what people wanted.

They said, "We want to feel inspired. We want to hear interesting people come in and talk. And we want to learn how other teams function and stay creative."

We kicked off the speaker series where we've brought in a lot of really interesting people to give inspirational lunchtime talks. We've had Kelly Anderson, Jess Burrows, Scott Dadich, Josh Brewer, Ryan Germick, Max Temkin, Ellen Lupton.

Last year, we had a really amazing all female team of designers from Anxy Magazine come in and talk to us about how they create their magazines. Last summer we also held our first Design Camp.

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