Design Hiring at Asana: An informal tea chat with Sara Kremer
🙏 Major thanks to Sara Kremer (@TinkerBeats) for sharing tea, career advice, and some truly awesome electronic jams.
I’ve been an avid Asana user for over 5 years, and it remains one of my favorite products to date. I’ve used Asana to manage multiple client projects, stay on top of meetings with mentees, and even plan a few personal trips.
I’ve been curious for quite some time about how Asana has built such a strong product team. No doubt, many designers would jump at the chance to work at a place where flying narwhals are part of the design system. But how does Asana find and recruit talent?
I met Sara Kremer, Product Design Manager at Asana while attending an awesome panel event arranged through the Bay Area Black Designers network. Sara was there, offering her insight round-robin style as the group fired off questions related to design.
Sara and I connected over a shared love of mentorship and music, and later arranged a tea date to chat about design hiring, challenges in the job market, and what candidates can do to succeed. She was gracious enough to give me her personal advice, which I’ve done my best to summarize below.
What do you look for in a UX portfolio?
I’d heard from others that, in the early stages of the candidate pipeline, screening is more about identifying red flags than gold stars. However, Sara explained that she’s really searching for the standout portfolios in the bunch.
While general UX skills are important, Sara adds that she looks for a candidate’s superpower — one thing they do exceptionally well. “Perhaps they’re an illustrator, or a great writer,” she says. This X-factor is an indicator of how the candidate will add value to Asana’s already-strong design team.
Of course, there are certain faux pas that quickly result in a no-hire: A disorganized site navigation and poor IA, lack of understanding of color theory and contrast, and alignment issues, to name a few. (The bar is set high for a reason: Asana’s award-winning project management tool serves over 50,000 paying organizations and touches millions of users worldwide.)
Whiteboard challenges are now an interviewing standard. What can candidates do to ace them?
It’s nice when candidates can produce beautiful sketches during a whiteboard design challenge, but it’s not the end of the world if they can’t or don’t.
According to Sara, what matters most is a candidate’s ability to demonstrate collaboration, empathy for the user, and curiosity.
Many emerging designers have a backwards view of the skills they need to highlight in a whiteboard challenge. They worry so much about making beautiful wireframes on the whiteboard, when in reality, a thorough exploration of the problem is monumentally more important than any semi-final designs.
Have you ever hit a wall in the job search?
I asked Sara if she herself had ever been in a particularly hard place when job-hunting. Sara said she feels grateful that, now with over 10 years of UX achievement to speak for her, good work finds her and not the other way around.
But — and it’s humbling to hear this — it wasn’t always so easy.
Sara shared that when the job hunt was tough, she hustled smarter, not harder. Rather than applying blindly to every available job on the market, she made connections at the companies she was interested in, asked for referrals, and did whatever she could to stand out.
Importantly, it was mainly loose connections rather than close colleagues that resulted in the most referral ROI. Many job-seekers fear reaching out to people they don’t know well, but in Sara’s case, this made all the difference.
What’s up with the lack of entry-level roles?
The job hunt can be particularly hard for junior designers looking to make their mark. Lately, many candidates have expressed disappointment after scouring through job postings, only to find that they all require 5+ years of experience.
I asked Sara, What’s happening to cause this trend of senior-level roles dominating the available job pool? And what can underdog junior candidates do about it?
Sara’s perspective: Most companies go through three phases as they scale.
When the company is small enough, they’re willing to hire designers at all experience levels. Candidates might still need 1–2 years of experience, but generally, startups consider mission over seniority because they’re looking for people who can grow with the company.
There’s a point, though, where a company is too big to take risks on less experienced candidates, but not yet big enough to invest in junior designers. At this stage, growth requires conserving the team’s resources and pouring them back into the product. Designers who have been on the team since the early days are seasoned, have been close to the work, and are ready to recruit experienced perspectives from other companies. Meanwhile, they’re working hard on the product and don’t have time to catch junior designers up to speed.
Put simply, mid-stage companies often can’t afford to hire and mentor junior designers.
Fortunately, there’s another turning point in which the company has grown sufficiently to invest in building a team with diverse levels of experience. At Asana, they do this by pairing junior designers with senior designers on projects.
So, perhaps the senior-level job opportunity trend isn’t a trend at all. Perhaps it’s just the result of many companies existing currently in that middle stage, unable to invest for the time being.
How might we build a more diverse future for design?
At the event where I met Sara, one theme that emerged during our discussion was that diversity remains a challenge in the design world. So, later over tea, I asked Sara, What can hiring managers do to improve outcomes for underrepresented talent? And what can underrepresented candidates do to best traverse this challenge?
Sara’s take: Companies need to reimagine their sourcing methods.
Searching for graduates from top design schools might result in a highly-skilled candidate pool, but seldom a diverse one. Hiring teams can make a commitment to source design candidates from schools that actively prioritize diversity in their admissions process. (Sara pointed to Carnegie Mellon as one example.)
On the candidate side, Sara brought up the issue of impostor syndrome and how it hinders many strong designers from throwing their hats in the ring. In my experience, both as a mentor and as a member of underrepresented groups in tech, I couldn’t agree with this more.
Structural barriers exist. Implicit biases exist. These things undoubtedly impact hiring practices in tech. But, sometimes, we are also standing in our own way.
Here’s something I wish someone had told me when I first embarked on my design career: Apply to that job you want, the one you think is out of your league. Chances are, there are candidates less qualified than you who are benefiting from taking the chance you’re afraid to take.
The world of design hiring isn’t perfect, but it’s getting there. Asana proves that, by breaking the hiring mold, teams can build legendary products.
