Designer spotlight: Julie Xu, Product Design Lead at Carta
Julie and I chat about her journey in software product design from editorial design to influencing product strategy at startups.
I first met Julie 3 years ago via ADPList. What immediately struck me about Julie was her impressive ability to articulate her design reasoning. It’s such a pleasure to reconnect with her and hear about the many things she’s achieved, from becoming a product design lead to teaching workshops to empower other designers. Over the next two newsletters this week, we’ll get a glimpse of Julie’s career in design, and how to influence and lead product strategy.
Designer Profile
Name: Julie Xu
Role: Product design lead at Carta
Motivations: realizing a team’s vision and mission
Skill to swipe: influencing product strategy
You can find Julie on LinkedIn and Twitter. She also teaches the workshop, Become a strategic design leader, through RETHINK.
Who are you?
I'm Julie. I'm currently a lead product designer at Carta building a new product there. Prior to that, I was at a YC company called SnapDocs where I helped grow the design team from 3 to 15 people, started the first design system, and helped them scale to unicorn status.
Also, I'm a coach at Rethink where I help designers and teach a workshop on how to influence product strategy and the roadmap.
How did you get started in design?
I started in editorial design learning about typography, layout, and information hierarchy. I really enjoyed that. Later on, I would do website design on the side for clubs, friends, and organizations.
I wanted my career to have a logical side, like research and data, and also that creative side that's associated with design. Product design was a really good intersection.
What relevant skills did you gain from editorial design?
It gave me a really good foundation. I had a fundamental understanding of visual design, like typography, spacing and how to display different content. Even though I designed articles, there were certain principles of UX, like arranging content on a page.
How did you discover product design?
I had been helping people design websites, but I never knew that it was a career.
I randomly stumbled upon it via YouTube. That’s when I learned you could go into a career for it.
What do you do now?
At Carta, I lead design on a new product.
I wear multiple hats, from user research to figuring out our roadmap to designing the actual experience, prototyping and content writing. I also work with our marketing team on go-to-market assets. Then there’s participating in design critique and making sure to give good feedback.
I lead the design culture committee at Carta where we foster an enriching, enjoyable culture. We have designers teach internally, the things that they've learned. We bring in external speakers. We just brought in a staff designer from GitHub to share how not to burn out. We also try innovative sessions like, how do you leverage ChatGPT in your design workflow, and social events.
What have you gained by working in startups?
Startups move really, really fast. You’re forced to grow at this accelerated pace.
I've had my hand in so many different things and that taught me how to grow really fast. I got to experience building the first component library and work with engineering to do that. At the previous place I worked, we went from 3 to 15 designers. You have to quickly learn how to go about shaping the culture and what are the different processes or rituals.
At startups, you are able to take on so much responsibility. That allowed me to try so many things.
What has motivated you to get where you are now?
I've always been motivated by the vision of the founder.
I've always wanted to work on things that I was passionate about. That motivated me to influence the roadmap because I wanted to make sure we're building the right things for end users because I really cared. It also made me really care about hiring and attracting the right designers. I wanted us to have a strong design team to build out those great experiences to solve these problems.
How did you get to a position to lead at Carta?
I took on the role at Carta because they told me that they had two YC founders that were acquired by Carta, but the product wasn't making any money. They needed to hire a designer to lead the experience of this product. I was already in a position where they're looking to me for guidance.
When I came in, the product had a really negative NPS score and didn't really have much adoption at all. Their biggest problem was the user experience, and they wouldn't be able to figure out how to become profitable if nobody was using it.
What are you excited to do next at Carta?
I built a new product there. We went from something that had a bad NPS score, making no revenue, to finding product market fit and hitting $3M ARR in the first year. Now I'm focused on scaling the product and growing it very rapidly.
It’s exciting to see how to grow this very quickly and carve out how the product is going to look in the future.
What skill has helped you be successful at startups?
How to think for yourself is really important
When I first joined Carta, instead of just starting to design features with no clarity on the problem. I first dived into the research to diagnose what this problem is before we just start designing different features.
I figured out the three key flows and usability tested all those key flows, as well as, ran some generative research to understand why people are even using the product in the first place. From that, I was able to be clearer on what to improve and the direction we're going.
What’s something hard you had to work through?
When I was at a startup and it was growing so rapidly, I felt like there was just so much to do.
At one point, my manager quit and the other designer went on maternity leave. I was the only designer there and I had to grow the team to 15 people. It’s a lot of work, onboarding new designers, setting the culture, interviewing, starting the design system. At some point I was also doing design for three teams, one of those a new product area. It was just a lot.
When you're really spread thin, the biggest things to figure out is how to
ruthlessly prioritize, say no to things, and figure out the right sequencing so you're not compromising on quality, and
learn to scale yourself, there are ways you still be delivering that impact, but it's not as many hours put in
What skill could you inject into another designer to immediately uplevel them?
Influencing the strategy, influencing the vision and roadmap.
I found personal success that I noticed that maybe other designers wouldn't.
In part two of our interview with Julie, we’ll dive deeper into her strategies and framework on how to influence product strategy on your team.
To learn more from Julie, save your spot at her workshop, Become a strategic design leader.